Motivating Your Team - Part 2 - He motivates himself

Post date: Feb 2, 2015 3:40:24 PM

Continuing this series on team motivation and following Herzberg's theory of aspects leading to job satisfaction, we focus for the last time on the individual aspect of motivating teams.

I believe the individual dimension is worth to be considered even in an agile world because each individual has his own motivation and targets to achieve even in a big picture endeavor where one or more teams perform.

1. Achievement - I mean, personal achievement. Be interested in it, find out what is worth for a person in your team. Recognize when achievement takes place. Think of ways to show it, talk about it.
2. Recognition - positive facts should be highlighted at a team level and negative ones should be discussed one on one. Although this might be obvious it is unfortunately not employed or even worse it is employed the other way around. Total lack of recognition is also not advisable or maybe worse than that it is the continuous understatement of an individual's realizations. Unfortunately both might happen and it might be cumbersome to realize it so that you stop you need it to.
3. Work itself - remember that project lead that reserved the most interesting tasks for himself? I did it and others did it, too. But this is not your role - to eat the best part of the cake, let tasteful slices to others too so that each can see the work itself as rewarding and interesting. Only this way can someone grow.
4. Responsibility - delegate more, do less. Know what to delegate, when and to whom and you will see that responsibility gains enhance individual fulfillment intrinsically.
5. Advancement - are the difficulty levels assigned to each team member the same as last year? Not good…Demand more and this will increase the motivation for self improvement and self actualization. Do not forget to reflect it properly into the bigger picture of your company when the time for this is right.
6. Growth - derived from all of the above, isn't it?

Having these applied we can conclude that by iteratively applying these five techniques we will be able to nurture high performing individuals who are the first building block for high performing teams and this translates to your company's growth which is the big picture target from which employees at all levels will benefit.