How to manage the Motivation, Performance, and Effectiveness of your tech teams
Introduction
This article documents the overall approach used by the author to manage Motivation, Performance, and Effectiveness of a technology team.
A team exists to achieve results and to increase its capacity to achieve results in the future. In short, to survive and thrive. A core aspect of this is to properly manage Motivation, Performance, and Effectiveness.
In the sections below you can see how you could apply structural approaches for all these aspects in order to increase performance of a technology team.
Motivation
The standard literature contains 5 main theories of motivation (Hughes, R.L. and Ginnett, R.C. and Curphy, G.J., 2018):
- Motives: Satisfy needs to change behavior
- Achievement orientation: Possess certain personality traits
- Goal setting: Set goals to change behavior
- Operant approach: Change rewards and punishments to change behavior
- Empowerment: Give people autonomy and latitude to increase their
motivation for work
Motives
This theory states that people are motivated by psychological needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness and the satisfaction of these will lead to more autonomous types of motivation (Wikipedia contributors, 2021). Here is how you can leverage these for greater effect:
- Autonomy: The leadership values timely decisions and is much more forgiving of errors of commission than omission. The key here is to create accountability mechanisms.
- Competence: The team will engage in activities that are assumed to lie beyond most individuals comfort zone. As such the leadership needs to allocate resources (time and budget) for self education and for coaching.
- Relatedness: The leadership needs to strive to make the mission clear to the individuals and to incorporate processes that are geared towards integration, such as:
- Pair programming
- Tech talks
- Coaching
- Mentoring
Achievement orientation
This theory states that some people have more of a trait called achievement orientation. Individuals with a strong achievement orientation strive to accomplish socially acceptable endeavors and activities.
These individuals also prefer tasks that provide immediate and ample feedback and are moderately difficult (that is, tasks that require a considerable amount of effort but are accomplishable).
Additionally, individuals with a strong need to achieve feel satisfied when they successfully solve work problems or accomplish job tasks.
Achievement orientation is also a component of the Five Factor Model or OCEAN model of personality (specifically the dimension of conscientiousness (Wikipedia contributors, 2021a)). Because of that, one can use standard personality tests as a filter on the recruiting process, thus covering this theory.
Given the expected individual and team profile (hardworking, dedicated, proud), the TU leadership should be conscious that this kind of teams self-destruct quickly when given unclear missions with few resources and impossible timelines. This connects this theory with the next one.
Goal setting
This theory states that a leader should set clear performance targets and then help followers create systematic plans to achieve them. Proper goal setting has some components to it:
- Specificity: Goal needs to be clear
- Difficulty: Goal needs to be moderately difficult
- Commitment: Followers need to be committed to achieve the goal
- Feedback: Leader needs to provide specific and timely feedback to followers.
One could use several approaches, such as the OKR framework, to set goals and tie them to the overall goals of the company.
Operant Approach
This theory states that one can change the direction, intensity, or persistence of behavior through rewards and punishments. Rewards and punishments are defined as:
- Reward: is any consequence that increases the likelihood that a particular behavior will be repeated.
- Punishment: is the administration of an adverse stimulus or the withdrawal of something desirable, each of which decreases the likelihood that a particular behavior will be repeated.
- Contingent rewards or punishments: are administered as consequences of a particular behavior. An example is a bonus check for a salesman for exceeding his sales quota.
- Non-contingent rewards and punishments: are not associated with particular behaviors. Monthly paychecks might be examples if the followers receive the same amount of base pay every month whatever their actual effort or output.
This approach can use several tools, such as praises, raises, Option Pools (SOP), and other approaches geared towards rewarding high performers.
Empowerment
This theory states that followers that are empowered are more motivated, learn more and experience less stress.
In this theory, empowerment has two key components:
- delegation: leaders delegate leadership and decision-making down to the lowest level possible.
- development: leaders equip followers with the resources, knowledge, and skills necessary to make good decisions.
In many ways the delegation and development components of empowerment are similar to the autonomy and mastery drives described in the section Motives.
Performance
The performance management cycle is a core feedback cycle to change the behaviors inside a team in order to achieve results.
Its components are described below.
Planning
This involves developing a thorough understanding of the team’s goals, the role followers need to play in goal accomplishment, the context in which followers operate, and the behaviors they need to exhibit for the team to be successful.
A standard approach that is reproducible in several contexts:
- Establish OKRs
- Use the OKRs to create high level plans from the Unit to the follower level.
- For any major initiative, do the following:
- Create specifications;
- Design;
- Estimated work breakdown structures (WBS).
Monitoring
Monitoring consists of several leader behaviors, including observing followers’ performance, providing feedback and coaching on followers’ behaviors, securing needed resources, and regularly reviewing goal progress with followers.
A basic approach:
- Weekly 30 minutes 1–1s with all followers.
- Weekly 1 hour staff meetings. Here one reviews:
- current context;
- progress towards the goals and;
- lessons learned.
- Track progress of the existing initiatives using standard project management tools.
Evaluating
Evaluation addresses 3 core issues:
- Differentiation of followers;
- Targeting of rewards;
- Structured feedback to followers.
A core strategy to employ a simple structured 360 questionnaire every quarter about each member of the team. The followers evaluate the leader as well.
Effectiveness
To diagnose and improve team Effectiveness, a well-supported structured approach is to use The Rocket Model (Curphy, G.J. and Nilsen, D.L. and Hogan R, 2019), which is a
framework and set of tools for boosting team performance. It can be used to diagnose team dynamics, and to provide leaders with specific tools and activities to improve team performance.
A core part of that model is the Team Assessment Survey, an in-depth feedback tool that measures team effectiveness. We use it every quarter or so to get both a description of our state and a prescription of improvements.
Glossary
Problems arise when the key concepts of this document are equated or confused. Getting followers to put in more time, energy, and effort on certain behaviors will not help the team to be more successful if they have the wrong behaviors to begin with. Similarly, followers may not know how and when to exhibit behaviors associated with team effectiveness.
- Motivation: anything that provides direction, intensity, and persistence to behavior.
- Performance: synonymous with behavior. It is something that people actually do and can be observed. By definition, it includes only those actions or behaviors that are relevant to the organization’s goals and that can be scaled (measured) in terms of each component (individual, team, unit) proficiency (level of contribution).
- Effectiveness: is the evaluation of the results of performance. By definition a measure of effectiveness is controlled by more than the performance of the component.
- Autonomy: Desire to be causal agents of one’s own life and act in harmony with one’s integrated self. As such it is concerned primarily with making choices: Do followers have the freedom to work on things they find interesting, or are they given the latitude to get things done in ways that make sense to them?
- Competence: Seek to control the outcome and experience mastery. Having the skills to perform at higher levels in comparison to your peers.
- Relatedness: Will to interact with, be connected to, and experience caring for others. It is connected to the notion of doing something that matters, having an impact, or being a part of something bigger than oneself.
- Mentoring: Career advise based on long term goals.
- Coaching: Help with skill acquirement based on short term goals.
References
Curphy, G.J. and Nilsen, D.L. and Hogan R (2019). Ignition: A Guide to Building High-Performing Teams, Hogan Press.
Hughes, R.L. and Ginnett, R.C. and Curphy, G.J. (2018). Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience, McGraw Hill Education.
Wikipedia contributors (2021). Self-determination theory — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Wikipedia contributors (2021a). Big Five personality traits — Wikipedia , The Free Encyclopedia.
For more articles from our technology unit, feel free to check our Medium page here, and also visit our website to see the cool things we build.
