Management 3.0: Moving Motivators — The path of intrinsic motivation

Do you know your coworker? Do you know how to motivate them? What moves our team to behave in a certain way? What motivations drive our decisions? Some of these questions are the ones a team typically faces when it needs to empower its members.

Not taking as an important activity the daily work of keeping people in teams motivated is one of the main causes that many initiatives are sporadic or fail. Gallup research shows that “only 21% of employees fully agree that their salary and incentives motivate them to achieve individual achievement (https://www.gallup.com/workplace/285590/reimagine-corporate-ladder .aspx) “. This means that these motivations may or may not align with people’s natural strengths and their intrinsic motivators.

There are many theories about what motivates us and the truth is that there are external and internal factors that lead us to do one thing or another, it is known as extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

When we talk about extrinsic motivation, it refers to the need to do something to achieve the desired result by something or someone external to the individual and offering rewards such as money, a prize, or a trophy. While intrinsic motivation refers to the desire to do something due to an interest in the subject or the enjoyment of the task itself. The latter is the motivation you want to promote in your teams.

Finding that intrinsic motivation in a team becomes a great challenge working with multidisciplinary teams, differences in cultures and customs, but above all, we know that everyone is unique. In short, these teams are made up of groups of people who do not have to know each other beforehand, with different stories and experiences, and also with different motivations.

A similar situation I had to face in a software construction team composed of 12 people divided into areas of, product, construction, and quality. The team had to develop a new app for the financial market.

It was a new team, its members had different realities. Some of them were newly hired, with all the energy of their beginning, others with experience and some years in the companies, a few with children and wives or they were enthusiastic students. This led to problems in terms of collaborative work, communication, and commitment.

What could motivate these people? Is there a common motivator that drives the team? How can you make an agreement about expectations?

In order to find out, I proposed a Management 3.0 exercise, this exercise called Moving Motivators. It is based on ten intrinsic desires, which Jurgen Appelo obtained from the works of Daniel Pink, Steven Reiss, and Edward Deci. I invite you to know more about Moving motivator at the following link: https://management30.com/practice/moving-motivators/

What is “Moving Motivators”?

Moving Motivators is an exercise designed to understand the motivations of each of the team members. It also helps us to reflect on intrinsic motivation and how it affects organizational changes, to find opportunities to seek meaningful motivation, and to achieve a mutually beneficial relationship with our creative workers.

Know the motivators

Curiosity: I have many things to research and think about.

Honor: I am proud that my personal values are reflected in my work.

Acceptance: My colleagues approve of what I do and who I am.

Mastery: My work defies my competition but within my capabilities.

Power: I have enough space to influence what is going on around me.

Freedom: I am independent of others in my work and responsibilities.

Relatedness: I have good social relationships with people at my job.

Order: There are enough rules and policies that give me a stable environment.

Goal: My life purpose is reflected in the work I do.

Status: My position is good and recognized by the people I work with.

Moving motivators in action

Before the dynamic, I shared a template created in Miro (an online tool), since the team was working 100% in remote mode.

For the dynamics, the following steps were followed:

1. Before starting the dynamic, I explained the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
2. Then I highlighted the purpose of the exercise, we agreed on the meaning of each motivator focusing on that, the most important thing is that each motivator makes sense for each person and the team.
3. To start the dynamic, each member of the team ordered their motivators horizontally, placing the most important on the left and the least important on the right.
4. Then they shared their individual motivators with the team, just talking about the top three and the bottom of the ten.
5. They reflected on how your motivators have been influenced positively or negatively in the last two weeks. At this stage, I asked them to draw an imaginary line on the cards of moving motivators and when choosing positively influenced motivators, that card would slide upwards, being negatively downwards, if there was no influence the cards kept their position.
6. Then each person wrote about the first 3 negatively influenced motivators, things they wrote things would have to happen for them to be positively influenced.
7. Finally, they shared with their companions.

Learnings

As a facilitator, I learned the importance of knowing and visualizing our motivators, and the change it produces when reflecting on the importance of each one. This kind of situation is very important, there are many people who decide to take a few seconds to reflect on what they observed since perhaps these questions had never been asked. This made it possible to generate common links and plan joint work actions.

The team took as learning the knowledge of common motivators of their colleagues, to feel identified with some of them. This led them to agree on expectations, achieving a social agreement in subsequent sessions, improving the well-being of their functions, designing new proposals within the team, increasing their performance, and pursuing common goals. As an example, I can cite the creation of a site where good practices from each area of ​​the team were shared and also sessions to share experiences with teams with similar experiences. Another common motivator was the purpose, which led to generating dynamics like Ikigai in search of individual purposes and how these were aligned to the collective purpose.

For my next experiment, I will change the facilitation after ordering the motivators, I will create groups of people for similar motivators and I would seek to generate collaborative and joint actions. Lead the Team to create a plan of the initiatives that the team can generate, on team motivators and that did not have a positive influence in the last weeks.

Conclusion

When a team assumes the responsibility of finding its motivations and giving visibility to its expectations, creating collective agreements, it makes the growth and behavior of the team generate a good work environment and productive context.

Moving motivators help to identify motivators in the work context, although once you use it, it helps you even in the personal context.

Always keep in mind, take a few minutes before starting as a facilitator of this meeting to define what each motivator means to you, and remember that we must motivate and encourage in a space of trust and absolute respect. It gives rise to silences, in certain situations, many people discover situations not considered before, which are shown by the order of the cards. Try to give spaces and silences until people can adapt to that information.

I invite you to live the experience of knowing your motivators and that of your team, generating that synergy so sought after in teams. (https://management30.com/practice/moving-motivators/)