Management 3.0: Moving motivators

What are moving motivators?

Money is not a good motivator for knowledge workers; on the contrary, it usually leads to undesirable behavior. Managers must create an environment that promotes the intrinsic motivation of employees.

Moving Motivators is a practice from the Management 3.0 portfolio that gives employees clarity about their intrinsic needs and values.

What is it that drives us?

Have you ever wondered why many people enjoy learning to play an instrument in their spare time? Even though they most likely will not get paid for it. According to Daniel Pink, people do this because they find satisfaction in improving a skill. Pink shows that people strive for mastery, autonomy (self-determined work), and meaningfulness.

Jurgen Appelo combined the motivators of various behavioral researchers (Daniel Pink,  Steven Reiss, and  Edward Deci ), brought together similar motivators, and sorted out some that (should) not play a role in the work context.

The result were these 10 motivators

• Curiosity: I have many things to investigate and think about.
• Honor: I am proud that my personal values ​​are reflected in how I work.
• Acceptance: The people around me like what I do and who I am.
• Mastery: My work questions my competence, but it is still within my abilities.
• Power: There is enough room for me to influence what happens around me.
• Freedom: I am independent of others with my work and my responsibilities.
• Relatedness: I have good social contact with the people in my work.
• Order: There are enough rules and policies for a stable environment.
• Goal: My purpose in life is reflected in the work I do.
• Status: My position is good and recognized by the people who work with me.

The 10 motivators can be easily remembered with the acronym CHAMPFROGS.

How you can use moving motivators

The Moving Motivators practice was originally developed for managers to learn more about what motivates and inspires their employees in one-on-one interviews. I also use the Moving Motivators regularly in team-building workshops and retrospectives – I let the group do the exercise in pairs.

That is how it works:

Step 1: Arrange the Moving Motivators cards in an order that makes sense for you. Start on the right with the motivator that is most important to you. Arrange the remaining motivators on the left in descending order of importance. This often proves to be more difficult than it initially appears. If you cannot do anything with some motivators, you’re welcome to take them out of the game.

Step 2: Think about how a possible (or concrete) change in your (professional) environment will affect your motivators. Are these strengthened or weakened by the change? Show this on the cards by sliding them up or down.

Step 3: Think about your findings with your counterpart and / or the group. Which motivators are important to you? Which are less or not at all important to you? Did something surprise you? Are there similarities with your counterpart or participants in the group?

Be sure to allow enough time for reflection when playing Moving Motivators with a team. I found it extremely rewarding to also talk – as part of this exercise -about how the team can offer the individual members an environment that addresses and values ​​the individual most important motivators. The practice can also be excellently combined with the Drucker exercise, which explores what the participants value, what they are good at, how they work, and what contribution they can make to the team.

My empiric learning

As a manager or a facilitator, I learned the importance to pay a lot of attention to know what events and environmental elements would increase the intrinsic motivation of each member of my team. Inviting the team to understand and to facilitate what will unlock and stimulate the intrinsic motivation of their pairs always gave excellent results.

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MORE YOU KNOW, MORE YOU GROW :

To know more about this practice, you could find more details here: management30: moving-motivators

If you need any further help on making your organization well energized and more responsive to the markets, you can also contact us

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