Motivation Is Not a One-Size-Fits-All Technique
A project manager, wanting to mark a difficult delivery, buys the team the same small gift and writes a warm note to go with it. Four people are pleased. Two are mildly embarrassed. One would have preferred to be asked to present the work to the steering group, and one has been waiting three months for somebody to fix the approval that makes her job miserable every Tuesday. The gesture was generous, it was well meant, and it reached about half the people it was aimed at.
That is the ordinary experience of motivating a project team, and the reason is not that the gesture was wrong. It is that motivation is individual, situational, and largely invisible unless somebody asks. Motivation sits inside the people side of the resource work that the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition brings together at Section 2.6, where developing and sustaining a team is treated as continuing work, and the practical version of that work starts with finding out what the people in front of you actually want from it.
Ask, because you will guess wrong
The question is unremarkable and most project managers never put it: what would make this a good six months for you? Asked once, early, in a one-to-one, it produces answers that no amount of observation would have supplied. Three kinds turn up repeatedly on projects, and they call for completely different responses.
Some people want their work to be visibly used. They are motivated by seeing the thing they built in the hands of the people it was for, and they are demoralised by work that disappears into a programme and is never heard of again. What they need from a project manager is a route to the end of the chain: a demonstration, a visit to the operational floor, a message from a user forwarded without editing.
Some people want to get better at something. A secondment onto a project is one of the few chances to learn in working hours, and the person who has put their hand up partly for that reason will be more engaged on a stretch task they are slightly underqualified for than on the work they can already do perfectly. This is the cheapest motivation available and it is regularly withheld by a project manager allocating work purely for speed.
Some people want to be trusted with a decision. For an experienced person seconded into a project, the difference between being consulted and being asked to decide is large, and most projects hold decisions at a level far above where the knowledge sits. Handing over a real one, with its boundaries stated, changes how somebody works for the rest of the project.
Remove what grinds first
Adding something pleasant is the instinctive move and it is usually the weaker one. The things that quietly demotivate people run every week, while the gesture happens once a quarter, and the arithmetic favours removing friction.
Work that goes nowhere. A report produced every Friday that nobody reads, a document rewritten to satisfy a template, a workshop whose output has been sitting in a folder since March. People notice exactly how much of their week is theatre, and they adjust their effort to match it.
Waiting. Approvals that take eleven days, an environment that is unavailable, access that was requested in week two and arrives in week seven. Time spent unable to do the job is the most reliable source of disengagement on any project, and it is normally within a project manager's power to shorten.
Being overridden without explanation. A decision reversed higher up is part of working life. A decision reversed with no reason given teaches somebody that their analysis was not read, and after it happens twice they stop producing it properly.
Invisible contribution. On projects with several organisations, it is easy for a person's work to be reported upwards under somebody else's name. Correcting that is a matter of a sentence in the right meeting, and the person concerned will remember it long after the project has closed.
Three handlers, three different answers
An insurer was rebuilding the way motor claims were triaged. Three experienced claims handlers were seconded to the project for nine months, chosen because they were the best in the department at the thing being redesigned.
Six weeks in, all three were flat, and the project manager had tried the usual repertoire: thanks in the team meeting, a lunch, a mention to their line manager. What she did next was to ask each of them what they were hoping to get out of the nine months.
The answers had almost nothing in common. One wanted to end up somewhere other than claims and saw the project as the way out, so what mattered to him was being introduced to people in other parts of the business and being given work that would show up on his record. One was frustrated at being used as a source of information and wanted to make decisions about the design, having spent eleven years handling the cases it would affect. The third cared about none of that and wanted to know that the new triage would actually reach the floor, because she had been on a project four years earlier whose output was abandoned after go-live.
Three different responses followed. The first was put in front of the operations director with a piece of analysis he had done, and later moved into the change team permanently. The second was given the triage rules to own outright, within stated boundaries on regulatory constraints and cost, and made better calls than the project would have made without her. The third got a standing invitation to the implementation planning, where she could see the rollout being scheduled, and she became its most effective advocate on the claims floor precisely because her scepticism was known.
None of that cost money. It cost about ninety minutes of conversation and the willingness to treat three people as three people.
For a PMP® candidate, the point to hold is that motivation is contextual and individual, so a situation describing a disengaged team member is asking what that particular person needs. A response that applies a team-wide gesture, however generous, has answered a different question. A structured PMP exam preparation course rehearses situations where the technique is sound and the person it was aimed at wanted something else.
The next fortnight is long enough for this. Take the three people whose engagement you are least sure about and ask each of them what would make the rest of this project worth their time. Two of the answers will be things you can act on within a week, and the third will usually be something you can at least be honest about, which is considerably better than guessing.
Interested in going further?
The gesture that works on four people and misses three is the normal outcome of treating motivation as a technique. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through team situations where the right response depends entirely on the individual in front of you.
Developing and sustaining a project team is part of the resource work in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A142: The PMBOK 8 Resources Performance Domain: What It Really Covers
A144: Resource Planning in a World of Shared Teams
A147: Conflict Is Not Always a Problem
A145: Resource Levelling vs Resource Smoothing
A143: People Are Resources, But Not Just Resources
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
