Intrinsic Motivators as key factors while decision making

Decision making could be hard and painful when you find some difficulties while making a choice between 2 options it is a time to consider all the benefits you’ll receive from the situation. Management 3.0 proposes to use the Moving motivators practice to figure out what really triggers and empowers you before making hard choices.

Within the moving motivators practice, you should use a set of 10 cards of different motivators with a short summary on it, the main purpose is to order them from 1 to 10 according to what drives you and what is not so important or useless for you. Here is the list of 10 intrinsic Motivations (CHAMPFROGS):

1. Curiosity: I have plenty of things to investigate and to think about
2. Honor: I feel proud that my personal values are reflected in how I work.
3. Acceptance: The people around me approve of what I do and who I am.
4. Mastery: My work challenges my competence but it is still within my abilities.
5. Power: There’s enough room for me to influence what happens around me.
6. Freedom: I am independent of others with my work and my responsibilities.
7. Relatedness: I have good social contacts with the people in my work.
8. Order: There are enough rules and policies for a stable environment.
9. Goal: My purpose in life is reflected in the work that I do.
10. Status: My position is good, and recognized by the people who work with me.

So whenever you feel that it is hard for you to make a choice you can use moving motivators cards physically, with the help of a Trello board or as an excel or word document, and create your own order of intrinsic motivators. When you`ll have your result, look through it carefully and think about your issue, in a case when your major motivators will be improved as a result of your decision you should definitely accept it. And if by making a decision your benefits would be related to the less important intrinsic motivators it should mean that probably it won’t make you a happier person.

Moving motivators will be also helpful within teamwork, as a way to outline what motivates your teammates, which will probably boost them in their self-improvement. Sometimes while working with a “toxic” person moving motivators can provide a better understanding of this toxicity cause, for example, a person is forced to perform something or maybe he/she has some fears related to his job.

The first time I found out about moving motivators was on a workshop where my delivery manager shared this practice with us, I was very excited about how it outlined what my priorities were at that time.

As an Agile Coach I always try to find tools and practices that can help me during my mentoring sessions and I’m using Moving Motivators very often.

One of my mentee was struggling, and couldn’t figure out if he wants to move from a digital artist to the art director role, so I asked him if he would like to try moving motivators.

At first, he wanted just to have a conversation, but after I’ve shown him a board with cards, he was excited to try it. It was very helpful and appealing for him to have a board with something he could see and “touch”.

During our session I asked him to sort the cards in Trello board. He started to ask a lot of questions to clarify the meaning of each card and it looked like he was afraid to do something wrong. After I explained the meaning of each card and that there is no “right” or “wrong” answers it became much easier for him to proceed.

As a result we had the next board:

1. Mastery
2. Curiosity
3. Social
4. Acceptance
5. Power
6. Status
7. Honor
8. Freedom
9. Order
10. Goal

After the session, it was obvious that he was satisfied and knew what to do next, even though he still had a lot to think about. We’ve figured out that, regardless most of his top motivators are not suite for “leadership”, he decided to give a try to the new opportunity and reconsider his priorities.

I can say that most of the times people don’t think about their motivation and it’s often a surprise for them to find out what motivates and what can make them happy.

This practice is really easy to use so it’s hard to make a mistake. My only advice is to make sure that you have plenty of time, as even if it seems like it could take only 10 minutes to sort the cards, it usually takes much longer than that and if you really want to know what motivates people you need to give them time to think.

In a nutshell, when you`ll find out what drives you or your teammate, what makes you alive, what is something that you can work on according to your goals and objectives, your job could be something that brings you fulfillment and engagement every day!

Sample of set cards that are available for download from here in different languages after your registration:

Sample of a doc in word

My Trello board (Ukrainian variant)