Optimism Or Delusion? How To Strike A Balance When Trying To Motivate Your Project Team

I came across a post by Ben Horsman that discussed the power and importance of being positive about project goals with the team. It got me thinking, does being positive actually help? I have found in life that some things can only be done through acting as if they will succeed. It’s allure is that it will be a self fulfilling prophesy. Also, planning for success allows us to capitalise on good luck. Daniel Kahneman suggests in Thinking Fast and Slow (p256) that optimistic leaders are more likely to succeed:

Their confidence in their future success sustains a positive mood that helps them obtain resources from others, raise the morale of their employees, and enhance their prospects of prevailing.

So there is this idea of acting “as if” something can be done to increase it’s chances of happening. On the other hand, this idea is prone to abuse. Projects with no chance of succeeding can see their outcomes made worse (and be made less tolerable for the team members) by blatant denial of reality by the leadership. James Boswell wrote in his book Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

It may be that optimism is the last refuge of the leader of a failing project. There is a great Dilbert on optimistic projects here. In addition to being an act of desperation, my experience is that unrealistic goals can have a strong demotivating effect on people. Martin Seligman has demonstrated something he calls Learned Helplessness, which arose in experiments when dogs were faced with insurmountable goals. I suspect something related to this dynamic is what I have seen in teams where we just don’t believe goals are rationally feasible. I wrote more about Seligman and the dog experiments in a previous post. There are so many costs associated with being knowingly unrealistic; colleagues will stop trusting you, some will try to adjust your estimates in their heads back to realistic numbers (with strange results), still others may avoid working with you because they don’t want to be lead by someone who oversells what they can do. All this is to say nothing of the ultimate price of losing personal integrity by knowingly misleading ourselves and others.

So, optimism about project goals can be either helpful or destructive. Is it a question of degree? Kahneman suggests moderation in optimism so as to

“accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality.

and this may be the balance to seek. As I understand it, Jean Paul Satre suggested that we recognise that no endeavour will change our lot in life in any way that matter. So, to lend life meaning, we should take on tasks and act as if they had meaning. He suggests this will work as long as we don’t forget that these undertakings are not intrinsicly meaningful. We may be able to lend sound project teams some motivation if we act as if they will perform better than we calculate they will, while never forgetting that their chances of success or failure must simultaneously be rigorously assessed, regularly checked and clearly communicated to all.

The way I attempt to pull off this balancing act is to aim for realism, communicate optimistic goals to the team and stakeholders, clearly label these goals to all as stretch targets and give feedback towards progress.

A very interesting approach to motivation has been put forward by E. Scott Geller. Ask your team three questions, he says.

• Can you do what we are asking you to do in the project?
• Can the project be done?
• Is it worth doing?

Give people autonomy and regular feedback once work commences and confidence will arise in them. These questions of Geller’s would be at home in any sprint planning meeting. Geller’s assertion that confidence follows is supported by my own experience of agile teams in action.

Geller’s ideas chime with another leading voice of our time on motivation, Dan Pink. In his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,  Pink suggests we look to “autonomy, mastery and purpose” for motivation. This echoes my experience. I have found that agile naturally involves team members in decision making. Mentoring and supporting team members to learn on the job has also been a great way to motivate people (it is also one of the most personally rewarding aspects of my work). Finally, sharing a common goal has been a feature of all successful projects I have worked on. Not just acknowledging that senior management have a certain goal, but personally feeling that this is something that should be done. Both Pink and Geller stress the importance of team members thinking that something is worth doing. Taking time to discuss with the team what I think senior management objectives are based on and why they are globally important has always been time well spent. I have Drive by Dan Pink on my bookshelf at home and may come back to this topic, once I have read it properly. From what I understand so far, it is worth a read as much for understanding “what you thought was true about motivation but is not” as for understanding “what actually does motivate people”.

I mentioned “personally feeling” that something should be done. I once had a Japanese language teacher called Hasegawa Sensei. She made it so abundantly clear that she was personally invested in us talking quality Japanese that it was infectious. We actually cared more because we knew she cared so much. Paying attention to the work produced by the people in my team is something that I strive to do and I wonder if that ever has the effect of making them care more about the work they do.

Both Pink and Geller have great Ted talks, that lay out some of their ideas on motivation. In so far as their ideas relate to motivating project teams, I find them very persuasive and in some part, familiar from seeing agile teams at work. Horsman’s article makes a point restated in a much more nuanced way by Kahneman. If my reference to Satre is justified, positivity has it’s place but must always be clearly labelled as such and people must never lose touch of the reality of what the project’s prospects are. There is so much more to say about motivation. Pink addresses one obvious question I have not gone into. Some think that people are paid to work on projects and that should be motivation enough. The truth is more subtle than that, I find, and it is has been well worth taking time to consider what motivates people, something I am still far from getting to the bottom of.

Image is Read My Mind by Shirokazan licensed under CC by 2.0

Who kept the dogs in? – Continuous Improvement Part 2 of 2

In part 1 of this post I was talking about how, when continuous improvement does work, it always strikes me as a much less stressful way to work and I was wondering why that is.

Although there may be conceptual parallels between Thorndike and AGILE, I don’t feel I have yet gotten to why continuous improvement feels like a more forgiving and easy environment. I was thinking maybe the work of Martin Seligman can shed some light on this.  Seligman (and Steve Maier) put dogs into situations where there was nothing they could do to avoid painful electric shocks. They found the dogs behaved in much the same way as depressed people. Other dogs could stop the shocks by pressing a lever. Still other dogs were not shocked at all. After this, Seligman and Maier put the same dogs in boxes (there they go again with their animals and boxes) and experimented with making them shuttle from one side of the box to the other. He motivated them to move using electric shocks. If they jumped over a small partition they escaped the electric shocks. I find this pretty grim stuff and am not at all clear this was worth it. Still, it is interesting to note that the dogs who had not been shocked and the dogs who had been able to do something about it were able to escape by jumping over the partition. The dogs who had been helpless sadly laid down and were shocked. They did not try to escape.

I am wondering if learned helplessness goes some way to explaining why continuous improvement environments are less stressful. We always feel we can try something new.

There is an interesting take on learned helplessness in people here