Motivating Your Team - Part 1 - He does NOT leave the company

Post date: Jan 26, 2015 1:43:02 PM

Many team leads believe that they can motivate their team members. In my opinion this is not true especially if we believe that Herzberg's theory is true indeed and if we are in an agile organization then another belief is that the best flavor of motivation is the intrinsic one.

I do not think that we can change other people and this applies to motivation, too. If your team members are not motivated then you cannot do anything else but triggering their need to change themselves with regard to their motivation.

How can we achieve that? Following Herzberg's roadmap so to speak the idea is to move out of the way the top things leading to dissatisfaction:

1. Relationship between you and each of them (build a successful relationship, more about this can be read in the excellent "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie)
2. Relationship between each two individuals in the team (in a team of n people there are n x (n - 1)/2 communication channels) and this is hardly under the control of any one person especially for larger teams. What you can do is to use time and money budgets in team building activities and to make use of meetings to let team members interact don't stick to dry meetings. For example get them 10 minutes earlier in, so that they exchange ideas between them and you show up later with your well prepared agenda and impeccable time management skills when going to the "meat" of the meeting. Personality clashes and other sorts of conflict are not always avoidable but this way they can be minimized.
3. Company policy - here you cannot do much but what you can do is to find a common area between the team member's goals and the company goals. Let your team members see the big picture, usually people like to be a part of a greater whole and to have a means of contributing to a vision and while doing this also achieving personal goals. This will trigger a self-motivation process (it does not happen over night but it usually happens).
4. Supervision - especially in agile environments avoid the "tell" leadership style with any price. Micromanaging is seldom recommended and if it has to be done then it should not be done twice with the same individual. Assign mentors and change them appropriately for any team member still needing close supervision. This way nobody in the team plays the "control freak" role and each experienced team member will become a leader at times. This has the potential to raise inner motivation.
5. Work conditions - here there is again not much influence on the leader's side, try to influence things for the better as much as possible and do at least impediment removal. Letting the team know of the boundaries of actions in this area is also a good thing to do (since it would enhance understanding of the environment).
6. Salary- maybe not too much influence but still something can be done here. Reaching proactively for your team members with regards to financial matters, willingness to help them achieve their financial goals enhances trust - even if the endeavor does not necessarily result in a financial increase (I'm talking especially about cases in which project or team leads cannot take financial decisions regarding the salaries of their team members).

If you do these steps, then you do not ensure the fact that they change themselves so that they are motivated enough not to leave the company but you decrease chances that they are "plagued" with "job dissatisfaction".