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Motivating your project team - Steven Blais |
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If you have had any experience as a project manager, or have had any experience working on a project or, for that matter, if you’ve ever been part of a team, any team, you know about motivation. It’s the carrot. It’s the stick. It’s the “win one for the ‘Gipper’” speech. It’s the “We’re Number One” chant. It’s the lovely pictures with poignant sayings posted on the walls, usually of the HR department. It’s the pat on the back. It’s fear. It’s love. It’s boredom. It’s status. It’s peer pressure.
Some might suggest that motivation drives everything. Whatever it is that we do, we are first motivated to do it. This elevates the concept of motivation to an epic level, something like The Force: may the motivation be with you.
The issue for those managing a project is how to harness this power and use it to achieve the goal of the project. There are a number of different aspects to motivation. We can motivate individuals. We can motivate the entire team. We can motivate with external tactics. We can motivate project teams. We can motivate process teams. Each of these situations requires variations in the motivational approaches applied, and not all motivational approaches are applicable for each category. For example, using a cash bonus for exceeding quota which may successfully motivate a process team may not work with a project team. To complicate things further, the timing of the technique used to motivate is critical. Some motivational methods only work when the team is forming, and others only when the team is performing.
Somewhat daunting, this motivational thing. This article focuses on team motivation as opposed to individual motivation, and specifically project team motivation. We’ll compare and contrast the external and internal techniques of motivation.
Motivation Is Not a Goal
We typically associate high motivation with success. A successful project team that meets its goal is “highly motivated.” A struggling team needs to be “motivated to do better.” Motivation is also closely linked to morale. We consider a highly motivated project team to have high morale. The outward signs are the same: working together, anticipating each other’s issues, moving toward achieving the successful completion of the project. Despite all that, motivation is not a goal of a project manager; the goal is to solve the business problem or achieve the business objective. Motivation is simply a means to do so.
In a team situation, motivation is contagious. Players can motivate each other. A single player can get the whole team fired up with her performance or belief. However, the opposite is also true. A single demotivating act may counter all efforts to the contrary. Motivation is not a continuum that once achieved stays at the same level. Motivation uses up emotions and energy which it needs to sustain itself. An exhausted team is not as motivated as a fresh one.
In and Out
“External motivation” techniques are those imposed on the individual or team from the outside, usually by management or the organization (in the form of bonuses, raises and promises of upward mobility). Internal are those that are induced subtly or perhaps even subconsciously and are inherent within the individual or team. Dr.Stephen Covey suggests that “Motivation is an Industrial-Age concept. Inspiration is a knowledge worker concept, meaning motivation from within.”1 The implication is that attempting to motivate people through external means such as cash rewards or threat of job loss is no longer a sustainable practice; managers must learn to provide the means for Generation X and Generation Y workers to motivate themselves. Instead of “providing motivation to the team” or “giving them some real motivation,” we might say, “Let’s inspire the team to achieve <insert the goal here>.” Instead of asking as managers “what can we do to motivate this team?” we might ask “what can we do to get them inspired?”
The trick for project managers is to apply both internal inspiration and external motivation to their project teams. And ironically, the best motivation is that which is not seen to be motivation.
Motivate Teams Not Individuals
The successful team is not simply a collection of motivated individuals.
If project success were a matter of assembling the right people – a group of highly motivated individuals with the right technical skills for example – and turning them loose, then the role of project manager would be more of project administrator keeping track of the progress and reporting status to those who need status reports. The important person would be the role of casting director who would choose the right people for inclusion in the project at the right time.
Unfortunately, we don’t usually get to hand-pick our teams. Even if we could, we would always be in competition for the star players that every other project manager wants to have on her team. Usually we are handed a group of individuals or inherit an existing team. Only occasionally do we have the luxury of assembling our team, like Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven.
Upper level management expects us, as project managers, to organize and motivate this group of people into a project team and then motivate them to achieve the goal of the project. The organization is relatively easy; we’ve got the PMBOK to follow. The motivation part…that’s another story.
Ideally, we would like our team to reach Tuckman’s “performing” stage or as Kathleen Hess describes it, the team is “small, but mighty, highly trained and practiced, heavily invested in honing their skills, and they have a coach (sponsor) who removes barriers to success.”2 A team like this according to Tom DeMarco, “doesn’t need to be managed in the traditional sense, and they certainly don’t need to be motivated.”
And that is the delicious irony: if we apply our team-motivation tactics successfully, we will have a team that doesn’t need to be motivated! The team will motivate itself; it will be inspired! |
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