A few years ago Harvard’s Teresa Amabile released her bestseller The Progress Principle, in which she outlined the importance of achieving small wins to motivate and engage us.  It intuitively highlights the way success motivates us to keep going, especially on tasks that might ordinarily take a long time.

New research from Johns Hopkins Carey Business School suggests, however, that we can be just as effectively motivated by the successes of other people as we are by our own successes.  What’s more, our motivation is especially piqued when the success of our colleague is exceptional.

Above and beyond

This last point is especially important, as is if one’s success could be expected as part of their usual high levels of performance, the boost to our own motivation was not as high as when the success went above and beyond normal levels.

What is equally interesting is that our boost in motivation comes not from jealousy or any form of negative emotion, but rather a pique in our interest or curiosity in how the success was achieved.  We essentially find others’ successes to be interesting and fuel our desire to learn.

This curiosity can also be piqued if our colleague fails, however, as the failure serves as a form of “check” on our understanding.  We essentially strive to learn from the mistakes of others so we can avoid making them ourselves.  We make the assumption that their failure was due to a mistake in some way that can be avoided in the future.

Virtual comparisons

Of course, the virtual nature of so much of our work during Covid has made making such comparisons that much harder as the performance of our peers is not so visible to us.  When we bump into a colleague in the hallway or at the watercooler we get the chance to learn about their latest project in a way that virtual working makes somewhat harder to replicate.

The researchers believe that their findings clearly illustrate the importance of being able to learn from the successes, and indeed failures, of colleagues, and how important it is for organizations to provide opportunities to do so.  They cite healthcare as a good example of a sector in which debriefs are done after treatments to understand what worked and what didn’t.

This isn’t something that’s commonly done, however, and especially in terms of our successes, as even outstanding success can often be passed off as expected or normal.  As such, it’s just as important to be able to celebrate successes as it is to learn from failures as both sorts of performance can motivate learning across the workforce.