Motivation at work - 6 phases of engagement

Anyone who has been in the workplace for a while knows that collaborative motivated teams accomplish a lot more than their unhappy disconnected colleagues. There is plenty of research from organizations such as Gallup that shows that engagement is a key factor in how people perform at work. And from one perspective, the statistics are worrying. It seems that, across the world, only one in three people is engaged at work—leaving two out of three of us who are not[1].

And what are the implications of disengagement? At its worst—which is when we have team members, managers, customers and other stakeholders who are actively disengaged—the actions and efforts of their colleagues are actually being undermined. Negative talk, persistent complaining and grudging work effort—combined with absenteeism and turnover—starts to negatively impact the entire team. Deadlines slip, work is not up to par, and tasks get missed.

Social Contagion

This a natural phenomenon called social contagion. As humans, we are designed to mirror the behavior—and mood—of the people around us. The consequences of low engagement are not hard to imagine—you only have to think of what outcomes might occur during a surgery conducted by a two-thirds disengaged team. Or think about crossing a bridge constructed by a two-thirds disengaged crew!

Even if disengagement is not active, but is passive, there is a drag on projects. There is more clock watching, internet surfing and general behaviors focused on things other than getting the work done.

The good news is that social contagion works the other way, too. Engagement and motivation are just as contagious. We can make a difference to the engagement of our team members just by changing our own level of engagement. When we take steps to boost the engagement of others directly, the sky is the limit.

When I started as a project manager, team engagement, personnel issues and resource development were not part of my remit. That was a job for line managers or human resources. Now though, the lines are much more blurred, and we all have a role to play in team engagement—and any project manager who can cultivate engagement and motivation is much more likely to enjoy a successful project.

And engagement does not come from being in a particular role. It is not just the most senior members of a medical team, for example, who feel have an opportunity to feel engaged. Engagement comes from a sense of connection to your role, and anyone can have that sense of purpose.

To engage others, we need to understand them, what motivates them, what gives them a sense of purpose. That understanding, and appreciation of others, is often referred to as social intelligence. This combination of social awareness and social facility is what helps us to connect with others and to engage them on their terms.

Interestingly, in asking project managers to take the VIA Character Strengths Survey (more on that later), I noticed that, as a group, project managers are lower in social intelligence than others. So how are we going to cultivate engagement in the people around us, beyond modeling engagement ourselves?

Looking for the Growing Tip

The secret is not to look at what the disengaged among us (and sometimes it is us!) are doing or not doing, but to focus on what the one in three are doing. What is their secret? How do we get some of what they have?

As it turns out, there is a lot of research available about that side of the equation, too. Research may have highlighted the problem—lack of engagement—and the source of the problem, management not focusing on the right things in their teams[2] (Gallup State of the American Manager), but research has also already highlighted some effective and surprisingly simple strategies for changing the balance of engagement in our favor.

So how do we get some of this engagement, and what does it cost? For many years, I have experimented with my teams to see what works to get people engaged, focused and motivated to make a project work. And of course, there is no one answer. Everything from the styles of communication to the quality of the food on weekend working days has an effect.

A Word on Food and Culture

Actually, it is worth pausing to think about food. Almost any large project will experience times when weekend and evening work are necessary. It is not always a reflection of poor planning and overruns. The reasons for working outside normal working hours are endless—access to systems for testing, access to people who are not available during normal working hours, time differences for international teams, the ability to test processes when clients are not accessing systems, offices, roadways, etc. I’m sure you can add to the list.

One thing I have learned about these out-of-hours activities is that it is important to be sensitive to peoples’ eating preferences. It is all too easy to order 27 pizzas from around the corner or to bring in tray loads of deli sandwiches, followed by the platters of cookies and cakes.

1. But what do the team members want?
2. What are the cultural or religious considerations for the members of the team?
3. What would they be eating if they were at home?
4. Who is dieting?
5. And how can the food be made a treat?
6. What else?

On one project I worked on, one of the team members had a friend who had a passion for cooking and we paid him to make us meals on our working weekends! He would ask us for a theme—voted for by the team—and then he would make four or five dishes according to the theme that provided enough variety to give everyone something to enjoy. Those "working Saturdays" were so successful that we had people from other departments lunch-crashing! Not only was the food good and varied, but the team had a hand in selecting the theme. And over time, team members started contributing traditional desserts to finish off the meals.

On another project, we got permission from management to order our meals from a well-known, high-end, family-style local restaurant. Although the food costs were higher than on most projects, management quickly saw the payback. People were much happier to work late knowing they would get a food treat at the end than when they were anticipating pizza or curly sandwiches!

Anyway, I digress—although as you will see, there is a link to our topic of strengths-based project management. Back to the question of how we can build engagement in our teams…

What the Research Says

There are multiple studies that show that when workers are connected to their core intrinsic motivators, they are more engaged, more productive and less likely to make mistakes or cause accidents. Those core motivators are character strengths. Different from talents and skills, character strengths really define who we are rather than how we operate or what we know. When we are aware of others’ strengths, help them explore their strengths and then encourage them to apply their strengths in the workplace, they increase their well-being and we experience better project and organizational outcomes. We treat them well, and they give more!

This reminds me of the well-known Golden Rule: treat others as you want to be treated. This is something that I, like many of the people reading, grew up with. Only as I got older did I start to realize that it may be an okay start, but it does not get us far enough. If I like flowers on my birthday, I may give someone else flowers on theirs—but it turns out they have bad allergies. I have treated them as I want to be treated—but I have not treated them well.

And although some might argue that “it’s the thought that counts,” my mother was always quick to point out that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions!” Similarly, if you feed me a juicy burger because that is what you love for dinner as a treat, I am not happy because I am vegetarian.

The even better rule is the Platinum Rule from Dr. Tony Alessandra, which advises us to treat others as they want to be treated. Sounds good, but how to do we know how they want to be treated? How do we know what motivates them? And how do we have the conversations we need to in order to find out?

This is where character strengths come in. As I mentioned before there are a lot of factors that contribute to a team member’s sense of well-being, commitment and engagement, but I have found that using character strengths is the one tool that consistently makes a difference regardless of the age, gender, geographical location, religion, ethnicity or cultural origins of my team-members.

Now let’s explore the origins of the groundbreaking science of character—and how we can use it as project managers to create highly motivated productive teams.

Introduction to Character Strengths

Researched on behalf of the Mayerson Foundation (VIA Institute on Character) between 2001 and 2004 by Dr. Christopher Peterson and Dr. Martin Seligman (along with 55 experts in multiple fields), character strengths have some very interesting qualities:

• They are universal—they cross all the boundaries of culture, ethnicity, religion, geography, age, gender and more.
• They are easy to understand—they don’t require special vocabulary or formulae to decode.
• They are all positive and recognized as desirable.
• They can all be exercised by one person with no detriment to anyone else.
• And now there is a?Community of Practice?for people who use #characterstrengths!

Character strengths are things we all share, and yet the variations in strengths combinations—and the way we show our strengths—is effectively infinite!

The other wonderful thing about character strengths is that you don’t need any special (or expensive) tools to find out about them. The basic survey is available online, and once you as a project manager have a basic understanding of the strengths and what they look like, you can start to leverage that knowledge to positively affect the attitudes, engagement and motivation of those around you. And even without the survey, you can make character strengths work for you and for those around you.

To find out more about the use of #characterstrengths in #projectmanagement, check out the book?Be a Project Motivator: Unlock the Secrets of Strengths-Based Project Management

OR

Check out the #LinkedinLearning program Project Manager to Project Motivator?https://www.dhirubhai.net/learning/project-manager-to-project-motivator-unlock-the-secrets-of-strengths-based-project-management/

6 stages of implementation

Understand:?This is a self-discovery phase. Learn about your own character strengths. Use the “aware, explore, apply” process to take your strengths from awareness of what they are, through appreciating how they come into play in your life, to intentional application.

Cultivate:?Build character strengths by practicing with them every day. Focus on your signature strengths (usually but not always your top five ranked strengths) to build personal engagement and well-being and to reduce anxiety, stress and depression. Focus on middle or lesser strengths to build your ability to bring the best strengths to each situation.

Model:?As you build your understanding and facility with all the strengths, show others how mindful use of strengths works. They will want some of what you have!

See:?Start to notice strengths use in others. Even when they are blind to their strengths, you can spot them and take note!

Acknowledge:?Help others to understand their strengths by calling them out and highlighting when strengths are helpful to the team.

Leverage:?As you become familiar with the top strengths of your team members, managers, consumers and stakeholders, call on them to use their strengths to the benefit of the project. Need some critical thinking? Pull in someone who you have seen carefully weighing information before making a decision—even if they are from outside the team. Need some creative thinking to address an issue or mitigate a risk? Call on someone you have seen coming up with creative solutions in other contexts. Creativity is a way of thinking that can be blended with the skills and knowledge of others to come up with great solutions.

Something wonderful starts to happen when we focus on character strengths, and the research supports my experience—the positive perspective that focusing on strengths offers also helps us to tackle gaps, weaknesses and problems.

Research shows that we are more creative about tackling problems when we start with what works. In her book Positivity[3], Barbara Fredrickson explains the broaden-and-build theory, which is that when we start from what is positive, our focus is broad, we are more open to ideas, and we are more likely to build solutions and come up with ideas that are novel, expansive and that take things forward in new ways. When we start with positives, we are more likely to have a growth mindset, which is believing that we don’t have to be constrained by what we already know or can already do.

The other good news is that character strengths, while generally stable, can also be cultivated. We can use deliberate practice to build up a strength. We can also combine strengths to act is if we have another. For example, many people I have worked with have held leadership roles, but for them leadership has not been a high strength. By blending other strengths such as appreciation, bravery, curiosity, fairness and gratitude, they have been effective leaders even without a high level of the strength of leadership.

These are all things we want on projects—creative expansive thinking that creates new possibilities and does not mire us in the way things are. After all, projects are about change. The very reason for undertaking projects is to make things new and to change the way things are. Being adaptable and mindfully using strengths to achieve goals makes us—and the people around us—more effective and happier!

There is a lot of ground to cover, but after only an hour in the webinar, anyone can walk away with tools and approaches they can use in any team in any organization. Whether all you can do is learn about and apply your own strengths—or you are able to enroll your whole team or organization in the process of getting to know strengths—you can bring positive change to your teams, and create higher engagement in those around you.

You may be wondering about the relevance of the food story. Understanding the needs and preferences of team members, caring for their physical well-being and creating an environment where team members feel seen and cared for is an example of social intelligence in action. Social intelligence doesn’t just affect our interaction with others in person, it influences the success of our communication—which is critical to our success as project managers, as communication is what we spend 90% of our time doing!

1]?Gallup.?State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide. 2013 report. Washington, DC: Gallup, 2013.

[2]?Gallup.?State of the American Manager. 2015 report. Washington, DC: Gallup, 2015.?https://www.gallup.com/services/182138/stateamerican manager.aspx.

[3]?Fredrickson, B. (2012).?Positivity: Groundbreaking research reveals how to embrace the hidden strength of positive emotions, overcome negativity, and thrive. New York, NY: MJF Books.