Management 3.0 Practitioner — Part 6: Enough motivation can move the world

Many times we approach the people of our team with a proposal that we believe will feed their desire to stay or grow and when we do not get the response we expected, we get frustrated. It may be that perhaps not all of us are motivated by the same things.

For a while, I collaborated with a software development team, where we were 5 people who had not previously worked together, and now had started in a remote context. As part of the first activities, we decided to use Moving Motivators (you can learn more about the practice at https://management30.com/practice/moving-motivators/) to collaborate with the process of knowing each other and understanding our identity, something we had already begun with other dynamics (Personal Map, Value Stories, among others).

What does this dynamic consist of? We have the following set of motivators, and as a first step each team member must order them according to how important they are to themself (from left to right, the last one being the most important):

Once the ordering is complete, each one comments on how changes have affected their motivators. For example, sharing if during the last month there were events that had an impact on them: if the impact was positive, we move the card up; if the impact was negative, we move the card down; if there was no change, we left it in place. Finally, each member of the team tells which motivators are more important to them and which are less. The purpose of this dynamic is to understand what motivates each member of the team, and then also to be able to understand common motivators for the group.

To implement it with the team that I mentioned previously, we carried out the following steps in a remote context:

• We first talked about the meaning of each motivator, to share ideas and understand what they represented.
• Then, each one made their prioritization of importance, also indicating the impact that there was on each motivator in the last two weeks (positive, negative, or neutral).
• Finally, we asked each person to tell why they chose the motivators that were in their top 3, in addition to explaining the least important one.

This was the result of it:

As a facilitator of this dynamic, I learned about the importance of maintaining active listening through dynamics like this to get to know our colleagues. Also, both the team and I discovered a little more about what mobilized each one and how it could not necessarily be aligned with our motivators. After this practice, some team members began to join in activities outside of work aligned with their common motivators: they joined company workshops together, worked on specific initiatives, among others.

For my next experiment with this practice, I would like to focus on those common motivators in the team and talk about what we can bring to our day-to-day to feel motivated.

I encourage you to experience this tool and dedicate a space to know what truly motivates the group and its members so that trust and integration become a pillar of your team.