How to Motivate Your Team

 

By Lynda Bourne

In my last post, “Is a Happy Team a Motivated Team?,” I suggested a happy project team was likely to be an outcome of a motivated team, rather than something you achieve in isolation. So this post looks at some of the key elements a project manager can use to develop a motivated team. That, in turn, should lead to a happy group of people who enjoy their work. My next post will examine even more ways to achieve this.

In his book Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock defines the “SCARF” model of what happens in the brain during social situations. This model can provide useful insight into the way motivation works. While it may seem odd to some, every team, every project and every workplace is primarily a social situation. People are interacting with other people to achieve something for their stakeholders—who are also people!

The SCARF model defines five elements that can be a motivational reward, or a threat to an individual:

• Status
• Certainty
• Autonomy
• Relatedness
• Fairness

A leader who establishes the right foundation for each of these factors will help build a successful and happy group.

The challenge for a leader is that each of these factors can trigger a threat or a reward experience. Insufficient levels will cause resentment (pain). The right levels will cause pleasure. But too much of any (with the possible exception of fairness) can lead to fear or the feeling of repression (pain). The challenge for every leader is to know enough about your team members to hit the sweet spot of “just right.”

Status

Everyone has a deep human drive for self-esteem or competence, but this is almost never assessed on its own. We are social beings, so our sense of competence appears to be deeply connected to others. What we actually measure is status.

Status means where we are positioned in relation to those around us—the pecking order. A person’s perception of status, and any changes in it, will be experienced as a reward or a threat. A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money, and a sense of decreasing status can make you feel like your life is in danger.  

There’s no universal scale for status. When you meet someone new and size up your relative importance, you might do so based on who is older, richer, stronger, smarter or funnier. Whatever framework you think is important, when your perceived sense of status goes up or down, an intense emotional response results.

Because of this, people—and teams—go to tremendous extremes to increase or protect their status. As Dr. Rock says, “The desire to increase status is behind many of society’s greatest achievements and some of our darker hours of destruction.” The challenge for every leader is to respect the status of all of the team members and minimize negative movements.

Conversely, thrusting someone into a high-status role they are not prepared for can be equally destructive. This is why public speaking ranks as one of the biggest fears. The spotlight is on the speaker, it is a high status position, and the person is terrified of failing.

Certainty

A sense of uncertainty about the future generates a strong threat response. Your brain detects something is wrong, and your ability to focus on other issues diminishes. Your brain doesn’t like uncertainty—it’s like a type of pain. Certainty, on the other hand, feels rewarding, and we tend to steer toward it, even when it might be better for us to remain uncertain.

Effective leaders provide enough certainty for their followers to experience the feeling or reward, but not so much as to stifle creativity and innovation. Again, this is a balancing act aimed at hitting the sweet spot and needs to be tailored to the characteristics of each individual. Some people crave stability and certainty; others like a degree of challenge (but not too much).

In my next post, I’ll dive into the rest of the SCARF model to finish my discussion of how to motivate people.