if-then reward

Dan Pink has given a very interesting presentation on the surprising science of motivation. Contradict to what we believed that incentives will motivate people hence much better performance, evidence has proved that for certain tasks, those require much creativity, commitment, outside-of-box thinking work, higher incentives will have negative effects. Dan quoted Candle problem created by a psychologist named Karl Duncker in 1945. You can find the details of this experiment on wiki.

This experiment has demonstrated our behavioural response under incentives will not always help us to achieve better performance, especially for those results can not be pre-determinated, e.g. creative tasks. Instead, traditional incentive-driven approach will narrow people's mind and sight, focus on what is not there yet, rather than keeping eyes and ears open, radar has been tuned to very limited frequency bands. What comes out from that would only be ok at best. Unfortunately, for these tasks, ok is simply not enough; ok means failure.

There are already many 21st century companies (just for you know, there are way too many last century ones around!) have already started to notice this discrepancy between 'common-sense' and what is really happening. Introducing 20% time for engineers to do whatever is not their daily jobs, breaking down hierarchical structure into small team with autonomous operation ability, motivating people by exposing information and searching for purpose which is bigger than individuals, these have been giving us surprisingly good returns. Most of Google's popular products stemmed from 20% time. Organisations start to realise the huge difference in a bunch of motivated people and what they can achieve - something not in the 'plan', something generates new revenue, channels, models.

"if you do this", "then you will get this and that amount" does not apply anymore. If you really look into it, you will realise work requiring self-motivation does not generally come from financial benefits, not anymore. Financial concerns will only play its part to a certain level, in clear defined target, or in Dan's word - tasks for dummies.

How to motivate a team

If we don't scrutinize it, we might not be aware at all of the importance of morale. It is so easy to forget, or simply choose to ignore. Unfortunately, as a team leader or manager, to realise the importance of morale, to quantify the difference it will be produced from a highly motivated team in terms of development deliverables, is absolutely necessary.

What you would find out from some motivation speech is thing such as "attitude = 100" (count a=1, b=2 etc, plus them together you will get 100, sorry I know this is a bit cheesy :)). They are not wrong! But this is not what I am interested. I want to find out how to quantify this effect.

So, what would happen if morale is changed? Efficiency, communication, motivation etc. These aren't measurable. What are things will be affected and can be put on pretty graph?

• Quantity of Deliverables in code, sensible notes, tests, documentation, parts, drawings ...
  
• Quality of Deliverables in design, code, test, documentation (write a blog when you are happy and do another one you are messed up, you'll see what I mean.)
  
• Satisfactory level. Most of the organisations ignore the other possibility that some engineers always deliver good quality work on time, however, they aren't happy. Of course you would argue as long as you got the result investors were looking for, who give a damn about one's happy or not - mature people know how to deal with it themselves. Unfortunately, the whole industry has soon realised that at the end of day, people, is all that matters. If people can't feel satisfied in they daily jobs, most important hours of an average day, you might as well just let them go, or most usually, they choose to move on.

This is blog is really trying to talk about how to motivate a team. You have to bear with me - I have this habit of wasting large part of a chapter in perusing the background, history orreasonings to things I really was planning to talk about...

Motivate a team is significantly different to motivating a person. Motivating a team means you have consider the dynamics within the team and how they would develop and affect each other. For instance, if you are trying to motivate a person you can help him to realise that he has the unique capability or potential to compete in a resource constraint environment; however, you can't possibly simply adopt similar approach to motivate a team - that way you would unintentionally cause conflicts and negative competitions.

To motivate a team, you need to understand the team goal and team development path, team skill set, team ambition, team structure, team morale. You need to help the team realise the common goal and develop the skill set, structure, tailor team ambition in a realistic and challenging way. To motivate a team is also to establish the right incentive scheme to encourage the practice which would help the team achieve its goal, to find out the strength and weakness hence development opportunities for each individual, resolve conflicts and encourage constructive competition and avoid unnecessary frictions or distractions.

There are certain subtly in achieving balance between coherence in the team and personal development. Imagine you inject a great deal of heat into a chemical element and you will find that more likely the instability of this element will increase. Similarly, the way you can motivate each individual is inherently different. Naturally these directions won't be the same hence the sum of those effects will not necessarily do the team any good.