Beyond the Daily Grind
Reignite Your Team's Passion and Energy
From “Going Through The Motions” To Thriving
Have you noticed a dip in team creativity and excitement? You're not alone. Even with seemingly high morale, a team can fall into a rut. Let’s explore some strategies to reignite engagement and get your team firing on all cylinders again.
When presented with low morale, leaders will often jump to organizing a team hangout or adding perks into the mix. These kinds of solutions are ‘sweetners’. They heighten the experience of a team that is already engaged. They rarely (if ever) do anything to solve fundamental motivation problems.
Motivation is much more complex. It's also different for each person. In large part, it arises by helping people both understand and connect to the reason the organization (and their team) exists. Most of the rest of the battle is about addressing demotivating factors.
Accentuate The Positive
If your organization or department lacks clarity around its mission / vision, we can help with that. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you have such clarity.
The journey from well-defined mission to strong motivation has three key steps: understanding, buy-in and impact. Here are a few coaching questions we often use to trace / debug this journey…
Understanding
Does everyone know and understand your company's core purpose?
Ask 10 team members to each articulate that purpose independently. Do you get 10 completely different answers?
Even if the answers were similar, were there divergences in key nuances?
Buy-in
For those that understand the mission well, are they sold that it’s a mission worth pursuing?
Does fulfilling the mission represent an intrinsic reward to them (in partnership with their extrinsic rewards like salary and benefits)?
Impact
Given that they understand the mission and believe that it’s important, can they see how their role contributes to winning as an organization?
Are there clear mechanisms for communicating the mission-value of individual and team contributions?
Address The Negative
While it’s important for your team to derive positive motivation from the organization’s mission, just focusing on this area is almost always insufficient. Mission conversations are all about the mountain top in the distance so they don’t tend to address how a team will get there (strategy, tactics, execution planning, processes etc…). The reality is that the road to that mountain top can be fraught with demotivating factors.
As a general recipe for identifying and dealing with such factors, consider…
Crowd-sourcing Frustrations: One easy method is to use a survey to collect team pain points. Once you’ve cleaned up and de-duped the responses, use a voting tool or digital whiteboard (Mural, Miro) to let everyone vote on the most significant issues. Use that ranking to prioritize improvement efforts.
Co-creating Solutions: Once you identify the demotivating factors it’s important to work collaboratively to brainstorm and test solutions for the top frustrations. This fosters a sense of ownership and increases buy-in for any necessary changes.
Experimentation & Iteration: Pilot solutions for a set period and gather feedback. Be prepared to adapt or drop unsuccessful approaches. This agile approach keeps the team engaged in the process (and results in more robust, battle-tested solutions).
Overall, we strongly encourage teams to practice…
Open Communication: Transparency and a safe space for feedback are crucial.
Celebrating Wins: Acknowledge and celebrate successes, both big and small.
Continuous Improvement: Make problem-solving and iteration a regular practice.