Moving Motivators: A tool to understand your team's motivations

The Introduction

“In fact, leisure is usually defined as “time when you can do whatever 
you want to do” and “enjoyable activities that you do when you are 
not working.” I find this a sad definition. It seems to imply that 
people, when they are working, cannot do what they want and will not 
enjoy the activities, either. How different would the world be if 
everyone found their jobs motivating and engaging” - 

Jurgen Appelo (paragraph from the book Managing for Happiness).
        

We are all bumped into the extent of distinct situations or events during our professional voyage, some are?good, some are?funny,?and others are a little more?challenging?to cope with, but something is certain that each of them influences us?even if we?don’t notice it.

In the best-seller “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, Daniel H. Pink explains that human motivation is largely intrinsic and that aspects of motivation can be divided into three categories autonomy, mastery and purpose. He explains that old models of motivation based on money and rewards are only useful if the task is very simple however if the task involved cognitive skills, creativity then you need to support the employees to achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Trying to motivate people by focusing on extrinsic motivations rarely works because it’s based on external factors. Intrinsic motivation, however, works much better as it comes from within.

The Moving Motivators practice focuses entirely on the intrinsic motivation of team members and how it affects organizational change. It forces us to sit down and ask ourselves?What is really important?for us? What will make me move faster? Why do I wake up every day?

Why you should read this article?

• Do you want to know what Moving Motivator practice is from Management 3.0?
• Are you planning to experiment with Moving Motivators practice with your team but wondering how to kick-off in a step-by-step pattern?
• How to interpret data points/trends coming out post-implementation of this practice and use it towards making more informed and meaningful decisions?
• Do you want to explorer/know the challenges and outcomes I observed while experimenting?
• How does this practice add value at different levels (In my case, Agile CoE (Center of Excellence) level)?
• Lastly, Do you want to know how to scale and sustain this practice?

If your answer is “Yes” for any of the above-mentioned questions, then this article may be of your help.

?What are Moving motivators?

Two questions are often asked in organizations worldwide: What motivates your team? And how can we motivate the people in our organization??These are significant questions undeniably because?without motivation nothing would be produced.?

“Firms exist to coordinate and motivate people’s economic activity”

 - John Roberts from his book The Modern Firm        

The Moving Motivators is one of the practice from Management 3.0 which helps to find answers to these questions. The practice of Moving Motivators is linked to intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. The construction of this tool was devised by Jurgen Appelo accurately to endorse self-knowledge, consenting each person to categorize what their motivators are and to identify which factors motivate other people belonging to the same corporate environment. Jurgen created 10 motivators and represented them through letters CHAMPFROGS model (an acronym)?which is in turn based on the books:

It should be noted that each person has all the motivators to a greater or lesser degree. This degree can increase or decrease according to the level of self-knowledge and moment of the life of this person.

Mainly there are two types of Motivation:

• Extrinsic motivation: The need to do something to achieve an outcome that is desired by something or someone outside of the individual and obtained by offering rewards (i.e. money, bonus, trophy, etc.)
• ?Intrinsic motivation: the desire to do something because of an interest in the topic or enjoyment in the task itself.

What does each card mean?

• Acceptance: The people around me approve of what I do and who I am.
• Curiosity: I have plenty of things to investigate and to think about.
• Freedom: I am independent of others with my work and my responsibilities.
• Status: My position is good and recognized by the people who work with me.
• Goal: My purpose in life is reflected in the work that I do.
• Honor: I feel proud that my personal values are reflected in how I work.
• Mastery: My work challenges my competence, but it is still within my abilities.
• Order: There are enough rules and policies for a stable environment.
• Power: There’s enough room for me to influence what happens around me.
• Relatedness: I have good social contacts with the people in my work.

But as an Enterprise Agile Coach what I want to achieve is meaningful motivation to reach a win-win relationship with our creative Teams

Why did I decide to use this practice?

I am an enterprise Agile Consultant; have mainly worked at a consulting organization and the common framework which I have witnessed is when agile consultant/coach gets onboarded; by design, s/he joins (typically) agile practice a.k.a Agile CoE (Center of Excellence)/Agile Capability. Later either that individual starts working for/at different clients which is outward (external client bills for his/her services) or sometimes inward-facing activity such as maturing internal project’s agile delivery capabilities, Working with L&D teams, etc.

I joined one of such groups of Agile Coaches/Consultants a couple of years back. After spending a couple of months, I started witnessing some anti-patterns (there were many but let me mention here core ones) such as - no team member collaboration (People are busy in their own external engagement – pretend to be occupied), Missing proactive willingness to support Agile CoE’s initiatives due to misaligned goals, the Power struggle between Sr. Folks, Leadership micromanaged people (of course at times), Lack of intrinsic motivation, Leadership observed ~20% attrition, etc. ?By the way, people within the team and respective leadership were aware of the situation. However, were not coming forward to address the same incrementally.

During my 1:1 and couple of iterations of discussion with leadership and sr. folks within the team; finally, I proposed to experiment with Moving Motivators from Management 3.0?for my group at a team offsite Q4 2019 (In-person event) and 2nd version 100% remote with Agile Teams and Agile CoE's individuals starting Q2 2020. Some of the focused areas were to explore and understand what motivates team (What keep them going), what Team members want, how Leadership can facilitate to achieve their expectation, explorer how the decision impacts team’s motivation. The ultimate objective was to build a TEAM out of this group so that we as an organization could create a competitive advantage. I knew everyone had a strong set of skills that they used at their client, but others at the organization did not necessarily know how they could benefit from the skills of their colleagues.

Lets explorer!!!!

How did I implement this practice?

It's been now close to 4+ years since I am experimenting with Moving Motivators with various engagements. Following are the steps how I largely implemented for the in-person setup (Pre COVID-19 pandemic) and remote/Virtual events (Starting Q2 2020).

Below are the steps I executed in the In-person setup:

Step 1: Kick-off

We were 16 in total (Agile CoE's team Size). I divided the group into two parts to make it easier to have conversations across the group. In each group, at first, each person laid out their motivators in one line (Left to Right) in front of them – Least to Most Important. ?Do notify participants that this is only a snapshot and might change over time.?Post completing this step it looked like this:

Then we had a pair conversation about the two rightmost and the two leftmost cards in each person’s motivators. After the pair conversation, each pair shared a couple of aha moments they had just experienced.

Some of these findings were:

• The main takeaway was how people define motivators differently. For example, the meaning of freedom is different for people depending on their background and culture.
• Motivators are not just a method to show how a person is motivated and understand how someone else’s motivators are different from theirs. This line-up is mostly interesting because it creates conversations about the underlying reasons why people selected the actions they chose on a regular basis.
• Some people had no idea that it was possible for someone to find power or freedom unimportant.?However, after some people explained their perspective about this, it was suddenly clear that it was not only possible but actually quite ok to value power and freedom less than other motivators in life.

Step 2: Scenario Introduction - Satisfaction of Motivation Factors in the Current Environment

In the second step, I introduced different scenarios to the group (Scenarios were gathered in advance from team members) And each member moved their motivators up and down accordingly without changing the order of the cards. ?It looked like:

They then had conversations in groups to describe how their motivators had been affected. Incrementally, I as the facilitator moved the scenario examples closer and closer to their daily work.

Some examples of the questions that I asked of the group are:

• How would your motivators move up or down, if one of our biggest clients going to hire an entire team of agile coaches wherein you are one of the team members?
• If our existing consulting organization gets bought by a bigger consultancy firm, how would your motivators move up or down?
• How would your motivators move up or down, if several of your colleagues lost their assignments but you kept yours?

Furthermore, or alternatively, emphasis on a prospective situation. In this case let the participants decide if the change has a positive or a negative impact on their motivations, or no impact at all. It looked like:

This step too created very interesting conversations amongst the people in the group and helped them understand their colleagues better.

Step 3: Group?Motivators

This is the step in which I created a team from a group of consultants. First, I asked the group to gather around one deck of moving motivators cards. Then I asked the group to do their best to create a lineup of what motivates the entire group. The purpose was to create a common sense of camaraderie amongst the different personalities in the team. They performed this step silently. As you can imagine, it took a while for people to move the cards and settle for the final results. This step was almost like a board game.?The game we played as I instructed had a few rules in order to allow every individual to voice their opinion. At first, I lined up the cards randomly.?The players took turns to make their moves.

For the person whose turn is to make a move, the rules were:

• You can touch up to three cards and move their placement.
• It is ok to move a card to the very end of the line (in each direction)
• If you are happy with the line-up, you can say “pass” and allow the next person to play their round.
• If you say “pass” twice in two consecutive rounds, you must step out and let the rest of the group play for two full rounds before you can enter the game again.

This step was very fun to play and created a lot of laughter amongst the group. Eventually, the team members settled and were all happy with the proposed line-up of values for their team. This was the first time, we saw each other as team members rather than just a group. This exercise paved the way for activities that then enabled this team to create visualizations, share knowledge, and assist each other in their assignments.

So this was all about the in-person experience. Let's explorer how I did it in a remote setup.

In the recent past (starting Q2 2020), I have started experimenting the same with remote Agile Teams too which is in addition to the above-mentioned experiment with Agile CoE folks. To set up the collaborative board I used Miro along with MS Teams channels, and the cool thing is that there is already a template ready to copy from Moving Motivators with Miro: Link is https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_laQYrsg=/?fromEmbed=1 and screen looks like as follows:

To make discussion happen, I have created several channels in MS Teams to enable pair and group discussion and other steps remain the same as mentioned above. I have already coached Scrum Masters in my ART (Agile Release Train) on how to drive it followed by a dry run to execute this practice with their own teams individually and the later collective result/outcome of the exercise was shared with the concerned team and stakeholders.

Next Level:

Since ART level experimentation is already running successfully it's time to scale up!! By end of Q4 2021, I am planning to introduce this practice at SM – CoP (Centre of Practice) for the client I am working with (while writing this article Moving motivators is already implemented at Team Level in the program/ART I am associated with). The CoP is going to be the ascended version as it encapsulates SMs from other ARTs (Agile Release Trains)/workstreams thereby, scaling Moving Motivators practice at the organization level which in turn would give valuable insight to management. Furthermore, other coaches from my team would explorer an opportunity in their own engagements too.

My Experience:

As I mentioned previously that it all started as an experiment, and I learned a lot from this practice and just to summarize below pivotal pointers:

Facilitator cheat sheet:

• Prepares one card set for each participant.
• Takes care that all participants lay out the cards in the same horizontal direction.
• Guides through the process.
• Helps the discussion stays focused on motivators.
• Moderates in case of conflict and disagreement.
• Helps the group to explore many sides of the issue.
• Shifts focus – moves from one speaker or topic to another.
• Helps group members grapple with the content by asking probing questions.
• Helps group members identify areas of agreement and disagreement.
• Creates opportunities for everyone to participate.
• Outline essence in the discussion or ask others to do so.
• I usually take a photo of each setting (if the participant allows it) and e-mail them to the participants.

My Learnings:

• It is important that the participants understand the motivators.
• It is okay if some of these motivators are not applicable to some participants at all, or that some are indifferent between two motivators.
• Sometimes people might find this exercise esoteric – don’t be discouraged, give it a try. In my experience, participants recognize the benefits later in everyday work, as they might try others differently or are treated according to their motivators.
• Repeat said exercise from time to time to see if the motivators (their order and how they are met) have changed, but especially if changes are imminent.
• You can also find out what motivates the team as a whole. In this case, you can use the Radar chart in Excel to generate the average, minimal and maximal per motivator as well as a graph of the variation and span of each motivator. It mainly shows how change has or might affect the whole team.

Experience:

• It is critical when it comes to facilitating clarification of the intent of such exercise that there is no good or bad motivator and those motivators are in accordance with the experience of each person and their values, needs, and personal desires and therefore should not be judged.
• Post this exercise, leadership has started thinking about the team's motivation before rolling out any decision.
• It is an excellent exercise for building empathy.
• I often use this approach in a retrospective, workshops, and even one-to-ones. It helps the participants gain a better understanding of each other and to subsequently treat each other more considerately
• First and foremost, it gives the people the opportunity to talk about their motivations. So, it is a great communication tool, ice breaker, and team-building exercise. encapsulating self-awareness, trust, transparency, team bonding.
• This exercise helped me substantially to understand what my team is feeling at its core.
• This exercise helps to navigate through conflict within the team.
• This practice uncovers key focus areas which in turn aided me to set the foundation for healthy and quality dialogue especially when the team member is newly joined.
• This exercise is a great tool to write a shared vision for the team and organization.
• Use some fun moments within the exercise.
• It is very common to see nervous faces when you start with the exercise but trust me you will see more happy faces once you are done with exercise.
• I have observed that there are people who seldom spare time to look back, examine and reveal their life in this VUCA world made them realize that they have never in their life stopped to think about what really drives them.
• As a facilitator, it seems a simple tool yet very powerful to work with. We may underrate its application and power a bit. I highly recommend that before utilizing, really bolster your own individual motivators. Reread each motivator to underline their intensity and that, when elucidating, do not discount any motivator with your personal version of it.
• Last but not the least, it can help you to boost your motivations level in the team. If known what is needed for a motivational environment, you as a manager or even as a team member can take this into account.?

Conclusion:

The Moving Motivators help team members to understand each other much better. I find this an incredibly useful tool to motivate people with just a little effort, such as to honestly praise people more, disrupt them less, give them challenging goals, and more. It helps to build a strong team and is an excellent tool to make transparent how changes might affect team motivation.

I believe that Kaizen is one of the most important things in order to run a successful business in today’s VUCA world. And this feedback should be collected easily and instantly, so we can learn and improve at the lightning speed. And finally, it is fun. participant do not enjoy filling out long questionnaires but from my experience, they feel always happy when their voice and opinion is heard. They are engaged! The Moving Motivator is a very easy, lightweight, fast tool and it cost almost nothing. I passionately recommend & persuade you and your team to give it a try.?It’s worth it.?

If you want to explore/learn more about Moving Motivators, you can look at Management 3.0 page at https://management30.com/practice/moving-motivators/

DISCLAIMER:

• The article is prepared & compiled basis on my personal Management 3.0 practice implementation experience/view-only; you may have your own version too.
• As project Moving Motivator implementation images are classified; have not been shared/published with this article.
• Moving Motivators Images courtesy – https://management30.com/practice/moving-motivators/