Uncover Motivation

Some days your team is energetic, open to ideas, and productive. On other days people seem passive, hostile, or unmotivated.

To get to the bottom of this, here is an exercise you can try with your team or in one-on-one meetings.

Try it anytime you feel something is wrong with people. It's also good for getting a better sense of what motivates people.

You can add them as stickers to a virtual board, for example, Miro.

Some examples:

• sense of contribution and purpose
• visibility
• feedback
• professional development
• reliable work
• team participation
• difficult work

In a 1-on-1 conversation (or even in advance), ask your team member to place values on a scale from "important" to "unimportant" to them. They can add their wording or modify the wording to make it more transparent. This is your first axis.

Make notes about what each item means.

Create a scale from "Doing well" to "Not Doing Well." Then start with the essential items. Ask them to rate their current level of satisfaction with each item.

For example: "How well does your current job give you a sense of contribution and purpose?"

Please leave room for an explanation and write down why.

What values are essential to your team member but not covered well?

If you are doing this exercise with the whole team, see if there is a match. Maybe everyone wants to "feel like part of the team," but there are gaps in practice.

Make a list of priority areas that will impact team-wide interactions, and use the next 1-on-1 meetings and team sessions to dig deeper and improve things.

You can't always improve your team's mood, but if you know what distracts them from their work, you can try to influence it. It can significantly affect their motivation to interact individually and collectively.

Try this exercise in your next one on one meeting!