Introduction to Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams

Our introduction to Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams begins where our introduction to the leadership volume began: with a disclaimer! Essentially, building great teams and leadership are similar in that they are complex, multifaceted activities requiring a full range of human intelligence, insight, knowledge and skills to accomplish. Therefore, any one book can only cover so much; as our Preface has hopefully made clear, our perspective here is not to detail all that could be said about top performing teams, but to focus – like a laser – on the motivational component of team building that Motivational Maps considers woefully under-investigated, under-explained and so rendered in-actionable. That after all is the key: action. Theories are fine, but endless theorising leads to academic stultification and no progress in the real world at all. Cicero observed¹ that it was ‘the function of wisdom … to discriminate between good and evil’, and so to have ideas but no practical solutions, surely, is a form of evil in that people are left floundering around in their own lack of productivity and poor performances.

And I mention lack of productivity here very specifically, because especially in the UK this has been a problem for more than 10 years. It is estimated² that productivity grew by 2% in total over the period from 2009 to 2019, whereas before the financial crisis of 2008 it had grown by 2% per year! High productivity is a by-product of top performing teams; and the thing about it to consider is that productivity is simply leveraged performance(s). Each individual is enabled to perform at a high level – to reach their personal best – but wonderfully, over and above their individual performance being itself productive, the collective performances (the team’s) has an amazing synergistic effect out of all proportion to the numbers.³ We will look at this in more detail later.

But also recall Peter Drucker⁴ who observed that, ‘No institution can survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it’. Actionable ideas will be, by their nature of being actionable, practical, useful, easy to understand and swift. The promise of building top performing teams is that whilst we do need intelligence, insight, knowledge and skills, we do not need to be geniuses or super-people; we need to be honest, diligent learners who seek to help achieve results and also to develop their fellow human beings whom we call our co-workers or colleagues. And we need these honest, diligent learners to be motivated and therefore highly motivating in everything they do. This, then, is a study about creating motivational teams through having motivational managers who fully understand motivation and how it works.

Since we are going through a new revolution in the work place, this issue of approaching top performing teams via motivation⁵ has never been more important. More than 150 years ago we underwent the Industrial Revolution, and now we are experiencing the Digital Revolution which is almost certainly going to have as dramatic an effect on the future as the Industrial Revolution did before. A recent report by Deloitte⁶ discusses the disruptors to the world of work: increasing automation and AI technologies, workplace relocation and the move away from traditional places of work, and finally the work force itself becoming more heterogeneous, as in less mere employees, but more a combination of, and interaction between, different worker/talent types (e.g. employees, gig workers, contractors, crowds).

All of this leads to some fundamental shifts. Deloitte instances six major shifts that its research indicates need to happen. First, they head up the whole thing as being about organisations which are ‘adaptable’ in future; and, to do this, organisations will have to switch from being:

• Profit-driven                                                 to  purpose-driven

• Internally focused                                         to  customer focused

• Hierarchically structured                              to  flexible network of teams

• Siloed, bureaucratic interactions                  to  collaborative, agile governance

• One-size-fits-all talent management            to  individualised talent engagement

• Resistance to change                                    to  ally earned them and that we are not bchange & learning are continuous

They also comment that organisations will have to consider ‘Employees are your first customers’ and that ‘high performing teams’ will be enabled ‘by adopting connected ways of working and an adaptable culture’.

As you can presuppose from my account above, I am extremely impressed by Deloitte’s research, but equally I am also disappointed. For in a 40-page document there is one word missing: motivation! Every buzz-word is used, except the one word that would really make a difference – motivation is not mentioned once in Deloitte’s report. It’s as if they think that by their analytics and data alone, they can re-shape an organisation. Indeed, they talk of ‘reshaping culture and behaviour to act with agility & collaboration’. And this is exactly what the psychometrics do: it’s a top-down approach which paradoxically claims to empower the work force. It means we are going to coerce ‘right’ behaviours and it is, therefore, staggeringly misconceived. At the beginning of the report we learn that ‘92% of organizations are not correctly structured to operate in this new environment [of the future]’ and my estimate would be that in another 10 years’ time another 92% will not be correctly structured either, because the whole approach is wrong.

In not addressing the bottom-up motivational approach organisations will never solve their people issues,⁷ although that may be good news for big consultancies in the same way that regional wars across the world are great news for various defence industries and corporations. Everyone has their job for life – their profits – and there is no change. And that is a real issue; there is an appearance of doing something about the rate of change, about change itself, and there is whole new line of jargon appearing that majors on this theme – the word ‘adaptability’ for example being just such a one. Carl Frey and Michael Osbourne⁸ recently observed that ‘Resistance to technological change does not just come from workers fearful of their jobs but from conservative elites who fear disruption to existing hierarchies’. How brilliant, then, to appear to be championing change but never addressing the real motivational issue underpinning it.

Anaïs Nin more generally commented on life⁹ that it is ‘a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death’. Top-down management invariably does this: it seeks change whilst simultaneously seeking to preserve things as they are. The poet WH Auden¹⁰ expressed it this way:

We would rather be ruined than changed.

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the present

And let our illusions die.

And that – climbing the cross of the present – is what is required. Motivation is about flow states, and so works with change.¹¹

If that sounds too abstract, then let’s boil it down to the simplest type of proposition, and let’s grasp the full import of William Kendall’s smart observation¹²: ‘Building a vibrant company is about forming a good team… You cannot do it on your own…. It is a question of persuading people who are better than you to form a successful team’. People better than you? Ah, there’s the rub. Who can accept that easily in a culture where – as, say, in television programmes like The Apprentice¹³ – we have to prove we are the best? So this is a psychological or ego issue, and one very similar to the whole thrust of what we have been saying all along: namely, that bottom-up is necessary and better than top-down in terms of long-term results and productivity. But again, psychologically, managers and leaders¹⁴ seem unable to let go of the need to ‘control’ their people.

But let’s add another layer to this analysis. For when it comes to teams, as well as individuals, we need to consider rewards. This is an easy to understand concept because it is soft-wired (if not hard-wired) into us from childhood onwards. If we perform, then we get prizes: be a good boy or be a good girl, and we get the ice cream or material reward; but even more important are the immaterial rewards we accumulate – acceptance, praise, admiration, support and more besides, including even love.¹⁵ We want – are motivated towards – these rewards. Organisations recognise this and many now have moved well beyond the simple and simplistic idea that paying people money is enough. However, this movement is itself not sufficient, since it tends to be about the WHAT and not the HOW, which is possibly even more important.

So, rewards are, on the one hand, a content – somebody receives ‘something’, which is a WHAT (for example, a pay bonus, a trip to the Caribbean, time off, and so on) – but also, critically, it is a process: the employee is handled in a specific way, and HOW this is done is crucial. Naturally, and as one would expect, most organisations spend most of their time focusing on arguably the less important of these two elements of rewards: the content. Content – the WHAT – is easy: make a list and dish out the goodies!¹⁶ Who wants to spend a lot of time thinking about it? But, of course, it is HOW we reward people that is more fundamental, and this does take some thinking about. And isn’t that obvious? The best gift in the world to one’s life partner left unwrapped and casually lying around will usually have less impact than a much more moderate gift – but carefully thought through and based on an understanding of the desires of the recipient – carefully and beautifully packaged, and presented at exactly the right psychological moment.

Moreover, a moment’s thought about what motivates us in our dealings with other people reveals that we prefer rewards that are:

• Genuine – in that we feel we have really earned them and that we are not being fobbed off

• Sincere – in that the person awarding the reward believes in our right to it

• Well-intentioned – in that the person awarding cares about us, as in sincerely cares

• Thoughtful – in that the reward itself is appropriate and commensurate with the performance

• Structured – in that the reward is part of an ongoing pattern or design of positive experiences

• Temporal – in that this specific reward is only a pledge of further, greater rewards in future

Any team leader, then, needs to ask themselves whether they are genuine, sincere, well-intentioned, thoughtful, structured and temporal in their approach to rewarding and dealing with their team members. And it would appear that these qualities need to be established at the recruitment or interviewing stage of any appointment for someone who is going to be a leader. For of course, there is no use asking anyone at interview: ‘Are you sincere’ or ‘Are you genuine’ because the answer will be ‘Yes’! But the fact is, past behavior is a good, though not infallible, indicator of whether these things are so. For more on Reward Strategies see Chapter 2, and on recruitment as a core asset for top performing teams and how to go about it motivationally, see Chapter 6.

This book unpacks four simple ideas from a motivational perspective: that top performing teams have or practise four characteristics: the remit’s clear, they practise interdependency, they have strong and specific beliefs, and they are accountable. Simples? Yes and no. The topic of The Remit alone takes up three chapters – 3, 4 and 5 – as we unpack three particular dimensions of it. And the remaining three chapters cover the other three areas of Interdependency, Beliefs and Accountability. Motivation at this point might be compared with knitting: there are certain threads and ‘weaves’ that come back time and again, or crossover from one characteristic to another. Furthermore, the usefulness of this book is in the relentless motivational focus it follows.

We could take the obvious lists like the one we have just listed – Genuine, Sincere, etc. – and ask for people to rate themselves and from that try to spot what is missing, and subsequently devise exercises around it. But where we can, we avoid that, and stick to the motivational issues, tools and techniques. One marked exception to this rule occurs in Chapter 7 where we introduce the classic NASA experiment, which is so relevant to team beliefs. There is always an exception!

Finally, because motivation is emotional, and is inherently about change, the case studies tend to be ‘messy’; there are no easy solutions. As soon as one has turned round a poor team, someone leaves, is poached, external circumstances change, disaster strikes (Covid-19 as I write this), and the whole team needs reconfiguring. However, the joy is: if we truly understand how motivation works, as these case studies reveal, then we are prepared for anything, and nothing should surprise us. We have the language and the metrics to measure, monitor and maximise motivation to its greatest effect – enhancing performance, increasing productivity and ultimately enabling more value or more profitability.

With this in mind, then, read on – explore the world of motivation and top performing teams!