Moving Motivators: How to better understand your team and yourself
After the success of my first Management 3.0 workshop with Personal Maps, I started a big immersion on this new way to manage and lead no more followers but Creative Workers like Jurgen Appelo call them in his book Managing for Happiness.
The next station of my M3.0 experience was Motivation, starting with mine.
We are all facing a quantity of different situations or events during our professional journey, some are good, some are funny and others are a little harder to manage, but something is sure each of them affects us even if we don’t notice it.
That’s the power of the Moving Motivators exercise, 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?
Let’s start with myself …
I 😍 love this paragraph from the book Managing for Happiness :
“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
I couldn’t say it better. For me, my work is not a punishment or something I must do. it’s one of the most enjoyable things in my life and that’s what I want for my team and coworkers. But sometimes …
I have the blues ! and I don’t know why ?
Mais ça c’etait avant! Now I follow my own motivation using Moving Motivators, and the discussion that happened with myself helps me finding and improving (or asking to improve) what is going wrong.
What about the team ?
Jurgen Appelo explained often in his books that we can’t manage people but we can manage the system. That’s what I am trying to do with his Moving Motivators exercise and other M3.0 tools, trying to understand better my team to respond greater to their needs and change what must be changed in order to become a native way of working (being) and not just a quick fix.
There is a lot of literature on motivation and how to influence it, but they all agree that we can roughly speaking distinguish 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 (money, bonus, trophy …)
- Intrinsic motivation: the desire to do something because of an interest in the topic or enjoyment in the task itself.
But as a manager what we want to achieve is meaningful motivation to reach a win-win relationship with our creative workers.
Wait a minute, don’t leave! I am stopping Blah Blah Blah to move to the exercise :-)
Moving Motivator is a deck of 10 cards, each one represents a business-related intrinsic motivator :
How we used it ?
We did a pizza Moving Motivator Lunch Break (pizza is a good extrinsic motivator but avoid using it alone 😇)
- I explained the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.
- I highlighted the purpose of the exercise.
- We agreed on the meaning of each motivator.
- Each one ordered his motivator horizontally by putting the most important right and the less important left.
- One after the other we talked about our 3 big motivators and our two small ones.
- Then I asked them to remember a change or an important event and impact their motivators accordingly (moving cards up for a positive impact and down for a negative one) I noticed that this step make a deeper reflection than the first ordering one, and sometimes leads to an adaptation of the initial motivator’s order.
- I finally asked to score the motivators from 0 (not existent) to 8 (hyper-motivated) according to what they feel now.
- We analyzed the results and discussed what can be done to improve.
- We also did a common motivator order inspired by Molood’s Article (Thanks Molood) to define the most important motivator for us as a Team.
But for me, the most important was to initiate the discussion and to hear from them in order to make Moving Motivator a new habit to follow especially during our One on One!
If you are like me, a believer in human first at work, or if you just want more details about the Moving Motivators and other Management 3.0 great tools and mindset, take a look here :
