This document provides an overview of the PACE framework which stands for Progress, Alignment, Capabilities, and Engagement. It is based on research from various sources on topics like motivation, performance, and talent optimization. Progress refers to making meaningful progress on work and fueling positive emotions. Alignment is the level of clarity between individual and organizational goals. Capabilities are the competencies, information, and resources needed to meet customer expectations. Engagement goes beyond satisfaction to represent willingness to exert effort and advocate for the organization. Together these elements can help foster high performance, commitment, and sustainable talent management in organizations.

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PACE stands for Progress, Alignment, Capabilities and Engagement. It comes from two primary
sources: The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at
Work by Amabile and Kramer and The ACE Advantage: How Smart Companies Unleash Talent
for Optimal Performance by Schiemann. It also draws on the work of Daniel Pink in Drive: The
Surprising Truth About what Motivates Us and A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will
Rule the Future as well as other authors that will be quoted in this summary.
PACE is really about talent optimization as defined in The Ace Advantage: “achieving the
highest performance and future potential from the talent that you have invested in. Talent is
defined as the collective competencies, values and attitudes, experiences, and behaviors of all
sources of labor. Talent management is defined as all activities, processes, or behaviors that
support the optimization of talent. And sustainable talent management is focused on achieving
the long-term optimization of talent – not just performance for this week or this quarter.
Progress
According to the Progress Principle, the secret to how Google succeeded in the top five
companies for work for in America “is creating the condition for great inner work life – the
conditions that foster positive emotions, strong internal motivation, and favorable perceptions of
colleagues and the work itself.” It starts with giving people something meaningful to
accomplish. It requires giving clear goals, autonomy, help, and resources. It depends on showing
respect for ideas and the people who create them. In short, “the secret to amazing performance is
empowering talented people to succeed at meaningful work.”
Inner work life is the mostly invisible part of each individual’s experience – the thoughts,
feelings, and drives triggered by the events of the workday. Most managers do not understand
inner work life well enough to ensure clear sailing and avoid onrushing disaster.
Little things can mean a lot for inner work life. Small positive and negative events are tiny
booster shots of psychological uppers and downers. In managing people, you really do have to
sweat the small stuff. Happy workers make better workers.
High performance has four dimensions: creativity, productivity, commitment, and collegiality.
Creativity – coming up with novel and useful ideas – is probably the most crucial aspect of
performance in today’s business world. But creativity alone is insufficient. Productivity means
getting work done on a steady basis, turning out consistently high quality work, and ultimately
completing projects successfully. Commitment to the work, the project, the team, and/or the
organization is something people demonstrate when they persevere through difficulties, help
their coworkers succeed, and do what it takes to get the job done. Collegiality is any action that
contributes to team cohesiveness; it is what team members demonstrate when they support each
other interpersonally, act as if they are all part of the same team and work effort, and show that

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they care about how well the team functions. Each dimension of performance fluctuates with
each component of inner work life.
Making headway on meaningful work brightens inner work life and boosts long-term
performance. Making progress leads to positive inner work life, which creates the progress loop
(the self-reinforcing process in which progress and inner work life fuel each other). Making
progress in meaningful work is the most powerful stimulant to great inner work life. At the
opposite end, setbacks in any sort of meaningful work – hitting dead ends while trying to solve a
vexing problem, being blocked in attempts to meet a goal, or failing to find crucial information –
are the biggest downer. Other sources of setbacks include being micromanaged, having resource
request rejected, finding out that someone else’s action had harmed the project, being ridiculed,
being ignored, and being overly pressured.
Other factors that contribute to inner work life include the catalyst factor and the nourishment
factor. Catalysts are actions that directly support the work on the project, including any type of
work-related help from a person or group. The opposite of catalysts are toxins. These negative
actions include failing to support the project, as well as actively hindering the project in some
way. Where catalysts are triggers directed at the project, nourishers are interpersonal triggers,
directed at the person including respect, encouragement, comfort, and other forms of social or
emotional support. The opposite of nourishers are toxins. These negative actions include failing
to support the person, as well as actively disrespecting the person.
If managers want to foster great inner work life, they should focus first on eliminating the
obstacles that cause setbacks because one setback has more power to sway inner work life than
one progress incident. Some surprising evidence:
• The effect of setbacks on emotions is stronger than the effect of progress.
• Small losses can overwhelm small wins.
• Negative team leader behaviors affect inner work life more broadly than do positive team
leader bahaviors.
• People may expend more cognitive and emotional energy on bad events than good ones.
• Other types of negative events – not just setbacks – are more powerful than their mirror-
image opposite events.
• The connection between mood and negative work events is about five times stronger than
the connection between mood and positive events.
• Employees recall more negative leader actions than positive actions, and they recall the
negative actions more intensely and in more detail than the positive ones.
The seven major catalysts include 1) setting clear goals 2) allowing autonomy 3) providing
resources 4) giving enough time – but not too much 5) help with the work 6) learning from
problems and success and 7) allowing ideas to flow. Organizational culture forces that shape

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specific catalyst and inhibitor events include 1) consideration for people and their ideas 2)
coordination and 3) communication.
The four major nourishers include 1) respect 2) encouragement 3) emotional support and 4)
affiliation. If you are a team leader, you may have even more power than top managers to create
a supportive or debilitating work environment for members of your team. You can even attenuate
the negative impact for members of your team. The most successful leaders know how to nourish
the inner work lives of those they lead. According to Peter Drucker: “The goal of management is
to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.” His view is that a
manager’s job is to serve employees by ensuring that their needs for challenging work and
satisfying work lives are fulfilled.
One of the best ways to put in motion the progress principle is to use the Progress Checklist (see
Appendix 1) every day. It only takes about five minutes at the end of the day. The aim of the
Progress Checklist is managing for meaningful progress, because that is the real job of a manager
inside the organization.
Because inner work life and progress exert mutual influence, the ideal is to keep positive
progress loops – virtuous cycles – going as long as possible and abort negative ones – vicious
cycles – as soon as possible.
Because emotions are contagious, managers should take care of their own inner work life in
order to resonate positive energy to those they lead.
Five Reasons why Optimism Is Better than Pessimism include:
#1 We need four times more positive emotional attractors than negative emotional
attractors
Neuroscientists, according to co-author of Becoming a Resonant Leader and Primal Leadership
Richard Boyatz, discovered that an optimal ratio of positive emotional attractors to negative
emotional attractors is around four for us to be engaged at work. It’s true that we can be too
optimistic. Some negative emotional attractors are needed for us to conduct the occasional reality
check. Not every scientist agree on the ratio of 4:1, but all agree that more positive is needed
than negative emotional attractors.
#2 Setbacks are five times more powerful than progress
We also need five times more progress than setbacks according to author of The Progress
Principle, to stay motivated at work. Since setbacks have a more powerful negative impact, more
progress is needed to keep us motivated.

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#3 It takes up to four hours to recover from strong emotions
According to Gary Harper, author of the Joy of Conflict Resolution, it can take up to four hours
for us to recover from strong emotions such as anger.
#4 Emotions are contagious
When we are positive, others around us tend to be positive. When we have negative emotions,
others tend to pick up on them as well. You emotions are contagious, especially if you are the
team leader. So if you want an optimistic team that can produce results, you need to be optimistic
yourself.
#5 Optimism is just plain more fun than pessimism
This one is my personal opinions, unlike to first four reasons that are based on scientific
research. After all, who wakes up in the morning hoping they will have a day full of negativity,
setbacks and angry co-workers. It’s just plain more fun to enjoy the company of those we work
with and share a healthy work environment full of positivity and optimism.
Fifteen ideas for developing and maintaining optimism include:
1. Discover Yourself
a. Clear the clutter
b. Discover your passions
c. Build on your strengths
2. Reach for the Stars
a. The power of personal vision
b. Living life by design
c. Put it in writing
3. Elaborate
a. How to get from here to there
b. The power of collaboration: you can’t do it alone
c. The hierarchy of goals: the mountain (life vision); the boulders (life goals); rocks
(annual goals); pebbles (weekly goals); sand (weekly objectives)

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4. Act
a. Taking that first step
b. Make the time for high importance low urgency activity
c. The power of renewal
5. Measure
a. Revisiting vision and the hierarchy of goals
b. The daily checklist
c. Celebrate your success
Alignment
Alignment is the level of clarity and congruity between the person and the organization’s goals,
direction, values, customer expectations, or other similar factors. Do employees understand the
direction and chief goals of the organization? Do they understand and behave in accordance with
the values that the company espouses and promotes? Do they understand and act consistently
with the brand promise to customers? Are they in sync with other units, teams, or individuals in
trying to achieve critical organizational priorities, often referred to as horizontal or network
alignment?
Capabilities
Capabilities, is often thought about too narrowly as simply employee competencies – the
experience, knowledge, and skills we immediately search for in résumés to see if someone is
qualified to join our organization, school, or club. Students spend hours trying to gain
competencies to add to their résumés in order to get into better schools, classes, clubs, and
organizations.
From a customer perspective, however, competencies are only one of the three critical
ingredients needed to maximize Capabilities. When customers want to purchase a service or
product, such as a refrigerator, they want the experience to match their expectations. This means
that employee competencies (for example, understanding the product and empathizing with the
customer), information (for example, prior orders or preferences, pricing, and warrantees), and
resources (for example, delivery and installation) must come together at the moment of truth for
the customer.
The customer-centric definition of Capabilities is the extent to which the organization effectively
creates and optimizes the talent, information, and resources needed to meet customer

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expectations. What makes this a broader definition especially useful is that it can be applied both
inside and outside the organization. Everyone in an organization has a customer or a stakeholder
for his or her services, whether he or she interfaces directly with the external customer or
supports someone within the organization who does.
Engagement
Engagement is often thought of as the motivational energy that someone expends on a task or the
level of commitment a person makes to an endeavor. Cloaked in the language of job or company
satisfaction, Engagement as traditionally defined gave an incomplete picture of the relationship
between the employer and the employee. Satisfaction alone is not enough to ensure
organizational success. An employee can be satisfied with a job or a company without
demonstrating additional oomph. Or the energy may be ineffectively directed.
Engagement is about finding people who willingly exert extraordinary effort and act as
advocates for the organization; they are more than simply satisfied employees. Engagement –
with its component parts of satisfaction, commitment, and advocacy – represents a powerful
engine for any group or organization.
Alignment is all about what and where you focus your time and Capabilities. Do I focus on task
A or task B? Which is most valuable at a given time to the organization? Where does the strategy
suggest it should be spent? Capabilities is about how you apply skills, information, and resources
to meet customer expectations. And Engagement is about why you deploy your Capabilities
lackadaisically or with zest.