Motivation is the driving force that encourages individuals to pursue and achieve goals. It’s the force that makes engineering teams go above and beyond, turning innovative ideas into groundbreaking products and solutions.
Numerous psychological theories support the intricate relationship between motivation and performance:
- Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs underscores the importance of fulfilling basic needs like food, sleep, and shelter to advanced needs such as meaning, creativity, and self-fulfilment to unlock an individual’s full potential.
- Herzberg’s hygiene motivation theory, or Two-Factor Theory, distinguishes between hygiene factors (extrinsic motivation) that prevent dissatisfaction, like low salary, bureaucracy, lousy management, etc. and motivational factors (intrinsic motivation) that foster job satisfaction and performance, like growth, achievements, recognition, etc.
Types of Motivation
The concept of motivation can be broadly divided into two distinct types:
- Extrinsic motivation relies on external factors to encourage people to do what they should be doing. It is also known as “carrot and stick” or “reward and punishment”. A pay rise, time off, performance bonus or the threat of losing your job are all examples of extrinsic motivators.
- Intrinsic motivation is an internal force and a personal desire to achieve goals and produce high-quality work. People who are passionate about their jobs and feel fulfilled are intrinsically motivated, leading to great satisfaction and performance.
Cultivating Motivation
The journey of cultivating motivation is a continuous and vital process to achieve sustained high performance. Here are strategies and insights into how managers can effectively cultivate motivation:
Empower your teams
As a manager, you must create a work environment where your team feels empowered to make decisions and drive solutions towards a goal. To create such an environment, you must focus on enabling your team to become intrinsically motivated.
Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” identifies three main intrinsic motivation factors for empowering teams: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
Autonomy
Autonomy is the freedom to make decisions and control the work processes. Having the autonomy to decide on a project will empower your team to take ownership, explore new ideas, build high-quality solutions and feel trusted and valued.
As managers, you can grant autonomy by building trust, delegating effectively, collaborating, unblocking the team and avoiding micromanaging.
Mastery
Mastery is the desire for continuous improvement until one achieves the expertise level. It is the constant determination to improve their skills by learning, practising and seeking feedback to achieve their goals. Providing such an environment guarantees each individual is growing, which creates a multiplier effect and long-term team success.
As managers, you must create a continuous learning environment where engineers are encouraged to improve their skills. You must support your engineers in their growth by assigning challenging projects that align with their goals and creating a culture of feedback.
Purpose
Purpose is the feeling of working towards a meaningful goal. People feel naturally inspired and motivated by knowing their work significantly impacts the company’s goal.
As managers, you inspire a purpose by setting clear goals and ensuring the team understands the impact of their work and how it aligns with the organisation’s success.
Safety
A work environment where people feel psychologically safe is vital to building a high-performance team. Build a space where your team feels safe to take risks, share ideas, experiment with new ideas and be creative without feeling criticised. When teams feel valued and do not fear making mistakes, they will unleash their full potential, boosting engagement and ownership and contributing to better solutions.
As managers, building a safe and trusting culture takes time. To create such an environment, you must embrace experimentation and accept failure as a learning opportunity where people can grow from their mistakes. Create a feedback culture where everyone feels comfortable giving and receiving feedback regarding their seniority.
Synergy
A team has excellent synergy when the collective performance exceeds the sum of the individual contributions, effectively making 1 + 1 + 1 > 3. This concept is grounded in the idea that when people work together effectively, their collaboration produces a greater output and achieves higher levels of success than would be possible if each person worked independently. When a team achieves this status of working in a collaborative and supportive environment, it boosts engagement and performance, leading to higher motivation and job satisfaction.
As managers, you can create synergies by ensuring everyone in the team is aligned on the North Star and understands their role in achieving it. Lead by example by promoting and encouraging collaboration. Recognise and celebrate both individual contributions and team achievements to motivate continued collaboration.
The key to unlocking peak performance in engineering teams is cultivating motivation through understanding individual drivers, fostering autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and creating a supportive environment that emphasises psychological safety and synergy. As managers, embracing these strategies enables us to inspire our teams to meet and exceed their goals, ensuring individual satisfaction and organisational success.