The motivation of team members is one of the essential, unchanging tasks of leadership.
Rosabeth Moss Kantor
As the opportunity develops and key staff used in earlier opportunity realization phases take on different roles and/or responsibilities and with the arrival of new additional staff into the project team, motivation of individuals and overall team building effort is necessary. It is important that the ‘old hands’ and new arrivals become quickly acquainted and that they start to build-up relationships across their working interface boundaries.
After the initial team formation stage, where the team members become acquainted and
break the ice, they then have to settle down and start working with each other and
building up their working relationships. At this time they develop a sense of boundaries
(who actually does what and how they like to work) and trust (how well they do it)
between each other.
The way in which the opportunity/project manager organises the team and interacts with
it has a major impact on the quality of work the team will produce. This simple fact is a
source both of satisfaction and at times of frustration to many project managers. There is
an increasing need to understand team dynamics, and what makes ‘good’ teams achieve
more effectively than others. Teams are no longer confined to a small band of Shell staff
sharing the same culture and values. Trends in project execution, (and in operations)
demonstrate that integrated teams of contractor(s), contract staff and a smaller number of
Shell staff are becoming increasingly common. Management of such teams will make a
considerable demand on the opportunity/project manager’s own management skills.
This section discusses how individuals can be motivated to become part of a high
performing team that takes great satisfaction and enjoyment from its work.
Motivational needs
As discussed in 3.11.3.1, there are differences in the way that individuals approach
working in groups and it follows that there are potentially different motivational needs.
One way of recognising different needs is to use McClelland’s theory of motivational
drives. He suggests that, in addition to the need for food, protection,
etc., people are motivated by the following drives:
Achievers achievement: the need to keep improving one’s own performance
Power Brokers power and influence: the need to exert and be seen to exert influence on others
Affiliators affiliation: the need to create and maintain friendly relationships
A good project manager is sensitive enough to spot the main needs of his/her staff and to
be reasonably flexible in his/her approach. A useful guideline here is “Treat them all the
same by treating them differently”.
A pen sketch of each type is given below, and the means of their motivation.
McClelland asserts that most people will have one of the three drives clearly prime, and
that it will be this one prime drive that influences most of their behaviour. Occasionally
people have two prime drives, and that can be more confusing to the observer.
Achievers
Achievers seek recognition for their own unique contribution. They like clear goals and
objectives, regular feedback on their performance, interesting, challenging and varied
work and the resources and autonomy to enable them to do a good job. They plan
carefully and weigh up the risks prudently before making major decisions, and resent
being rushed. They are strongly task-oriented and tend to dislike vagueness, social
chit-chat, political manoeuvrings and rambling meetings, all of which they regard as a
waste of time. Their main strength is their ability to motivate and organise themselves.
Possible weaknesses are insensitivity to others and a reluctance to coach and delegate.
Motivating people with a high achievement drive
Achievers, are motivated by clear and challenging objectives. They require the necessary
resources for the task. They should be allowed autonomy, given regular feedback, and the
time to make important decisions.
They are strongly focussed on improving their technical performance, so offer them
training and other ways to develop their skills. Do not expect them to be sensitive with
people or to be politically aware, and remember they will often be impatient with
paperwork and what they perceive as ‘bureaucracy’. If the achiever is managing a small
team, check whether the person needs help with delegating to team members.
Power Brokers
Staff who are interested in power and influence have a high need for respect. They like to
be consulted and informed, and enjoy offering advice whether solicited or unsolicited.
They become demotivated if they are ignored, if they are not informed about
developments, or if they are made to lose face, especially with senior staff present or in
large meetings. They like high visibility and often have high interpersonal presentation
and negotiation skills. They are usually not afraid of high risks or of conflicts. They are
less interested in technical details, and more intrigued by the people, personalities and
the general politics and structure of the organisation. At their worst they can become
manipulative empire-builders, but at their best they are excellent leaders and will invest
time and patient energy in coaching and developing staff.
Motivating people with a high drive for power and influence
Power and influence oriented staff are motivated by being kept informed. Ask their
advice, use their political skills and offer them visibility and contact with senior staff.
Enable them to develop their coaching and leadership skills as early as possible. Show
them how they have had impact on important decisions. Avoid at all costs, cutting them
out of information or making them look foolish in any way. Be careful with giving
criticism, and remember they may be less interested in technical details.
Affiliators
Affiliators are more interested in people and relationships than in the task. They put
enormous effort into maintaining harmony in the team. They are sensitive to the
emotional needs of others and are often skilled at smoothing over tensions and at
offering support. They find conflicts stressful and dislike giving bad news, and they may
find it hard to take negative feedback. Occasionally affiliators will try to hide some of
their sensitivity, particularly in a business environment where their strengths may not be
appreciated and their needs for acceptance and inclusion may be misinterpreted as
weakness. Affiliators appreciate recognition of their team-building, and like their
manager to take a personal interest in the team members. They will often enjoy the
challenge of organising team social events, away days and any opportunity to meet
others. Like the team workers in the Belbin model, they are often happiest in roles which
enable them to facilitate and liaise with others. Where the power and influence oriented
person and the achiever view people largely as a means to an end, the affiliator sees
people as an end in themselves.
Motivating people with a high affiliation drive
Affiliators, are motivated by the need to be liked and appreciated, and see life in terms of
relationships and people. A manager should show the affiliator he appreciates his
contribution to the harmony of the team. Ask his advice when there is a need to know
how the team is ‘feeling’ (individually and collectively). Bear in mind the affiliator may
also be a useful conduit for personal problems. Affiliators may find it especially hard to
take criticism, or be isolated and they like and need social contact. If they have to tackle
conflicts or give bad news, they may need prior coaching. If they like and feel comfortable
with their manager, they will perform at their best in order (partly at least) to please him.
Motivational Tools
It is believed that the motivational tools are changing as job guarantees, promotion and
reward for individual performance are often no longer available or are much diminished.
The motivational tools now available to leaders are seen as those shown in Figure 3.11.10.
Vision/Mission/Pride
Buy in to the Case for Change, the Vision and Objectives and the framework for achieving the Vision.
Pride
• Professional pride driving towards achievement of the Vision.
Team Values
• Development of and adherence to the ‘rules of the game’ for the team.
Agenda Control
• Communication, delegation, empowerment.
Learning
Leadership and management skills, processes and tools, technical knowledge.
• Coaching, education, training, on-the-job learning,
Reputation
Recognition from managers, peers, subordinates, external world.
Recognition and Reward Policy, performance reviews and ranking, public praise, papers and presentations.
Share of Value Creation
• Reward linked to team performance and extra value created.
Physical Work Environment
Some aspects of the motivational tools are picked out for discussion below;
Team Values
A significant team-building motivator is the development by the team of a set of values
that all members commit to observing. This can be a valuable adjunct to an Opportunity
Framing workshop (where the Vision and Objectives are also formulated) but it is
important that as many people as possible are involved in their development and that all
team members buy into them. (Those who are not prepared to share the team values
should not be allowed to remain in the team.) The values will, of course, be those chosen
by the team but they might include such things as fairness, openness, honesty, listening,
prompt attendance, meeting deadlines etc. The team, and especially the managers,
should be regularly measured against these values.
Communication
Without good communication of the objectives, progress and issues facing the team, the
team members will not have a firm basis for decision making and so will not feel
adequately in control of their agendas and their destinies. A few simple rules for
achieving effective communication are given in Figure 3.11.11.
The Seven Principles of Good Communication
- Keep it simple
- Use metaphors and analogies
- Use many different forums/ways to spread
the word - Repeat, repeat and repeat
- Lead by example
- Be consistent (explicitly address inconsistencies)
- Listen and be listened to (Dialogue)
A communication plan should be developed as part of the Project Execution Plan’s Information Management Plan.
Delegation and Empowerment
The height of misery is to depend on another’s will.
Publilius Syrius, 42BC
Both delegation and empowerment can be highly effective motivators but, whereas delegation
starts off as part of a manager’s job which he/she then delegates, empowerment involves
removing constraints that prevent someone from doing their job as effectively as possible.
Empowerment can be defined as the authority of subordinates to decide and act.
Although it implies a large degree of discretion and independence for those empowered,
generally, empowerment takes place within defined boundaries with respect to the
discretion of those empowered. Empowerment does not, therefore, mean unconstrained
freedom and reporting, monitoring and analysis of the empowered team’s performance is
still necessary. One Shell team’s view of how empowerment should work is shown in
Figure 3.11.12.
The risks arising from empowerment that need to be monitored and managed are:
• untrained staff developing a false sense of confidence
• the shift to empowering leadership stresses some management and some staff
• deadlines being missed as staff gain experience in their new responsibilities
The benefits of empowerment are:
• greater efficiency : staff pull together as a team
• highly motivated workforce that wants to succeed
• increased commitment to shared sense of responsibility to get things done
• job enrichment as staff grow and develop in their roles
Leaders are needed at all levels of an organization and the development of such leaders is one
of the important tasks for the senior management of the team. Noel Tichy (The Leadership
Engine) states, “The companies that consistently win don’t just have one strong leader, or just
a few at the top. They have lots of strong leaders and they have them at all levels of the
organization. The ability to teach leadership is their key competence.” Empowerment is the
best means of taking leadership into all levels of the organization.
Coaching
Today’s leaders realise that they have to give up control to get results – they act as coaches not as
Robert Waterman
the ‘boss’.
In order to engage with and benefit from the talents of the team’s individuals (and, especially,
the up-and-coming generation) we need to rethink the role of managers and the task of
leadership. More-and-more, there is a developing view that the leader’s function is to support
and encourage their people in carrying out their tasks rather than to direct and control them.
The philosophy of coaching required in order to achieve these aims are set out in the
following figures.
Role of Coaches
1 The coaching task is to help the pupil achieve excellence.
2 The focus is on the pupil, not the coach.
3 Superior coaches are ones whose pupil’s achieve continuous performance improvement.
4 The coach may not have the pupil’s skill. The pupil is coached to exceed the coach’s performance.
5 The coach’s reward is from the pupil’s achievement.
6 The public may not be aware of the coach’s role but those “in the know” are.
Core Coaching Skills
Active listening
attending – body language
listening – suspend judgement/opinions
reflecting – summarise what is being said (has it been correctly heard?)
Enquiring
developing sufficient information so that pupils can discover how to improve their performance
Focusing
• helping pupils explore their options and develop strategies
Touching
• demonstrating a relevant skill – must be centred on the pupil
Affirming
• drawing attention to the pupil’s competence
Characteristics of Superior Coaching
Balance
in the coach/pupil interaction
Being Concrete
focuses on what the pupil can improve
specific and to the point
Shared Responsibility
between the coach and the pupil in working together for the pupil’s continuous improvement
Respect
of the coach for the pupil
involving the pupil in such a way that makes him/her a fully accepted player
Shape
identify the goal
encourage the expansion of the available information
focus on the pupil as he/she moves towards the goal
In addition to the above motivational tools, three other motivational issues need
leadership consideration:
Management of Change
Significant change in the way that the team is organized, in its objective or in the
processes that it follows in carrying out the task can be destructive to the team and to the
end result unless the change is managed in a structured way that allows the whole team
to accept the change and adjust to it. The management of such changes is discussed in
4.8.3, Business Process and Organizational Change.
Stress
It is evident that stress in the work place is becoming an issue that has to have the leader’s
attention and needs to have thought given to it by the team’s management and close
cooperation with the company’s medical advisers. A simple guideline on this issue might be:
• Enquire
• Watch
• Listen
• Understand
• Act
Feedback
Giving positive feedback, and appreciation when things are going to plan is easy.
Negative feedback, i.e. for the purpose of improvement through behavioural change, is
much more difficult, and often done badly – if at all.
The following should be borne in mind when faced with this sensitive task:
- stick to the facts – find clear examples of the behaviour the person needs to change;
- put criticism in context. Balance it by examples of work that was up to or above the standard expected;
- give a rationale – explain why a piece of work is below standard, and check the person genuinely agrees. Be honest about sharing the responsibility for a mistake, because of poor briefing, for instance
- give the criticism as soon as possible after the event;
- remember that giving criticism can easily hurt or offend – prevention is better than cure, so delegate with thought and careful preparation;
- when accepting criticism, listen; ask if necessary for examples, and thank the person for the information. Ask for suggestions for improvement when stuck.