Activity 7.1

Why are beliefs so important? And, recalling material in Chapter 1, which beliefs specifically are critical for a high performing team?

Beliefs are critically important. Motivation itself² depends upon beliefs and expectations for its existence; in other words, beliefs help generate motivation. But more than just motivation depends on our belief systems. At the philosophical level William James³ expressed it this way: ‘Belief creates the actual fact’. At the parapsychological level,⁴ ‘Few laymen realize what parapsychologists have known for years – that, strangely enough, belief and expectancy themselves actually create phenomena, rather than the other way round’. And at the personal development and business level,⁵ ‘People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. When they believe in themselves, they have the first secret of success’. There is a wealth of evidence, both theoretical and experiential, that our beliefs affect reality and the outcomes of our lives.⁶

Specifically, however, when it comes to top performing teams there is one belief in particular that it is crucial to maintain, and also to really believe. We emphasise the word really here because anyone can say they believe it, and anyone can intellectually believe it; but sadly intellectually ‘believing’ it, is not believing it! This is rather like the work we covered in Chapter 6 on recruitment: everyone comes to an interview claiming to be the right candidate, claiming a track record of achievement, claiming they are the perfect fit for the job, and in one sense they often believe it. But the purpose of the interview is to expose these beliefs for what they are⁷: to find where the fit doesn’t fit, to discover where the achievement record falls short, and why the candidate is indeed not the right candidate. At least, to do these things until the right candidate actually is found.

With this in mind, then, we have to realise that believing in the superior efficacy⁸ of team work is not an option, or a thought; what we are alluding to is a belief that has an emotional component that drives us – like motivation itself – to act. If we really believe something, then we act accordingly. And this becomes something similar to what John Stuart Mill⁹ expressed well over a century ago: ‘One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests’. Imagine what a whole team might be, then!

The most obvious way of seeing, or better, proving this is by results. It’s all very well seeing sporting teams win glory and then attributing it to teamwork, or some company in a journal gaining market share and likewise attributing it to their great teams. But results take time, and however well sports teams and other business teams do, we personally may not have ‘felt’ this for ourselves. They remain examples, but we may not be motivated to want to emulate them. As Dr Alan Watkins¹⁰ said, ‘We still need the motivation to change and the optimistic belief that change is actually possible’. We may need a shortcut to help our people believe in teamwork; and one of the most powerful ways in which we can get buy-in from a team to this belief is by simulation. A simulation replicates what happens in the real world but does so in a safe environment where the risks of permanent damage – for example, to motivation and performance – are minimal.

There are various simulations that may do this but our favourite that has been in the public domain¹¹ since the early 1970s is the NASA¹² Moon exercise. This is a way of ‘proving’ teams outperform individuals, and it is very compelling. One aspect of being a top performing team is through making the right decisions. Therefore, what if we can, in an unknown situation that ‘sort of’ replicates what organisations face all the time,¹³ get individuals to make decisions and then compare these individual decisions with a collective team decision?

Here’s how it works.

Activity 7.2

Instructions: You are part of a space crew originally scheduled to rendezvous with a mother ship on the lighted surface of the moon. Due to mechanical difficulties, however, your ship was forced to land at a spot some 200 miles from the rendezvous point. During re-entry and landing, much of the equipment aboard was damaged and, since survival depends on reaching the mother ship, the most critical items available must be chosen for the 200-mile trip. In Figure 7.2 are listed the 15 items left intact and undamaged after landing. Your task is to rank order them in terms of their importance in allowing your crew to reach the rendezvous point. Place the number 1 by (in the blank left hand column) the most important item, the number 2 by the second most important, and so on through to number 15, the least important. Try this now for yourself. And, if you are in a group or team, including your own friends or family members who may be to hand, then ask them to do it, and once they have, do it collectively as if you were a team producing one rank order between you.

When you have done this, you will be keen to know how accurate your rank order is compared with NASA’s rank order. It is important to stress at this point that the NASA rank order must be taken as ‘gospel’, as it were; there can be no arguing with their rank order, even though this was created over 50 years ago and since then new information has obviously emerged. Having conducted this exercise dozens of times, every now and then some ‘expert’ in the team pops up and knows better than NASA! The rules of the game are that this is not allowed.

But before seeing the actual answer, or anybody else’s – for remember, we may have here a team of up to a dozen people all independently rank ordering the 15 items – we now ask the team to do it collectively; that is, to produce a team rank order, so that we can compare this with the individual answers. Once that is done, we can begin the analysis as per Figure 7.3.

To help understand how to do this and what the scores mean,¹⁴ consider the following: suppose in row two, Box of Matches, we have, for example, our Own answer as 12. Then, the Difference1 Score from NASA’s correct answer is 15−12 = 3. And suppose the Team answer is 14, the Difference2 Score is 15−14 = 1. Clearly, the lower the sum of difference scores, the better the individual or team performance because the nearer it is to the correct NASA score. If the individual or team answered 15 then the difference would be 15−15 = 0. Ideally, then, an individual or a team would score 0 for each of the 15 items, and their total deviance from NASA’s answers would be 0 too!¹⁵

Hence, in this way, each individual in the team can see two things: one, how their own personal result compared with NASA’s correct rank order. They cannot beat NASA but if their score is 0, they have correctly got all 15 items in the right order. Second, they can see whether the team score is better than their own. We show this beneath Figure 7.3 as A. own sum of difference versus B. team sum of difference. Typically, in an average team (maybe one recently formed for a specific project) the team score can be around 30, whereas individual scores may be more like 60! This means the decision making is twice as good if the team makes it, as opposed to individuals in the group making it. Sometimes team decisions can be three times better than the group of individuals’ decisions. If we could get real team decisions, what might that do for your business or organisation?

Activity 7.3

We cannot answer what it would mean for you, but imagine it: if your team(s) could make decisions that were at least twice as good as the individual decisions made within the team, what would that do for your business or organisation? Where would its effects most be felt: in sales, marketing, customer service, finance, operations? Where?

Frequently in doing this NASA simulation, everybody scores worse than the team score; and occasionally one person outperforms the team score, but everyone else fails to. The point is, in doing this, the conviction that a team outperforms an individual, is astonishing: many delegates are frankly amazed by the result, because they have been so reliant on their own skill, knowledge, sense of prowess. To find that the team performs better than they can – despite having subscribed to a team mantra in an intellectual way – comes as a complete shock to their system; and, also a profound wake-up call. The team leader can use this new awareness immediately as the team faces their next challenge or project. Also, if there is one person who outperforms the team, then who is this person? Are they generally taken seriously? Does it come as a surprise as to who it is? These questions all bear thinking about.

But two words of warning. As with reality generally, and people specifically, there is always the possibility that one can get a ‘wrong’ or reverse result; though even this can prove useful. As mentioned before, having conducted dozens of these NASA team exercise, rarely – but predictably – one comes across a result where the individuals outperform the team, and sometimes massively so. On investigation, two reasons keep popping up time and again, and one needs to be aware of these.

First, a possible reason why the ‘wrong’ result occurs and the individuals outperform the team is what I have come to call ‘expert deference’. To give a clear example from my own experience: I once did the exercise with a team of Heads of Faculty in a large secondary school, and this included one individual who was head of physics. Therefore, it was assumed – and he assumed very dogmatically – that he knew all about lunar conditions and science. So naturally, the heads of English, history, geography et al. all deferred to his opinion. Thus, the team scoring became almost identical to his personal scoring, and that was plain wrong. He – no surprise – would not accept the NASA result, which said all that needed to be said about team-playing. And it was also noticeable how his ‘authority’ shut down all real discussion, because – he knew.

If that is bad enough, a worse scenario sometimes ensues. But this time instead of the expert deference, we have the ‘boss deference’. Here is where exactly the same process happens as with the self-appointed ‘expert’, only instead of the expert we have the boss, or manager, or team leader, and the culture is such that everyone defers to their opinion. There is no healthy exchange of views. As soon as the boss expresses an opinion, the ‘yes-men’ and ‘yes-women’ agree that that makes sense. What makes this the ‘worst’ scenario is the fact that they are the boss, and if they have created that culture, they may well like it and want it to continue. There will be, therefore, a lip-service adherence to team-building¹⁶ (of which the NASA simulation may be a manifestation), but in reality there may well be a ‘no-change here, please’ situation. This, clearly, is a delicate issue that will call forth all the powers and skills of the consultant involved to resolve.¹⁷

But however that may be, we should have established through the simulation that teams outperform individuals, and that belief, if activated within each individual, will produce fruit. Like the motivators themselves, it becomes a source of energy and stimulus to greater levels of performance. And once having done the simulation, the leader can constantly remind them of it, and spur them on to use team working even more effectively.¹⁸

This, then, is one foundational building block of building belief in the team, as opposed to subscribing to pure self-reliance, and every person in it for themselves. What else helps develop strong belief in the team? I often quote Virgil, ‘Success nourished them; they seemed to be able, and so they were able’.¹⁹ In that brief expression we have the essence for ongoing belief: ‘success nourished them …’. In other words, our belief in the power of what we are doing is strengthened every time we get results; for that is what success is – it’s getting results.

Goal-setting, targets, milestones, celebrating achievements along the way, these ideas are all well-known, well-trodden, and we approve of them. Our book, Mapping Motivation for Leadership,²⁰ deals with several of these ideas in some detail. Effectively, then, teams grow in belief the more success they achieve, or results they produce that prove that what they are doing is working. Just as we have feedback from leaders, and from team members (each other) which might be termed internal feedback, so results are what might be termed the external feedback from the environment.

We acknowledge, therefore, the importance of this, but pass over it here because our primary concern is how motivation might strengthen belief in the team. So, what can we do motivationally to improve belief in teams? The answer in one sense is surprisingly simple, for the issue of belief in teams is analogous to the issue of belief in motivation! From the start of this whole series of Mapping Motivation books we have made the point that motivation is a feature of organisational life, but a feature that is not perceived as a benefit; rather, organisations seek to measure performance, productivity and profit – the big three ‘Ps’. It is easy in this scenario to overlook the fact that motivation drives performance – which drives productivity – which leads to profits (given the right strategy). Motivation is, therefore, the invisible component of success. What if, instead of bringing in motivational speakers or having Ra-Ra ‘motivation’ days, we seriously started tracking motivation in teams and using this as a basis for developmental work?

In Chapter 8 we will look at the motivational accountability of teams within an organisation; but now let’s consider how the team becomes motivationally accountable to itself and thereby strengthens its belief in itself. The way we do this is by team tracking.

Let’s consider the case of a real professional services company, which we’ll call ABS Ltd. ABS caters to the Building sector of the economy. It has approximately 50 employees, although this varies over time (and depending on economic conditions), and these staff make up about 10 teams, though this again varies. Some teams are technical, some commercial, and there is of course a senior team and what I am going to call an Admin team. I say ‘going to call’ as the team does more than just ‘admin’ – because the company runs a tight ship, the team was initially run by the Finance Director (FD) and its brief included HR functions! Anyone familiar with SME businesses will recognise this scenario! It’s certainly not ideal because FDs tend not to be ideal HR experts; and it’s also not ideal including specific HR functions amongst all the administrative work, particularly hiring new staff.

But this is the team I’d like to focus on because it’s self-belief over a long period of time was, in my view, quite astonishing, and proved a mainstay for the company. And yet, as so often with ‘heroes/heroines’, they went largely neglected: they weren’t in sales and they didn’t possess the technical skills which the company traded on. Admin teams, expressed another way, are a cost to the business; and they tend – everywhere – to be low down in the pecking order. Certainly, they are not paid as well as other more ‘important’ departments or teams. It’s rather like the fact that the brain does the thinking, the muscles do the lifting, so we rarely think about the blood which circulates around all parts of the body, and – in one important sense – like the skin that keeps it together or keeps it functioning.

Activity 7.4

Take a look at Figure 7.4. Here we see a comparison of the motivational scores for ABS as an organisation with those of its Admin team for four, though not consecutive, years: years 1 and 2, and then a 4-year gap after which years 6 and 7 have completed the Maps. We’ll talk about this shortly, but for now – given that we are focusing on belief – what might we say about these scores and how they compare?

The Motivational Maps are a self-perception inventory; this means that an individual measures themselves against themselves and not against each other or some external standard. Measuring ourselves against each other can produce counter-productive animosity between individuals and between teams; but the reality is, we always want to know how other people are doing. It provides a benchmark for how we are doing, and it can spur us on. Furthermore, in seeing that we are doing better than others, we can also begin to believe in our own capabilities.

What, then, is remarkable in this scenario of Figure 7.4 is that the Admin team has consistently over a long period of time been more motivated – more energised – than ABS as a whole. And not to get lost in detail here, apart from Year 1, where they were the second most highly motivated team, in the three other succeeding years, they were the most highly motivated! This is quite extraordinary when you think about them being the lowest paid workers in the office. Also, this reminds us of the quotation from Virgil that I cited earlier in this chapter.

This is, so far, simply the motivational scoring, which we know is important. But what about the motivators themselves, which motivators?

Activity 7.5

Now review Figure 7.5 which compares the Organisation’s motivators over the 4, but non-consecutive, years those of the Admin team. What do you observe and what would you conclude from this comparison?

As always with Motivational Maps, there are so many points that could be made, but we need to focus on the really key ones. First, it is highly apparent that the Organisation and the Admin are in sync regarding their motivators; this is not true of many of the other teams. The Admin team, therefore, are having their motivational energies reinforced not specifically by the management but by the whole organisation. This is like an invisible coating or net that draws them in the same direction as all the people in the company, and so strengthens their sense of purpose or meaningfulness – hence their reinforced belief in the rightness of what they are doing.

Second, we notice that the three core motivators are Searcher, Defender and Expert, and in that order of importance. So far as being an Admin team is concerned this fits almost perfectly with the kind of work they need to do: the Searcher is customer focused, and here their customer is the whole organisation, which it serves. But almost as importantly, the Admin – if no-one else – has to be systems orientated and procedurally driven, which is very much what the Defender wants to do. Finally, given the range of activities that this Admin team has to cope with – from IT in all its ramifications, to filing, researching, invoicing, and HR functions – then the need for ongoing professional development is critical. In other words, the Expert motivator.

Third, and finally here, let’s comment on something more problematic. In terms of belief we note that not only are the top three motivators more or less completely aligned (in Years 1 and 6 they are exactly the same) but so also is the Lowest motivator, which with one exception (the Organisation in Year 7 which has Star) remains the Director. That they are aligned even here is good from the point of view of belief, because particularly this motivator – the Director – can be very disruptive to other motivational types, since it tends to want to take control. Imagine the situation whereby the Admin team came under the influence of strong Director types seeking to control its activities when this kind of behavior was something they actually disliked. How would that play out? On the other hand, with the whole organisation, as well as the Admin team specifically, having a very weak drive to manage, control and take responsibility, can that be a good thing? Actually, as events proved in this case, no. In one hyphenated word, we find too much ‘laissez-faire’.

So we need to dig deeper here to uncover more of what is going on. And it needs to be said at this point, in giving more background information, that this team experienced a strange contradiction but one that is not that uncommon in SMEs. First, it needs to be pointed out that the work in this company took place over more than a 10-year period.²¹ During that time, whilst all the employees, including the senior directors of the company, were Map profiled regularly, the MD – the major shareholder of the company – declined to be mapped! He wanted to know everyone else’s profile, but not be known himself.²² There were seemingly good reasons for this at the time, but retrospectively one realises this was – potentially – a mistake to permit. However, given this anomaly, one thing was pretty clear working within the company: that the MD most certainly had Director in his top three motivators, for he could not stop micro-managing everyone around him. All the teams suffered from this, except … you’ve guessed it, the Admin team! Why? How?

The reason why the MD could not interfere with the Admin team was because the Finance Director (Figure 7.6, Pamela, SMT1)²³ was a strong individual put in charge of it to start with – and she did not allow interference with her domain! The MD lion could interfere with all the other animals in his jungle, but the lioness and her cubs nobody messed with. This meant that the Admin team could develop without, as we mentioned in our Preface, the Petronius Arbiter syndrome²⁴ occurring: ‘We trained hard … But it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up in teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation’.

If we look at Figure 7.7, we see Pamela still firmly in control, and even more highly motivated!

The team is changing – Fred and Rachel have left, but there has only been one replacement, Jane. We might note that the departure of Fred is probably not surprising; he is reasonably motivated, but his profile is at odds with the team, and he is the only person with Spirit in his top three. Given this team profile, that does not seem a fit. Rachel’s top motivator does not really fit either, although it did mean that her relationship with Pamela was warm. But her motivational scores, relative to the team, were the lowest except for Mia. Mia was a part-timer who actually was much older than anybody else in the team, was ‘old school’, and was in the team through an historical anachronism – and would soon retire anyway. The addition of Jane, motivationally, was largely consistent with the team profile: although in Year 2, Builder has replaced Expert as third motivator, a cursory examination shows this to be because of Mia’s Builder spike – she alone has it in her top three, and approaching retirement presumably has it weighing on her mind more than her younger counterparts.

Overall, the motivational score has improved by 1%: from 75% to 76%. However, we need to examine this more closely.

Activity 7.6

Comparing Figures 7.6 and 7.7, what in your opinion might be a cause for concern in the motivational scoring?

Four factors increase the overall scoring in Year 2: first, the addition of Jane, who is 80% motivated which is above the average for Year 1. Two, Sarah’s score has slightly increased. And three and four, we have both the SMT leader, Pamela and the manager, Vicky, now scoring 100%. Their scores may be valid, so that is all good, but keep in mind that they are the leaders. Caroline and Mia, however, have both seriously lost motivation. Furthermore, despite being 100% motivated, Vicky has effectively no motivators at all! Note her scoring: all motivators are 20/20 – exactly, so that although there is a technical result or order, in reality all nine motivators are pulling her equally. This suggests that the demands on the team are coming from all angles and – protean-like – Vicky is able to respond with equanimity, as it were, and not be motivationally phased. A cool hand steering the ship. However, there is clearly turbulence,²⁵ and the lower scores of Caroline and Mia reflect that.

But what has this got to do with belief? We have to be tentative here, because so many factors are and can be involved. But look at stability: two personnel changes and major, de-motivating turbulence, and yet the motivational scores remain steady; and perhaps even more revealingly, the motivational profile is more or less constant. Indeed, without Mia’s extreme and non-representative spike on Builder, the two team maps would be the same for their top three and lowest motivators: this is a team built on the energies of Searcher, Defender and Expert. In one sense, since they are so stable despite all that is happening, they come to embody beliefs about themselves: we believe we make a difference, we believe in proper systems and processes, and we value expertise and learning.

As these energies drive forward, so the beliefs in them deepen: beliefs shift attitudes,²⁶ which generate thoughts and feelings that finally affect decisions and choices. Therefore, a loop – in this case virtuous – emerges whereby the identity of the team is preserved. Now it is important to be clear: sometimes, in order to be effective, a team needs a new infusion of people and different motivators. Diversity can be useful, can be good. But in periods of turbulence, stability can also be a strength, which is what we find here.

Remember what we said before? The essence of belief in teams comes down to this essential point: we believe that teams are more productive than any individual can be. That was the point of the NASA exercise demonstration: to get the individuals to realise that simply in the area of decision-making teams worked better than individuals. Now we are talking about the energies – the motivations – forming a collective impact, which, if they are effective, feed back into the team belief loop.

How, then, does this play out in future? Let’s skip a few years and travel to the point where we are close to the end. In Figure 7.8(i) and (ii) we see Years 6 and 7. In other words, we have skipped 4 years to see what has happened with this team, and we are looking to see whether the motivational profiles tell us anything about the team beliefs.

Activity 7.7

Given the thread of what we have been discussing – how motivations might reinforce belief in teams – and from what we have seen in Years 1 and 2 (Figures 7.6 and 7.7), identify three issues relating to these topics from Figures 7.8(i) and (ii) (showing Years 6 and 7).

Before identifying three key issues, let’s first clear some ground. Pamela has stepped back from managing this team altogether; she is still in the company, but her role is now exclusively financial. This means Vicky has had to step up and manage – a role Pamela inducted her into. Next, we note that Vicky and Caroline span all four maps, and since joining in Year 2, Jane also has been constantly a member. In fact, in Year 7 there is only one entirely new member, Tina. Depending where we make the cut, we have approximately 50% of the staff who stay in the team. What, then, are three issues that these Maps reveal?

First, and perhaps most importantly, the team motivational profile remains amazingly stable: we have Searcher, Defender and Expert in Years 6 and 7 as we did in Year 1 and, more or less, in Year 2. And the Director motivator still remains lowest in all four years. This consistency over 7 years might suggest a too comfortable arrangement; what we like to call a Country Club scenario whereby nobody disturbs the status quo.

However, this seems – and is – unlikely in this situation because – second issue – the motivational scoring is persistently high, peaking in Year 6 at 82% – in the Optimal Zone of motivation. Usually Country Club scenarios have, at best, scores in the middling 50–60% range. That said, the drop to 71% in Year 7 is slightly concerning, though we note that the whole ABS organisational motivation also drops to 62% (see Figure 7.4). Is something going on here?

The answer is yes. And here we come to a highly advanced application of Motivational Maps that can be extraordinarily powerful. I’d like to introduce you to some of the concepts here, albeit space is brief, and clearly what I am about to show is just the beginning: a whole book of case studies could be written on this topic. I am talking about the satisfaction rating scores and how they apply collectively, that is, across a team.

For example, if we take Vicky in Year 7 (Figure 7.8(ii)) and see that her top three motivators are Expert, Defender and Builder, we also see that her satisfaction ratings with these 3 motivators are respectively, 9, 10, 10 (all out of 10 maximum). In other words, Vicky is 100% satisfied that her Defender and Builder motivators are being met at work, but only 90% satisfied with her top motivator, the Expert. But what instead of looking at the individual’s satisfaction, we attempted to review the overall satisfaction of a specific motivator?

Take the Expert motivator in Year 7 (Figure 7.8(ii)). Who has this motivator in their top three? Vicky, Caroline, Hannah, Jane and Jessica. We might represent this information in this way, Figure 7.9.

On its own, this information is interesting but limited. We know that the Expert motivator is important to this team in Year 7: it’s ranked second, although in reality we might want to consider it first.

Activity 7.8

Study Year 7 in Figures 7.8(i) and (ii). Why might we think that Expert is actually more important in this team than the Searcher, which seems to be the top motivator?

The reason why this may be the case, and something senior management would do well to ponder, is that there is – with seven team members – only a one point difference in the scoring: Searcher 179 versus Expert 178, but the Expert motivator is in the top three of five team members, whereas the Searcher motivator is only in the top three of four team members. It is the averaging effect of the non-top three scores that leads to the Searcher coming out first.

But be that as it may, what we are learning is that in Year 7 the Admin team is reasonably satisfied (7/10) that their learning needs are being met. Since 6/10 would be an ‘average’ score, then 7 is better, but clearly not ideal. What we need, though, is to see how all the satisfaction scores of the leading motivators stack up. Figure 7.10, then, takes the three motivators that consistently span the 7 years, as shown in Figure 7.5, and applies the process we have outlined in Figure 7.9.

Now we begin to see, in Figure 7.10, some information with much wider implications.

Activity 7.9

What implications might you draw out from Figure 7.10? What might be helpful in terms of thinking about top performing teams and in terms of team belief?

The first thing that seems important is that the satisfaction ratings for the motivators are quite consistent, but their tendencies are going in different directions. The Searcher is consistently around the 7+ score and the Defender around the 8+ score, but the overall direction seems to be downwards: a small and slight erosion in the sense of accomplishing mission and in feeling secure is detectable in the numbers. This is particularly marked in Year 7 where the Defender drops for the first time to below 8 at 7.6. The making a difference in Years 6 and 7 is not quite as good as in Years 1 and 2. On the other hand, the Expert satisfaction is trending upwards, despite the lapse to 7 in Year 7; for both Years 6 and 7 are ahead of Years 1 and 2.

If we take the numbers and do a little further calculation on them, we then find, in Figure 7.11, that we have even more information.

We see from the Average numbers that Defender (8.3) may not be the top motivator, but it is the most satisfied one. Perhaps this should not surprise us in that there has been a consistency of personnel and leadership over a long period of time. Expert, on the other hand, is the least satisfied of the top three motivators (6.8), but this seems about to change. And it is the Range numbers that indicate this: the making a difference for the customer has changed only in a small way (although now beginning to dip), but the Expert motivator satisfaction rating has increased by a whole 2.0 points (from 6.0 to 8.0 max, which is, 2 of 6, a 33% increase) over the period.

What can we deduce from this? I think we can deduce two opposing conclusions, although from the numbers alone one seems more likely. We discover which conclusion is correct, however, by always referring to what is happening on the ground: how did this top performing team – for that is what they are – pan out?

One conclusion – the less likely one – is that the motivations of the team are changing, and that the desire to make a difference and to get the right processes in place to do so, is being augmented by an increasing desire – hunger even – within the team for more learning and expertise. On the face of it, that seems good; but I think there are good motivational reasons for suspecting this is not the scenario that is unfolding. The primary reason for this is two-fold: namely, that the Expert motivator in Year 7, despite the upward drift from Years 1 and 2, has fallen backwards, and quite significantly (from 8.0 to 7.0); at the same time, the overall motivation has dropped from 82% to 71% (Figure 7.4) AND the sense of security, the Defender motivator, satisfaction rating is also falling away (from 8.8 to 7.6), which is following the general drift downwards. Why would security satisfaction be less if the company were doing well? And if the Admin team ‘believed’ that to be the case?

Here we reach an unpalatable truth about organisational life: namely, that top performing teams can be destroyed, not through any fault of their own but because of other factors within the organisational structure. Of which, of course, poor leadership is the primary reason. Sadly, too, within the hierarchy of most organisations and companies, Admin teams tend not to have a lot of political clout or weight: they are not rain-makers, or profit centres, but costs to the business, and so invariably a last consideration in terms of needs and rewards.

So, the second – and correct interpretation of these numbers (see Endnote 20 for more on the problem) – is that a crisis is looming, despite the excellent work this team is performing. Essentially, the issue is this: both satisfaction with making a difference and feeling secure is waning, and in a situation like that we ask ourselves, why is that? Often the answer we tell ourselves is²⁷: I am not performing well enough because I don’t know enough. Ergo, I need to know more, develop more expertise, and then my contribution will make that difference and also ensure my – our, the team – security. The Expert motivator, then, can almost in this situation be viewed as a coping motivator – one²⁸ we easily resort to in any crisis.

Looking at motivators in this way can, therefore, be a massive help in understanding a number of things. Firstly, we have seen that this is a top performing team from the comparisons with organisational results over a long period of time. Second, we learn that satisfaction with motivators can give us a clue, an inkling, into the state of belief in the team and, by extension, the organisation at any given point. We have deliberately here tried to reduce the amount of data presented (omitting Years 3, 4, and 5) in order to keep it manageable. But clearly, patterns emerge that are extremely revealing. Third, and finally for this chapter, it is worth pointing out that it is small changes in the numbers that can be so indicative: the Range numbers, for example, in Figure 7.11 are not large, but comparing them with each other shows wide variations which are meaningful.

At the end of the day, whilst there is not a necessarily direct correlation between team motivation and belief in the team, when we examine the details we see the sort of evidence that shows us what sort of beliefs a team holds and the direction in which those energies are going. If we know that, we know – using Reward Strategy ideas from Chapter 2 – how to provide more fuel and sustenance to keep top performing teams top, and even to revive teams that are flagging.

From here we reach our final chapter on the fourth characteristic of top performing teams: accountability.