Managing Motivation
Determining goals the right way. Photo courtesy Emma Lo Russo.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When I took my first official management role, one with ‘manager’ in the title, I took responsibility of a team I’d previously been part of.
The transition from contributor to manager of your peers wasn’t going to be easy, but I had a plan. I knew Agile. I knew that I could put together a couple of sprints worth of work in our shiny new tool. I knew my new team would smash through it. They’d done it before with me as part of the team. They would do it again.
Except… it didn’t quite work out. At all. What had I missed?
Wisdom came from my own manager, who had managed my team before me. He asked me one question:
“How did you motivate your team?”
Motivation was an abstract concept to green manager me. I didn’t have an answer. Schoolboy error for a manager. I’d provided a list of to-do items that already had solutions provided, and left no room for the team to innovate and innovate and solve the problem themselves. As a result, they had little motivation or desire to do the work. To the team, it was just stuff to be done.
Whilst us knowledge workers do like to get paid, the reason they love their role is being able to solve problems.
That’s their primary motivation, and I’d eliminated that aspect from the work I’d asked them to do.
As a new manager, try to think like a sports coach, not like the foreman in a Dickensian factory.
Don’t ask your team to put the ball on the white spot and kick it past the keeper. Instead, set the vision, the goals and the constraints. Help them build the picture in their mind. Provide support, not to-do lists. Measure their impact and encourage them to course-correct. Everyone is motivated differently and a big part of a manager’s role is finding that motivation. Help your team find it and help them apply it.
Give your team the motivation to find solutions themselves, and they will.