Management 3.0 – “Intrinsic motivators and the power of one question”

We all have intrinsic motivators that inspire us to perform an activity to get a job done: “pride”, “order”, or “mastery”, just to name a few.
Management 3.0 offers a game called Moving Motivators. Basically, it’s nothing more than 10 cards, each with the description of one motivator, and designed as a one player game.
My experiment was to make it a group game.

I started the game by handing each team-member a card deck and asking them to rank the motivators in order of importance measured against their own values. The “motivators” to be ranked were curiosity, honor, acceptance, mastery, power, freedom, relatedness, order, goal and status. The participants in my experiment did not take this task lightly and needed some time to think about their choices.

After all personal rankings were made, they were shared with the other team-members, not intending to start a discussion, but just to get a better understanding of what each team-member had ranked the highest. Finally, I asked a simple question:

“As of now, your team is fully self-managed and therefore as a team you are truly responsible and accountable for your team success. Would this change the order of your motivators?”
I did this experiment several times now and without fail each team-member had a few motivators that would become more important. Funny side note, this even happens in teams that had already declared themselves self-managed.

There are two levels of insights here:

• On a personal level; when we are part of a team, we are willing to put more emphasis on the motivators that are the most important motivators for the good of the group instead of our personal motivators;
• Our personal motivators are literally moving when the objective of a group has changed or when new members join the team.