What motivates your project team?

Articles

Monday, 05 July 2010 13:39

Understanding what drives people is key to project leadership

It has now been well established that leadership skills can be key to project management success. Most project management Bodies of Knowledge, standards, textbooks and training courses now highlight leadership as one of the most important aspects of managing projects or project teams. In other words, leadership is a critical success factor for project managers.

Leadership involves many things, but clearly understanding motivation is an important aspect of project leadership.

Programme and project managers need to understand what will motivate their teams, individually and collectively, to higher performance.

Executives need to understand employee motivation in order to implement policies and actions to stimulate performance and increase programme, project and organisational success.

And we all need to understand what motivates ourselves – often the first step in knowing what may motivate others.

Motivation is an important factor for leaders of all types of organisations, particularly project-oriented organisations, and even more so for programme and project managers for whom positive performance is critical.

But what are the leading motivators for project managers and project management professionals (and team members)? Is it recognition, more rewards (e.g. more money), happy workplace, less stress, or what?

We all have our ideas and opinions, perhaps based on our own experiences, theories or books we have read. Perhaps motivation varies by project type, industry, location, culture or other factors.

In all likelihood, if you are an executive, programme manager or project leader, you have made some decisions in order to motivate others and in order to move your programme or project forward (or to avoid disruption, problems or for other reasons).

As a student and teacher of project management, the importance of both leadership and motivation has been clear to me for many years. I was therefore drawn to a fascinating article on this very topic in the January-February edition of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.

The conclusions and message were, on the surface, somewhat surprising; but they also carry an important message for project managers.1

The HBR article on Leadership

According to the authors, “In a recent survey, we invited more than 600 managers from dozens of companies to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors commonly considered significant: recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, support for making progress, and clear goals.

“Recognition for good work (either public or private) came out number one.”1

This should not be surprising. How many times have we seen or heard authors, educators, consultants or experts extol the importance of rewarding our project managers or recognising project team members as key to motivating them to higher performance?

Well, again according to Amabile and Kramer, the managers in their survey “were dead wrong”.

The authors describe their recently completed multiyear study, “tracking the day-to-day activities, emotions and motivation levels of hundreds of knowledge workers in a wide variety of settings.”

What they found was that the number-one motivator for workers is the very item that most managers ranked last – progress.

“On days when workers have the sense they are making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak,”1 they write.

This is very good news for project managers, and very significant. When I read these few paragraphs, I thought, “Wow, this is great! This is directly related to programme and project management.”

Think about it: If the number-one motivator is helping your team make progress, then this is something you can easily act upon. You can set policies, establish procedures and take actions that help move the project forward. You can help remove obstacles.

If you actually help your project teams make progress, that success may even be multiplied.

Look to ourselves

It makes sense to me. I love the feeling of making progress, finishing an activity, completing a project.

Rewards are good, but not if I am behind schedule, have not completed an objective, run out of money, or end up with an unsatisfactory result at the end of the day.

Breakthrough idea

This article was included in a section of the January-February HBR, entitled “Breakthrough Ideas for 2010”. It was breakthrough idea number one.

Other good points in the article:

* “The key to motivation turns out to be largely within your control. What’s more, it doesn’t depend on elaborate incentive systems. (In fact, people in our study rarely mentioned incentives...).”
* “Managers have powerful influence over events that facilitate or undermine progress. They can provide meaningful goals, resources and encouragement, and they can protect their people from irrelevant demands. Or they can fail to do so.”
* “Scrupulously avoid impeding progress by changing goals…, being indecisive, or holding up resources”.
* “Negative events generally have a greater effect on people’s emotions, perceptions and motivation than positive ones, and nothing is more demotivating than a setback…”

Conclusion

This is all extremely relevant for project management, and good news for programme/project managers and executives in project-oriented organisations.

Help your project managers and teams make progress. Establish a culture of teamwork and helpfulness. And if there is more work to do, pitch in, roll up your sleeves, join the team. Not only will your co-workers appreciate it, the work will get done faster.

Of course, after the project is complete, celebrate! Reward your team! A little recognition is still appreciated.

If you have a comment or reaction to this article, please let me know.

Good luck with your projects!

David L. Pells

Managing editor

“PM World Today”

www.pmforum.org or

www.pmworldtoday.net

E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Reference

1. Amabile, Teresa M. and Kramer, Steven J.; “What Really Motivates Workers: Understanding the power of progress,” Harvard Business Review, January-February 2010, pp. 44-45.

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What motivates your project team?
Monday, 05 July 2010