Motivating a team
A while ago I did some research on the psychology of motivation, to discover ways that I could relate to our software development team that would support them being motivated.
I won’t go into the gory details (since it is was a while ago and I have forgotten my references), but what I came out with was that in order to be happy, a person should experience the following:
- competence – they should feel like they are good at their job
- autonomy – they should feel some sense of being able to choose how they work, and what they work on
- relatedness – they should feel that they are a part of some larger whole
This balances out over a person’s day-to-day living. So if I have no relatedness at work, the only way I can be truly happy is if I find a lot of relatedness elsewhere, such as participating in a sporting team.
Happy goes a long way towards supporting motivation, so in order to motivate someone, I should endeavor to make them happy.
Thinking in this way has helped me avoid repeating mistakes. One thing I had been guilty in the past was throwing unrealistic learning curves at people. But, a learning curve (while useful) temporarily reduces a person’s feelings of competence. If they feel lost, then they can also feel alone (relatedness).
Even small changes can push a person over the line, to the point where they start looking for a new job. I still throw leaning curves at people, but I try to do so in a much more supportive way.
I try to filter my thinking at work by considering whether different things increase motivation (by supporting feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness), or decrease it:
- how do the work-processes we use affect the people that are using them?
- as a person with much more experience and knowledge, how do I interact with people with less of those things?
- how can we introduce a new employee to work in a way that makes them more likely to stay with us
