The 6 motivation languages

Totally alluding to The 5 Love Languages; so, shameless plug and shoutout to them, definitely recommend the book, content, and exercise (can’t speak to the other material). Moving on!

One of the things I seem to do is create exercises for people to use to gain self understanding through self reflection. (Granted they tend to start as exercises I run on myself.) One of them is like Snog, Marry, Avoid but with activities; I’m sure I’ll write it up soon. The other is this one.

I get asked a lot about motivating people and teams. I never knew how to respond to this question because everyone is different. So, step one is to not assume the things that motivate you are the same as someone else. Step two is to not assume that the person you are trying to motivate knows what motivates them. This is why I think the reference to The 5 Love Languages (not a sponsor) is appropriate.

Dan Pink released a book entitled Drive (he also talked about it quite a bit). In it he identifies 3 motivators better suited when it comes to knowledge work stating that the traditional carrots and sticks doesn’t work when it comes to work that goes beyond just being able to follow a set of rules and process steps. The three motivators are: mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

I also started seeing more talks discussing “the millenials” and how to motivate them. What are they looking for in employers? Some of these talks described what previous generations had been looking for in work (I might mess these up). The Baby Boomers were really motivated by money or being placed in management positions. The Silents (prior to the boomers) were about prestigious titles and labels (call me a Custodial Engineer not a Janitor). And, of course, you still have someone yelling and screaming at you or threatening you with “shape up or ship out”…a stick.

So, in no particular order, the definitions:

1. Mastery: I want to be good at what I do and I want people to seek me out to learn more.
2. Autonomy: Don’t tell me how to do it. Tell me what the expectation is and give me the resources I need to get it done. I want to choose my own adventure.
3. Purpose: Why am I doing this? Who does it benefit?
4. Numbers: I manage a team of 200 people. I manage a project worth $20M. My salary is $500K per year. My house cost $X. My team finished 500 points this iteration.
5. Labels: Your last job called you a JavaScript Ninja because that’s what you wanted to be called. Your current recruiter wants to change that on your resume to be Software Engineer.
6. Sticks: I will only do deadlifts if my trainer is yelling at me.

Now for the exercise. Take the six and put them in descending order from what motivates or inspires you to what makes you run to the hills. For me, it looks like this:

1. Purpose: I need to know why. For me, the why answers the questions of value. If I don’t think I’m producing value, I have a very hard time continuing.
2. Autonomy: Don’t box me in. Don’t pigeonhole me.
3. Mastery: If I’m doing something, I want to have the freedom and backing to go as deep as I want to with the subject.
4. Numbers: Like Dan Pink says, I want to be paid well enough to make money a non-issue in my life but it’s not the most important thing for me.
5. Labels: I don’t care what you call me, what will I be doing on the day? I’ve seen so many job descriptions for Scrum Masters that read like traditional project managers or business analysts (and I’ve held enough jobs) to know that a title doesn’t mean much.
6. Sticks: This is an anti-motivator for me. One, when it comes to fight, flight, and freeze I tend to freeze. Two, I’m a rebel at heart and will turn into a non-violent protestor from the 60s getting beat up by the National Guard in no time flat. I will also begin looking elsewhere for work…if it gets bad enough, I might even jump without a net.

So that’s me. You might be different. And that’s okay. That’s sort of the point; to figure out commonalities and differences within the team and organization.

I did this with the CEO of a company I was working for and his list was pretty different than mine. What sticks in my head though is that, for him, numbers were first (specifically money) but he said it apologetically as if it were bad that money was his primary motivator…that’s not the point. (And, for a CEO, that can be a very good thing.)

The point is that just because money is your primary motivator doesn’t mean it’s that way for everyone else. Giving an autonomy employee a raise isn’t going to help in the same way one more day of paid time off a year might…and the one more day of paid time off might be cheaper.

If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to formally go through this exercise with other people, you can use language (all language) to sometimes interpret someone’s motivators at least at the moment.

I had a housemate once who was very motivated by numbers (money in this case). How did I know? Because our conversations were roughly 80% about the cost of something, the state of her retirement and pension, and so on.

I had an acquaintance who was heavy into mastery. How did I know? 80% of our conversations entailed her teaching me something that was two or three levels deeper than I was prepared to understand or telling me about the new thing she had just learned.

So yeah, give it a shot? Let me know what happens.