Preface

Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams is the fifth and final volume in the series, The Complete Guide to Mapping Motivation. It is, perhaps, somewhat odd that this particular volume has occurred at this relatively late stage, or even occurred at all, given that a whole chapter was devoted to motivation and teams in the first volume, Mapping Motivation; and then again the topic was covered in the subsequent books, Mapping Motivation for Engagement, and finally Mapping Motivation for Leadership. In each book there was substantially more, and original, information presented on motivation and the use of Motivational Maps in order to develop strong teams or address issues with weaker ones. In short, we have already covered the issue of motivation and teams, haven’t we?

True, but in reality we cannot cover the issue enough if we want to be serious about organisational development, achieving goals, increasing performance and productivity, and more generally making things happen and making a difference. And just to pick up the first point – organisational development – as long ago as 1986 Charles Handy¹ observed that teams were the basic building blocks of organisational development, and were useful for: distribution of work and developing skills, problem-solving, decision-making, collection of ideas and information and information processing, inter and intra group co-ordination and liaison, management and control of work, testing and ratifying decisions, increased commitment and involvement. And that’s just the start!

But there is another, profounder reason why we need to consider teams in much more detail. Bertrand Russell,² one of the great British philosophers of the twentieth century noted that, ‘Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social life survives, self-realisation cannot be the supreme principle of ethics’. We have become in the last 50 or so years quite obsessed in the West with the notion of personal development; indeed, the model which has come to symbolise it more than any other (despite claims that it has been superseded by newer models) is Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.³ The very apex of this model is ‘self-actualisation’, which is pretty much the same as Russell’s ‘self-realisation’.

The rise of coaching itself as a major and mainstream industry testifies to the importance of the individual and their realising their ‘full potential’. And pointing this out is not to denigrate it: Motivational Maps was originally designed to help the individual realise their capabilities, as well as helping the coach to help them too! But it soon became obvious that the individual alone could only deliver so much, but not enough; that teams were absolutely crucial – not only for enhanced performance, but also for that cohesion that comes from a sense of belonging, and so of identity. Paul Martin in his magisterial survey of The Sickening Mind⁴ commented as long ago as 1997 that ‘We shall all be consultants before long’. Given his context of ‘there is no longer a job for life’: on the one hand this suggests a stepping up of the work force to new levels of expertise and autonomy; but on the other it suggests isolation and alienation as we become increasingly distant from each other. And we see that Martin was not wrong: there has been an explosion of consultancy services throughout the world since he wrote his book, and a vast extension of the domains where it is now ‘appropriate’ to be a consultant.⁵

Motivational Maps for teams, then, was developed quite quickly after the individual Map was established, for it recognised the importance not just of the individual’s motivation but what collectively the motivational profile indicated. One of the central observations from early-on was simply the fact that so many so-called ‘personality’ conflicts within teams were nothing of the sort: they were motivational conflicts; they were where the energies between people were running in diametrically opposite directions, and there seemed to be no way to reconcile these tensions.

Furthermore, very early on Motivational Maps realised that there was a vital, crucial distinction to be made between what we often call a group and what organisations and businesses usually want, which is a team; and that it was too easy to settle for groups and pretend that they were a team. The mechanism by which this pretence occurred – and still occurs – is the familiar one: nomenclature. Stick a title on something and somehow it has been magicked into existence: the sales team, the finance team, the operations team; and if we extend this logic, even when we don’t use the word team (as in, for example, the use of words like group,⁶ department, faculty, unit, division and so on), we still imagine that that is what we have – a fully-functioning team whole heartedly devoted to its specialism. But the reality is invariably otherwise.

We want teams; we need teams; and if we wanted a really simple way of expressing this, we could do worse than going to the sadly deceased Bee Gee, Maurice Gibb! Commenting on the creative power and success of the three Gibb brothers who comprised the Bee Gees pop group, he said: ‘One of us is OK, two of us are pretty good, but three of us together are magic’. That is what we are looking for: the synergy between people that produces an unstoppable magic – in business, in music, in virtually any aspect of human life. They worked as a real team; and when they stopped working as a team – as is well-documented in their various split-ups starting in the late 1960s – they were nowhere near as successful, either in commercial terms of record sales, or even in quality of the music and its wider appeal.

Perhaps the real beginnings of the need to understand how teams actually work, and how crucial they were, began in the 1980s, although of course there were plenty of studies before then, but often using the term ‘group’, as in T-groups,⁷ or ‘group-think’, and such like. Belbin was a famous researcher of the 1980s whose work led to the creation of the Belbin Inventory, an important discovery surrounding the importance of realising that there are complementary roles within a group and their bases need to be covered if we are to achieve teamwork. Writing in the foreword to Belbin’s book, Anthony Jay⁸ notes that ‘while not ignoring or neglecting the individual, we should devote far more thought to teams: to the selection, development, and training of teams, to the qualifications, experience, and achievements of teams, and above all to the psychology, motivation, composition, and behaviour of teams’. Notice that word, which slips into the ‘above all’ category of attention: motivation. Whilst Belbin’s book is fabulous and important still, interestingly his own index at the back of the book does not contain the word ‘motivation’. It’s like, everyone points to ‘motivation’ as a key factor but then moves on to discuss ‘more important’ aspects of building a team.

Lest this be thought fanciful, take another great text from the 1980s: the book Super Teams: A Blueprint for Organisational Success,⁹ and produced by researchers at Ashridge Management College, which was one of leading centres for management at the time. To create a ‘super team’ (or what we are referring to simply as a real team, as opposed to a group of people) they identified 20 qualities it needed to have, and again we find that motivation is not one of them. Indeed, motivation has only one citation in the index, although the word does appear some eight or nine times; but motivation is understood by the authors as something ‘that comes from being successful’. This view of motivation – which is still common – is a cart before the horse perspective: motivation, they are arguing, derives from success, whereas we think motivation causes success, or more accurately, is an essential component in the real success that results from true productivity.¹⁰

Of course, lessons have been learnt, haven’t they? We are not in the 1980s now; that was over 30 years ago and this is the current situation. But if we could genuinely compound all the organisations, corporations, companies, institutions, teams and individuals who have said ‘lessons will or must be learned’, and imagine that they actually had been, and that the expression was not some meaningless cliché, then we simply would be in a world where there were no problems, for – obviously – the lessons would have been learnt. Alas, we are not in such a world. For whether it be 30 years ago, or 2000, the problem persists, as Petronius Arbiter¹¹ noted: ‘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’. In other words, there seems to be a general principle of entropy at work and that actually to achieve ‘teams’, that is high performing teams, is a constant and persistent issue; and it does not go away because we have formed one at one moment of time.

Indeed, if we have taken on board what I am saying here we realise why all the solutions to creating high performing teams over the last 30 years have been – shall we say? – not wholly effective: because they do not address the motivation issue. Motivation is an energy, it changes over time; it’s like people – it’s something we have to constantly examine, like our health. It’s not something we should ever take for granted. But that is exactly what happens.

Belbin, as I have said, is great – it makes sense to look at ‘roles’ within a team and this can help. But roles are a static concept: have we got the appropriate person in the appropriate role and have we got all our role-bases covered? Yes. But where’s the energy? Where’s the movement that underpins activity, which underpins achievement and success? And what happens as roles subtly, or not so subtly, shift?

I could cite lots of other ‘systems’ for developing teams and they all have the same short-fall. To take, perhaps, just one, and the most wildly successful ‘team’ solution of the last 15 years, then consider Patrick Lencioni’s best-selling The Five Dysfunctions of Teams.¹² This is another ‘solution’ and a really interesting book. Its first paragraph could be an epigraph for this study: ‘Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare’. Wow – isn’t that wonderful?

But what is the model? Certainly one I approve of in general terms: it is reversing the five deadliest problems that beset teams. Namely, absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. This, like Belbin’s roles, is another checklist of nouns – things – that we have to pay attention to. What about trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results – where are we with these? Where do we want to be? How will we get there? And so the process goes on. But where is the motivation – not the static noun, the thing – but the motivating, the to-motivate, the verb which is about change and flow between people?

This is what Motivational Maps offers. I am not going to pretend this is easy, because it is exactly not that: it is not a magic pill, or a ‘do-this-job-done’ kind of process, which the ‘nouns’ tend to be. This is a deep change process. As Roger Harrison¹³ observed, ‘The deeper we intervene, the more we impact core values and self-concepts’. Motivational Maps require we do just that because we are working with the change in people; this is frightening in some senses, and some employees, never mind employers, will run terrified by the prospect. But I believe, as does the Motivational Mapping community, that ‘Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor, in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday to Friday sort of dying’.¹⁴’

We are looking for a different way of working, one that reverses the tendencies of the last few decades, and some of its unintended by-products. For example, recently Gallup found that 87% of employees were disengaged! That is a startling figure, prompting Derek Thompson¹⁵ to observe that ‘one solution would be to make work less awful’! Yes, that would be good! In the UK¹⁶ we find that ‘Since the 2008 financial crisis, the UK’s productivity has barely budged … perhaps the productivity puzzle is explained by lack of motivation. People are working longer and longer hours, in jobs that are increasingly insecure, for organisations focused solely on the bottom line. Is it any surprise that many workers feel demotivated?’ No, it is not surprising; and notice the word motivation creeping in here too.

How are we going to address motivation; and especially how at the team level? For if we could do that we would have seriously high performing teams. Steven Landsburg¹⁷ observed that ‘Most economies can be summarised in four words: ‘People respond to incentives’. The rest is commentary’. Motivation, then, is the energy and so finding out the motivators of the team is the task, and having done that the need is to supply the relevant incentives based on the motivators, at an individual and a team level.

What I am advocating is what Dr Alan Watkins¹⁸ suggested: ‘Coherent Enlightened Leaders will therefore not only recognise that the troops are in an emotionally different place from them, which is itself a skill, but will have sufficient emotional flexibility to offer different emotional input depending on where the team is on the roller-coaster of change’. The thing is, these are very advanced skills to accomplish without a specific tool such as the Motivational Map. Motivation is emotional, is fed by emotions, and emotions change over time. We create, then, a window with this product to see into the individual and the team at a profound level. At the same time as we see, we can also incentivise appropriately, which is to maximise motivation, and by repeated and regular use we can monitor motivation.

Finally, then, it needs saying that this is not your traditional, conventional ‘top performing teams’ type of book. By which I mean, a book full of glamour and glitz, involving the famous high-tech organisations that everyone adores, and ooh-aahs about in the popular business pages: we had a problem, we did this, problem sorted, and look how wonderful we are now. You too can be like us! No, the focus of this book is on change and ambiguity, and one thing this focus does highlight is how we can go forward, but also how easy it is to go backwards. It is also less about the well-financed corporates and more about how Small and Medium sized businesses cope with change. The principles, however, are applicable to any organisation. I have ransacked my extensive collection of case studies (all anonymised), sometimes going back a long way, in order to show some fascinating insights into motivation and change that beset and perplex the unwary. This book really is for those who want depth of understanding, not just an easy fix.

Therefore, some of these examples and case studies are hard, but there are plenty of activities to encourage thinking, as well as doing, and the abundant Figures provided by Linda E Sale will I hope provide much clarity into what I am talking about. With these thoughts in mind, now read on!