Is your team a wheel-barrow?  When you stop pushing it, does it stop moving?  (Thanks to John Coxall for this unforgettable though rather pessimistic metaphor).

If your team lacks internal motivation, it may be time to review how their work is designed.  According to J Richard Hackman, author of “Leading Teams”, internally motivated teams require three things:

  • To feel personally responsible for the work.
  • To experience the work as meaningful.
  • To know how well they are doing.

Designing work for this experience is a lot more difficult than dumping the task with the team and letting them get on with it.  This takes creativity as well as the perseverance and wisdom to deal with the inertia from a team-resistant culture.  So how do you design work for internal motivation?

  • To encourage responsibility, leaders give their teams autonomy, within clearly specified limits.  And this means real autonomy, not telling the team they have it but then defining their work in such detail that they cannot exercise it.
  • To promote meaningful work, leaders clearly define tasks that are significant and require a variety of skills.
  • The work includes built-in mechanisms providing continuous feedback to the team on the results of their efforts.

Working towards internal motivation also introduces risks which include:

  • Social loafing: Bigger teams can take on more significant tasks, agreeing amongst themselves how to divide up the work to be done.  However large teams are subject to motivation decrement where individuals slack off.
  • Recalcitrance: With autonomy teams grow in empowerment and are able to use their first-hand experience of a situation to adjust how they work together.  But autonomous teams can go off the rails and leaders require wisdom in monitoring the outputs of the team without encroaching on their freedom.
  • Anti-learning: When the work is designed to provide trustworthy feedback to the team as a whole, the team can learn and grow.  Sometimes however teams may convince themselves of their correctness in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  Addressing an anti-learning stance requires more than information.

These risks may be mitigated through other components of his Leading Teams model such as providing an engaging direction, a supportive organisational context and effective coaching.  You may also consider the other elements of an enabling internal structure:

  • The core norms of conduct that guide and constrain team behaviour.
  • The composition of the team.