Oh Shit, We Have to Be Motivated for How Long?
I’ve been in a slump lately when it comes to my own motivation at work. Although it’s nothing serious, it’s been enough that I’ve actually felt guilty for not, you know, “bursting with joy” every day.
One of the reasons is probably that our team for a long time now have been doing really good. I know, another sad story from a poor white man, but what I’ve realised is when you’re on such a high for a long time, having a down time feels like failure — when all it is is just a calmer period for some of us (and busier for our devs).
This is a never ending game. There is no finish line. We continue to use our skill as a team to optimize, but it is essentially an infinite game of making things better.
For the most part, you want two things:
- Earn more
- Spend less
The difference over time is that some things get’s prioritised, while other things get de-prioritised.
To create motivation within this game, you need the dynamics of lows to appriciate the highs. To have great product teams, you essentially need a pulse over a periode of time to grow together as a unit. (read how to gain psychological safety)
This isn’t something you get for free though, because a year in itself is booooring.
This is where different pulses come in.
The different team pulses
To showcase different pulses, I made several highly scientific chartlines of what normal pulses in teams usually are. Most of them are of course bad, but I also added an ideal one at the bottom.
To start, the “git motivated bro” is what everyone pressumes is the answer. The pressure is there to always “be professional”, but it’s impossible to be 100% all the time. And if you aim to always be on a high, you’re essentially creating a flatline.
Flatline teams are so many teams. It’s probably comfortable, but it also probably includes a lot of backlog work and the “innovation” is based on orders from stakeholders. The insight and data work are likely low except data on system health.
Flatliners isn’t good because it lacks the “waves” to create the effort needed to do great work.
Or as Bob Dylan sang “He (who is) not busy being born is busy dying.”
A lot of people say you need a heart beat in your team, which is the same as a pulse in my mind. However, don’t mix it with actually having a a heart beat in your team. Imagene the turbulence this would be. The highs would only be followed with a deep low. It easily can happen at the end or start of a quarter because setting new OKR’s can slow things down.
Some teams have been created because of a project. If the project is not ran with the full ownership of the product team, it’s an almost guaranteed slowl death as sonn as the project is done.
It’s very easy to get stuck in the project-mind and how that was done, instead of daring to do major changes on the product.
The 110% pulse is usually when a leader tries to hammer in that WE NEED TO WORK EXTREMELY HARD ON THIS TO ACHIEVE THESE NUMBERS!! The problem with this a) you can always chase numbers and b) the numbers usually don’t mean anything to the team because they don’t have ownership to what they are trying to achieve.
What ends up having is that you have alternating motivation between leader vs team.
This is simply a recipt for creation of solutions that not actually helps the user, lack of insight and data within the team, drama and frequent changes within the team members. The leader is probably wearing a very nice white or light blue shirt.
An actual healthy pulse is relatively stable over time, but dynamic enough so it creates excitments and mental breaks for the team. If you want to create great products over time, you want this.
The pitfall of this pulse is different views on what’s motivating. If, for example, the ux/design is extremely motivated, but the devs are not, it’s not a healthy pulse.
The healthy pulse is when the whole team is aligned on the why and what we are trying to achieve. There’s no major gaps between ux and dev and everyone has ownership over both the team, but also their individually contribution.
So, that’s it. A highly scientific walkthrough of how you and you’re teams pulse should be. If you want to learn more about how to achieve an actually healthy pulse, I humbly recommend this story:
Nice, you made it to the end! 🎉
P.S. On a related subject, check out Why focusing on psychological safety as a solution doesn’t create psychological safety in your team.
P.S.S. You can of course follow me on Medium, and Linkedin or Goodreads.
If you would like more stories like these, check out Failing Forward.
