Detect the intrinsic motivations of your teams

It can be difficult to detect the motivations of colleagues or teams, especially in a situation of sudden and changing context.

Motivation is not easily measurable; ultimately, there is no common language around this notion: motivation, need, commitment…

What made us all get up in the morning to continue working from home in this context of COVID-19? Why did some people have a bad experience of working from home while others felt very comfortable and motivated?

What inspires your colleagues and your teams, in general, finally?

Case study (comments in italics)

As an organizational coach and facilitator, these questions seem crucial to me to successfully engage teams in their daily work.
I had these questions come up in my client’s Project Manager community. This is what led me to conduct various workshops to discover the Moving Motivators tool with project managers. In particular, they wanted to find out “how to motivate teams” or “how to improve the motivation level of teams” (large questions…).

Why initiate a sharing around intrinsic motivations?

The first part of the awareness was to reclarify the concept of intrinsic motivation to project managers and teams. Here is a summary of the elements I presented to them :

“Motivation” means “what urges action” or “what brings movement”. To better understand what brings us movement, we must first distinguish between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation:

• Extrinsic motivation is anything that comes from “outside” and that will lead you to regulate your behavior to obtain a reward or avoid being punished. For example, job location and remuneration can be sources of extrinsic motivation. However, this does not depend only on you because it is linked to your environment.
• Intrinsic motivation is like a built-in regulation, you regulate your behavior because it is consistent with your values ​​and goals. It causes you to do things because it makes sense to you or satisfies you, not because of an external factor.

Various authors such as Maslow and his famous pyramid have already shown that the need for accomplishment and pleasure at work are among the main sources of employee motivation. Other authors such as Daniel Pink, Steven Reiss, and even Deci and Ryan have explained how satisfying the needs for autonomy, competence, affiliation, mastery, or meaning could improve individuals’ intrinsic motivation.

This is why detecting and sharing these intrinsic motivations will lead to a richer team life as well as better manager support: empathy, skills development, conflict mediation, etc.

What we are looking for when trying to “improve the motivation of employees” is indeed to initiate a movement and a commitment. It is still necessary to detect what brings this movement in a natural way for them and not by fear or expectation of external events.

— The biggest realization was that project manager comanagers directly impact the motivation of their teams. This created a lot of discussions to bring about a “letting go” on their part.

Yes, they could create favorable conditions to allow the teams to exchange their deepest motivations. No, they did not have all the levers in hand to influence the motivation of each individual. We, therefore, had a lot of discussions at this stage about the notion of “managing the system rather than the individuals” and I took the time to define the notion of complexity and systemic.

Following the first workshops, I added a few slides explaining systemic thinking because I finally found that the whole change of posture of the managerial layer was located at this level to carry out the Moving motivators exercise.

How do detect these intrinsic motivations?

— In the second part of the awareness, I introduced them to the Moving Motivators game and we took time to play it together. This allowed the project managers to experience the game for themselves and to think about a possible application for their teams.

Jurgen Appelo has developed an exercise around intrinsic motivations, taken from Management 3.0.

Management 3.0 is a set of tools and practices to develop one’s managerial posture to focus on the management of the system and not only on people.

For this exercise, he has listed 10 intrinsic motivations to classify according to the importance you give them:

Let’s play Moving motivators exercise

STEP 1: Order what is important to you (15–20 minutes)

This step is individual and each one orders the 10 intrinsic motivations according to the importance they have to them. From right to left, on the right is the card that seems to them most important, and on the left, the one which seems to them the least important.

I specified that this order is personal and they should not try to align themselves with the other participants. Also, if they wish, they can share their card order explaining what they understand about each card and why they put them in those positions.

— The project managers were surprised that they could choose whether or not to share the Moving Motivators order. This led me to talk to them about the concept of psychological safety.

We even brainstormed together about potential formats for doing the exercise with the teams: on their own or in a one-to-one meeting with the project manager. How can we get the teams to feel comfortable discussing their intrinsic motivations? So many ideas that I kept afterward to lead this workshop.

STEP 2: Measure the effects of a change (30 minutes)

Keeping their order of the cards from right to left, I asked them to think about a professional change (agile transformation, moving to the office, working remotely, etc.).

If the change has a positive impact on motivation, they move the card up. If on the contrary, it hurts motivation, they move the card down.

Following the movement of the cards, I invited them to share their feelings and the effect of the change on the motivations located furthest to the right (thus the most important).

— To encourage projection, we took time to reflect on a change they were experiencing together (since they were not on the same team). They decided to think about the generalization of telecommuting in the company.

They have been able to detect that in a remote context, motivations such as order or social relations have been negatively impacted for some people, for example, and that the impact depended very much on the level of importance that the intrinsic motivation had for the individual.

Learnings

In the end, I discovered as much as they did in educating them about the Moving Motivators exercise. Observing the reaction of the management team and their way of thinking about a potential application with the teams allowed me to better understand their difficulties and their intentions (not being a manager on my side, I could understand them better). The notions of psychological and systemic safety were central in the support of a new managerial posture. I have therefore added these notions to my introduction of the tool.

I also noticed confusion between the notions of work efficiency and motivation. Was their intention only benevolent: to detect the teams’ deep motivations and allow them to exchange on the subject? Or to detect the motivations to push for more daily efficiency? They were not all aligned on the subject and this also made me aware of the “dangers” of such a tool in the hands of someone with bad intentions.

New experiments

I have had the opportunity to use the Moving Motivators tool in other contexts, each enriching in a different way:
- during job interviews: the cards were more of a pretext to get to know the candidate and discuss what drives them in their work. Each time, the candidates appreciated this exercise and it only took 20–30 minutes in the interview. I was careful to point out that there were no right or wrong answers in the ranking and that it was only to better get to know them.

-during kick-off workshops and team building: getting to know the members of your team should, in my opinion, be an almost mandatory starting point at the beginning of each project. I had the opportunity to accompany around 4 teams whose members had never worked together before and to witness their “first steps together”. The Moving Motivators exercise allowed them to discover their colleagues and to take the time to listen and understand what brings energy to each of them.

Thus, even if the purpose was not the same (team cohesion or pretext for discussion), I was able to observe that this tool allowed to liberate speech by creating a bridge between individuals: each one speaks in their name (by using the pronoun “I”) of what motivates them and their deepest values. Since it is an observation and not a debate, I found that the listening of the participants was each time benevolent and welcoming.

If you are interested in learning more about Moving Motivators: https://management30.com/practice/moving-motivators/