I help to manage my teenage daughter’s soccer team. It is (mostly) great fun and the experience has given me a deeper appreciation of the nuances of the game. I read quite a lot of football-related books but one I read recently on team tactics has got me thinking about the essentials of a winning team dynamic. It states that you need to be better than your opposing team in six key areas in order to win a soccer game:
Tactics, Ability, Fitness, Motivation, Power and Luck
I think this is a great way to think about any team dynamic, and it fits especially well with a software development team. How do you create a team that can create an amazing product, deliver a success project or a release, achieve a desired outcome for a quarter? Do you just rely on your team’s ability? How do you effectively motivate your team? How much is your team’s success reliant on sheer luck?
Developing this analogy has been a great way to collect my thoughts on how I build teams. I’ve learnt a lot as well, so I thought I would share how I think you can create a game-winning team by focusing on the six key areas.
I intend to write a blog on each of the six areas. First up is Motivation.
NOTE: Before I continue, I need to address my contentious use of the term “soccer” rather than “football” (I am English not American, after all!). Having read several books on the history football, I know that in that the early days of the evolution of the sport, football was split into two distinct rules/codes – Association (Soccer) and Rugby. The term soccer was first used by the British in the late 19th century and I believe is the best way to distinguish it from all the other codes around the world – Aussie Rules, Gaelic, Rugby, American etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_football
Motivation
In a soccer game, the motivation of the team is the biggest factor in effecting whether they are going to win the game, especially at the top level where the relative ability of the players is mostly even with only slight gains from having the top, top players in your team. The most important job of a soccer coach is to motivate the team to play harder than the other team. To do this the coach need to get the tactics right, of course, but a team that is really focussed on winning will win more frequently than a team who are on autopilot.
In the business world, motivation means that everyone in the team gives 100% every day to deliver as quickly as possible to their highest standard and actively participate in making the workplace a more efficient place to work. Having a team in this state will mean that you can achieve anything, no matter what challenges you have been given.
There are lots of books on how to motivate individuals in the work place. Commonly considered the best book on this subject, Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us describes three core elements to motivating an individual:
- Autonomy – The desire to direct our own lives
- Mastery – The urge to get better at something that matters
- Purpose – The need to do work that has meaning
I am not going to discuss these further here, Pink has done a very good job of that already. However, I think he has missed two important elements:
- Having Fun
- Collective Responsibility
Having fun
Making work fun is implied in Pink’s book. If you have autonomy, if you are getting better at something and have a purpose you will naturally be enjoying the work and be more motivated. My suggestion however is that you need to actively make work fun to motivate people. If people enjoy their work and the people they work with, they will be more eager to make the project (and therefore the company) a success.
In Fish! A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results (Stephen C. Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen), the authors describe how you need to include play in everyday working life. I suggest you do this in two ways – actively reserve time in the week to play games with team members and gamify essential but repetitive and boring (often admin) tasks. For example, make bug fixing a game by creating a leader board of the team members who solved the most/biggest bugs. I recommend weighting the bugs according to their importance and difficulty to avoid promoting the wrong behaviours.
Playing games is a great way to build relationships in a team and making the team enjoy working together. However, don’t forget that this type of activity may not be fun for everyone, and enforced/mandatory fun will not actually be enjoyable at all. Make it optional and if some of the team don’t want to attend then find out specifically how you can make work fun for them too. In my gamification example for bug fixing, you are still going to get team members who don’t solve bugs and are going to be at the bottom of the table every month. Make light of this rather than it being a shaming exercise, and you can even reward the person at the bottom of the table (wooden spoon?), then it will still be a fun exercise for everyone.
Psychological safety and trust is a big part of making work fun. If people can make mistakes, experiment with ideas without fear of being chastised and ridiculed then humour and playfulness is more likely to occur naturally. Amy Edmondson in her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, notes, “Encouraging curiosity and learning means creating conditions where people feel free to ask questions, explore ideas, and even have fun with what they’re doing.”
Silliness also has a place in a motivated team. In Fish!, the authors describe a fish market where workers toss fish to each other, joke with customers and engage in playful interactions, which may appear “silly” to outsiders but serve to energize the environment. Being silly can break tension, foster connection and boost creativity but this does need to be balanced with professionalism. Knowing when to do this, with whom and in what environments is important. For example, in front of the management team in a board meeting might not be the best choice! Examples of silliness could be Icebreaker questions at the beginning of a daily meeting such as, “If you were a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?”, or instigating a Hawaiian shirt day.
Variety is often important to make work fun. In software development you can often get experts in particular aspects of the product and when delivering to tight deadlines it is very easy to ask the same person to work on the same area. Try to make sure knowledge is shared as much as possible and everyone can try new things as often as possible. Again, some people don’t like change and you need to make sure that the person with the new challenge you are giving them is comfortable with it.
“Variety is the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavor.”
William Cowper
Having a flexible work-life balance can make work more fun by integrating personal needs, and therefore reducing stress. This does need to be balanced with the necessity of the team to be able to communicate effectively, (having core hours is important), but if you can be flexible with the team members they will be flexible with you and work in personal hours if required.
And lastly, you need to celebrate success! Let’s go back to the analogy at the beginning of this blog – when teams win soccer games there is a LOT of celebrating! This provides a vital opportunity to bond with team mates. I recommend celebrating whenever possible, even for the smallest wins. Just make sure the celebration matches the success – an all-expenses paid team night out is not justified for the completion of a successful iteration, but it is for a major project delivery lasting over a year.
Success itself is a massive motivation – if you are part of a winning team you have confidence to go and win the next game. Celebrating success no matter the size of the achievement will show the team that they are winning and make them want to win more.
Collective Responsibility
In Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, he says that having a shared purpose is important in motivating people but here I want to emphasise the need for the individual to take the responsibility for delivering the shared vision.
To do this you need to make everyone in the team invested in the team goal. In soccer this is obvious: they want to win a game, the cup, or the league. It is also obvious what they need to do to contribute to the goal: score a goal, save a shot, run with the ball, tackle and pass. So, in your business team you need to do the same: explain the company or project goal and explain how to contribute to achieving that goal.
When the team is given a new challenge make sure that this is clearly communicated to the team, including why it is important and how it will make the company better. Discuss how to solve the challenge as a team and get them to agree the milestones and delivery date. In doing this you getting them to be invested in the project. If they feel they have been consulted and are part of the commitment they will be motivated to deliver it.
They will also be motivated to improve the team processes, cover for other team members and actively spot issues and risk and remove them. In soccer teams we coach this – if the full back advances up the pitch with an attack opportunity the winger needs to cover the defensive position if there is a counter-attack.
Jessie J is right – It is not all about the Money, Money, Money
I am sure lots of people would say that the best way to motivate an individual is money, or the threat to remove it. Whilst at a basic level this is true (people will work harder for a promise of a pay rise), once someone has enough money to make them comfortable, it becomes less of a motivation and they can fall into a trap of working at 80% of capacity and become bored.
Pink states in his book, “The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay them fairly and pay them well. Once that’s done, the true motivators of autonomy, mastery, and purpose take over.”
If you can combine having fun with giving your team members autonomy, mastery and purpose whilst at the same time giving them collective responsibility you will have an all conquering team which will succeed in any situation.
Let me know how you get on.
Pragmatic Agile 