Beyond Empowered Teams

Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.

  Agile  

Agile methods emphasize and encourage the creation of empowered teams, but is empowerment enough? Not according to Daniel Pink, author of “Drive: The Surprising truth about what motivates us“. He calls empowerment just a slightly more civilized form of control--which is part of a broken motivation system corporations use that he calls Motivation 2.0.

Here’s the quick summary: Motivation 1.0 is our basic desire to find food, shelter, sex, etc. Once met, people look to higher levels of rewards to motivate us. Motivation 2.0 has been traditional management’s carrot-and-stick motivation system. If you do X, then you get Y. The trouble with “If/then” rewards is that while we like them at first, we quickly tire of them. Then because the reward can never continue to escalate at levels that excite us, we grow used to them and get discouraged if we fail to meet the “if” condition and do not get the reward (or worse, if the “If/then” reward is removed).

Pink cites several MIT studies where adults and children were rewarded for conducting work, hobbies and play activities. Once the reward is removed, people stopped doing them--even if they had previously happily and voluntarily done them before. Once tainted by “If/then” rewards, the motivation was sucked right out of it.

Pink asserts the current &…

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