Progress is the secret sauce of motivation...

 

I've written about many drivers of individual motivation. Receiving regular recognition (Early Saturday morning alliteration!), effective empowerment giving us autonomy over our work, having opportunities to improve our skills, belonging to a team where psychological safety is valued and feeling that our inner purpose is linked to the outer purpose for our projects are all important.

But the missing component from the above ingredients list is seeing frequent (ideally daily) evidence of the progress we are making through our work efforts.

In his last Pinkcast, Daniel Pink spoke about the perceived importance of demonstrable progress and referenced Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's book The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work

So what does this imply for project managers?

If your approach is to deliver a few, infrequent "big bang" changes rather than encouraging early and regular delivery of value, this may not support the progress principle. This is less of a concern with those projects involving tangible, visible outcomes. An engineering and construction team might be building a theatre so stakeholder value is only realized once the theatre has been fully built and turned over to its owners. Although this may not happen for months, at the end of each day on the job site the team members are able to see visible signs of the progress they've made. I believe that this is one of the motivators for the volunteers who will work at disaster sites clearing debris every day as they are able to incrementally see order returned to chaos.

But on those projects which will have intangible outcomes, this gets trickier. Assuming the context of these projects would support adaptive lifecycles, adopting such approaches should increase the likelihood of all team members seeing progress. A batched approach to processing work items implies that one skill set is highly engaged whereas others upstream or downstream are waiting. With a flow-based teaming approach, all team members should see visible evidence of the work they've completed. Sprint reviews and other similar ceremonies will provide structured product feedback and recognition from external stakeholders, but serve as motivational gravy rather than the main course.

Seeing is believing, but seeing is also motivating!