Motivating volunteers
Mike Griffiths
asserts that when everyone on a team is recognised and treated as a volunteer their productivity far exceeds that of team members working for reward. He uses the diagram below to illustrate the scale of an individual's contribution to the team. (I've included Mike's descriptions):
- Undermining/Resistance: People negatively impact the project, either intentionally or through misguided objectives and actions, their presence on the team actually has a net drain on project productivity.
- Passive Compliance: People do generally work on to-do items, but without much thought and without any passion for the task or goal. (This is all too common in large organizations where for team members feel like cogs in a machine they have very little say in.)
- Active Participation and Committed Dedication: This is where the good work starts getting done. People are engaged personally instead of merely by job obligation and are truly thinking about how best to solve problems and find new solutions. With brain engaged and a sense of ownership for task, the net contribution to the project are orders of magnitude higher than Passive Compliance contributors.
- Passionate Innovation: This occurs when the task becomes the all consuming passion for those involved. Usually witnessed in start-ups and by partners in a business who's vision is being executed, passionate innovation can bring exceptional results and solutions.
Mike says that an individual's level of contribution is voluntary. Individuals choose where they want to operate on the scale. Extrinsic motivation probably causes them to turn up. A shared vision, belief in the goal/s and a sense of belonging to the team might cause them to contribute somewhere between active participation and committed dedication. But add
intrinsic motivation to the mix and more individuals might work with passionate innovation.
Tags:
team,
volunteer,
motivation
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What motivates people?
Via
Knowledge Jolt with Jack.
People are only truly motivated when they engage in an activity for its own sake or pleasure, without an external incentive.
Deming called this
intrinsic motivation. and a hobby is an example.
Rewarding people for doing something removes their own innate desire to do it of their own accord.
Extrinsic motivation - rewards such as bonuses, promotion, or public commendation - is probably not sustainable for the long term. Withdraw the reward and the motivation disappears. Keep the reward at the same level and motivation drops off. To get the same motivation next time the reward needs to be bigger. People will come to expect a reward every time they do something. Similarly, the threat of severe consequences for not doing something, such as redundancy or demotion, will demotivate people (and help create a fear culture).
Create an environment that promotes intrinsic motivation. A place where people feel safe to volunteer and rise to challenges, where they can cooperate, and are free to be creative and pursue their curiosity to the benefit of the organisation. Create an open environment (and culture) where people are trusted and not managed to death, which provides an enabling context, or
ba, where knowledge is created, is openly available and shared freely. Create a social community that fosters relationships among people where everyone is free to speak and speaks equally, and where everyone contributes. You want people to genuinely enjoy what they do, be happy at work and have fun with their colleagues.
Tags:
motivation,
creativity,
ba
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Architecting maintenance
Jason Yip is distressed by the lack of consideration given to testability and maintenance by many enterprise architects and their followers. It's not all about scaling and vendor relationships, but doing the simplest thing, building features only when they're needed, and keeping options open while deferring commitment until the latest responsible moment is not the staple diet of the enterprise architect. 'Anticipate' is their word. Justify why you're not building a generalised solution that caters for everything and can handle every conceivable change. The problem with this approach is that it introduces complexity and that complexity requires significantly more maintenance.
Keep it simple, stupid. Justify why you're building more than you need to. Justify why you're building something that is expensive to test. Remember:
- It has to work. It has to be easy to verify that it works and keeps working.
- It has to be maintainable. A single change should be a single change.
- It has to be understandable otherwise it won't be maintainable.
- Less things built means easier to maintain.
Tags:
simplicity,
testability,
maintenance,
architecture
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Grow a whole dedicated team around a single product
If your people are organised by function rather than along product lines then you are fostering a silo mentality, creating artificial barriers and introducing coordination overhead. Give responsibility for each product to a cross-functional
team with full-time members, located together in one place, who possess all the skills required to deliver product frequently to your customer.
If a committee makes business decisions for each product then you will see a lack of authoritative decision-making and a loss of direction and urgency, resulting in delays and rework. Empower a
single person, collocated and available for discussion, to own the product, champion its vision, maintain a visible
backlog of requested work items prioritised by value, and steer development by
making business decisions quickly.
Tags:
team,
product,
lean,
scrum
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Reward the team, not the individual
If reward is linked to a person's individual performance and job title then you are encouraging people to pursue success as an individual. This undermines teamwork and peoples' sense of team.
Actively support the integrity of teams. Through your actions foster the conviction that a team will always be better than any individual at solving a problem and that success as a team is more important than individual success or success at any cost.
Reward a team for its success and let it decide how to share the reward.
Tags:
performance review,
reward,
team
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Partnerships, not relationships
If you establish relationships that keep the other parties at arms-length and are based on contracts describing the expected results rather than the nature of the relationship, then each party will work for its own short-term gains, and the relationship is likely to break down over time as goals diverge, motives are questioned, and communication becomes forced.
Nurture cooperative partnerships for the long-term that are built on mutual loyalty, trust and confidence, and which share the risks and the rewards. Treat your partners as extensions to your business and align incentives so that everybody works for the good of the partnership.
Tags:
partnership,
relationship,
trust,
outsourcing
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Keep the customers' perspective visible
I've talked about being
customer-driven: See everything from the customer point of view first, understand value from the customers' perspective, ask what they want next and deliver it to them quickly.
In the
charter, express the product vision in customer terms. Start to create a
product backlog by first capturing the product sponsor's strategy as goals expressed in customer terms. Organise the goals as a tree with the vision at the root.
Break goals down into smaller goals (and be careful not to go too far so that strategy becomes tactics). The goal tree is a strategic planning tool but, just as importantly, you should use it as an execution tool with the goals encapsulating the voice of the customer.
The
product owner uses the goal tree as a roadmap to achieve the vision (periodically reviewing it with the product sponsor to ensure it continues to steer a true course). Making tactical decisions and creating tactical goals for the release and iteration planning games the product owner steers the development effort to deliver the highest value functionality to customers and realise maximum return on investment for the business.
Tags:
vision,
customer-driven,
goal-driven,
product backlog,
product sponsor,
product owner
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