Firing on All Cylinders! 3 Factor Theory of Personal Motivation

Do you want a quick model and visual on how to fire up your project team, help authentically motivate somebody who reports to you, or just try to figure out people?

Based on my own background in psychology, client experience, and talking to smart folks in the coaching practice (who do this for a living), I currently use a 3 factor theory of work and motivational alignment.

This approach is based on three core assertions:

• People want to self-realize. Simply put, folks have their own set of personal values and interest of self. Self-interest in this context can be expressed through a need to satify their own yearning for growth (mastery), and through other various pathways of satisfying it through different phenomenological experiences. This idea borrows from Maslow’s hierarchy (be familar with this guy at least superficially): we have basic needs at first, and then ultimately we are striving for something bigger.
• In our world of work, we are always to some extent working now, and we want to get better through constant improvement and honing of our professional skills. We live in a world that supplies us with a steady diet of information, constant change, evolving needs, disruptive business models, which requires us to stay current in our practice, field of expertise.
• Our work (our job) is most frequently done as a member of a team, working within an orgnizational and/or company context. Our own interests intersect frequently with the company. Our self interest is aligned with the organization through financial rewards (bonuses, pay, not getting paid, having employment), and non-financial rewards like being on projects that we could not do without company affiliation, and also learning by working alongside skilled coworkers in your field solving shared problems and challenges.

By using these three assertions, we essentially have three components we can satisfy:

• Self growth
• Professional growth
• Organizational growth

We are not always satisfying all three criteria at the same time every minute of the day, but in general, we want to be satisfying all three them enough of the time to be in an optimum state at our job and have personal satisfaction. Our goal as the leader is to be mindful of these three states, and creating conditions, then alignments to support and sustain these three states.

Some applications…

For people on my own team (direct reports), I find it essential that their professional growth goals overlap and align with their own idea of personal growth. If we have these both set up, in more cases than not, we will be setting ourselves up to have the organization benefit as well.

Likewise, if you’re on a project team, and you’re managing non-direct reports, how does one motivate in this case? Using the factors above, we again look at motivation of the self, intrinsic drivers (what motivates the person), to help maximize task (professional) performance. Equally, you can help pump up your colleague by illustrating how his or her performance contributes to the success of the particular project, or if it’s appropriate, to the financial benefit if your organization as well.

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