How to unlock motivation for high performance in your team by Eduardo Bellani
As an engineering manager(EM), one of your core tasks is to build and maintain a team of high performance. To accomplish this, it should be obvious that motivation is a key factor:
Why do followers join some teams but not others? How do you get followers to exhibit enough of the critical behaviors needed for the team to succeed? And why are some leaders capable of getting followers to go above and beyond the call of duty? The ability to motivate others is a fundamental leadership skill and has strong connections to building cohesive, goal-oriented teams and getting results through others. The importance of follower motivation is suggested in findings that most people believe they could give as much as 15 percent or 20 percent more effort at work than they now do with no one, including their own bosses, recognizing any difference. Perhaps even more startling, these workers also believed they could give 15 percent or 20 percent less effort with no one noticing any difference. Moreover, variation in work output varies significantly across leaders and followers. The top 15 percent of workers in any particular job may produce 20 to 50 percent more output than the average worker, depending on the complexity of the job. Put another way, the best computer programmers or salesclerks might write up to 50 percent more programs or process 50 percent more customer orders. (CURPHY et al. 2018)
Let’s assume that you are convinced that having a motivated team is key for your success as an EM. Now comes the question, how? Everyone and their dog has advice on this, mostly about your interactions with your followers. This article will focus on a different angle: the advice is to you about you, or more specifically, about your vision.
Why vision?
Followers expect leaders to provide a sense of mission and a hopeful view of the future and to explain why they are doing what they are doing and why it matters. (Warrenfeltz and Kellett 2016)
Now, how do you develop a vision? Since action follows from essence, we should understand what is the essence of a man. For this context, what matters is that man is a creature in tension between his contingent situation and the contemplation of God, the Eternal transcendence.
The way man deals with this tension sucessfully is with a story. This story is what connects his present to the vanishing point we call the future. (Noica, Blyth, and Stoiciu 2009)
Since it is likely that the vast majority of people you will encounter as followers have no such story, they will be inclined to follow yours as long as you present it clearly and be able to connect it to the company’s goals.
Summing it up: clarify to yourself and to others what is your story and how it connects to the current situation. There are specific tools available if you want help crafting your story, such as (Booker 2004).
Figure 1: Pontifical High Mass in the ruins of St Mary’s Cathedral, Nagasaki, Japan. December 7th, 1949 - (5 years after the atom bomb).