Foster a motivating environment for async agile
When you can create a motivating environment for people to work asynchronously, you don't have to micromanage them. To create a fulfilling work environment, I suggest optimising each parameter of Dan Pink's theory of motivation.
- Autonomy: our desire to direct our own lives and work.
- Resist the urge to micro-manage and observe people. Instead, trust that high ability individuals want to do great work.
- Evaluate people's work on what they produce and not how much you get to see them.
- Give people ownership of substantial chunks of work. Avoid making them "code monkeys" or "ticket takers".
- Mastery: the urge to get better at the things we do.
- Reduce boring work by automating repetitive tasks, simplifying them or by just not doing them if they don't add value.
- Limit bullshit jobs so you maximise people's capacity to do meaningful work.
- Learn about your people well enough so you can match their skills to work that'll keep them in the Goldilocks zone.
- Purpose: people’s need to do something that has meaning and is important.
- Beyond your organisation's purpose and mission, think about encouraging teams to articulate their own purposes, so they know why they do what they do.
One sign of a healthy culture is that people feel motivated by the work they do. Yes, there’ll be good days and bad, but on the whole you want your people to enjoy the work they do. There are several theories you can pick up about culture and motivation. My favourite and probably the most well known of these theories is the one by Dan Pink. We discussed this briefly when we addressed the principles for asynchronous collaboration.
Right off the bat, Pink says that extrinsic motivators such as bonuses and commissions aren't as effective as intrinsic motivation. He says that while rewards are effective for routine, rule-based work, they’re counterproductive for creative problem solving. Rewards narrow our focus, he says. Pink lays out a three-part framework listing the factors that drive intrinsic motivation.
Autonomy. Our desire to direct our own lives and work.
Mastery. The urge to get better at the things we do.
Purpose. People’s need to do something that has meaning and is important.
In today’s post, I want to examine these three factors in some detail and help you think about how you as a leader can create a motivating work environment for the people you work with.
Autonomy
Let’s begin with the fundamentals. Async agile seeks to enable an anywhere, anytime work environment. If people aren’t working in front of you, then you need to trust that they’re actually working! Trust is a foundational element of working remotely, but even more so when you work asynchronously. There’s no easy way around this. If you’ve grown up as a leader practising management by wandering around, it is very difficult to pick up signals about what work is happening. You’ll feel tempted to set up heaps of meetings, check-ins and updates just to stay on top of what your people are up to. Don’t do it. Another world is possible.
It all begins with trust
If you can’t trust your people to work, there’s something wrong that no physical or virtual space can fix. Either you haven’t hired the right people, or you’re underestimating them. This isn’t a site about hiring, so I’ll assume that you’ve got capable, high-ability individuals on your team. In which case you need to relinquish your feeling of control. Instead, embrace the reality that high ability, high integrity people don’t want to sit around twiddling their thumbs. They want to do great work. Trust is a two-way street. When you place your trust in people, they’ll inevitably pay you back and pay it forward.
Outcomes over presence
Old school management equated presence in an office with people’s commitment to work. Even the existence of the remote trailblazers - GitLab, Automattic, Basecamp - didn’t change this perspective. It took a global pandemic to prove that work can happen even when you don’t see your people in front of you. What can you take away from this experience? I recommend you shift your perspective to an outcome focus from a focus on hours and presence.
Don’t judge your people by how many meetings they’re part of or how often they pop up on chat. If people are attending loads of meetings and are always visible on chat, they can’t possibly do deep work. You need to ignore presence and focus on what people are actually achieving. Pay attention to tangible outcomes - code, design, writing, clear ideas. When you change your perspective, the team will follow.
“You evaluate people’s work on what they produce, not how or when they produce it. Trust emerges as the glue that holds the entire operation together.”
Promote skin in the game
Smart people don’t want you to tell them what to do. Instead, they want to take a crack at a hard problem worth solving. This is where your teams’ ways of working come into play. A large part of this writing project focussed on asynchronous best practices in an agile environment. Scrum is the most popular agile methodology, so I wrote a post about making scrum ceremonies more asynchronous. And while I think Scrum, Kanban and other variants of agile will continue to exist, we need to embrace modes of working that give people even more autonomy. After all, the agile movement is all about people, outcomes, software quality and embracing change, isn’t it?
There are already voices in the industry that question the status quo of the scrum product backlog or the Kanban board full of tasks. Arguably, this is a reductionist approach to building software. People pick up tasks in a mechanistic fashion, but they lose sight of the big picture. Instead, can small groups of people come together to achieve specific outcomes? Let them define their own tasks. In an earlier I described how you can create pods to deliver specific features for your product.
Ryan Singer’s “Shape Up” approach is even more radical. They work in eight-week cycles. Six of these eight weeks follow a dual track approach. While developers and designers are building software; leaders are shaping work for the next cycle. The final two weeks are a cool-down period. During this time, leaders spend time at a “betting table” deciding which pitches to bet on for the next cycle. Pitches; Ryan’s name for “shaped up work”; don’t go into implementation detail. That’s for the team to figure out. They only define the broad contours of work - the problem, the company’s appetite, the rough solution sketch, rabbit holes and no-gos. If leaders bet on getting this work done in six weeks, they give a team uninterrupted time to focus on it. I understand that not every organisation or team can adopt Ryan’s approach in its purest form. We can, however, take small steps to get there.
“Teams love being given more freedom to implement an idea the way they think is best. Talented people don’t like being treated like “code monkeys” or ticket takers.” - Ryan Singer.
Mastery
High ability people are restless. They crave challenging work that’ll help them build their skills. In 2018, a Korn Ferry survey revealed that a third of their respondents were leaving their job because they were bored. They needed a new challenge. Your best people need fresh challenges regularly.
Reduce drudgery
Now I am a realist. I know that there’s some drudgery that we have to put up with. Take my example. I’m a consultant. Filling time cards each week is one of those mundane tasks I can’t escape. Thankfully, my employers have a mobile app for this and it barely takes a minute to get done. There are a few ways to minimise the pain some of these mechanistic, routine tasks cause.
Automate them. For example, many status updates don’t need a meeting. With a clever use of tools, you may not even need to write them. By wiring together automation tools, you can produce these updates without human intervention.
Simplify them. Many tasks are painful because they’re not just boring, they’re also time-consuming. Spend some time to find the simplest way to execute necessary, but boring tasks. These days, there’s an app for everything. Where possible, invest in tools that speed up boring tasks. The idea is to get these tasks out of the way so people have time for deep, challenging work.
Don’t do them. Many tasks exist because “we’ve always done it this way”. Shake off the status quo. The only thing worse than doing a boring task is when it’s also pointless. Stop doing non-value adding work.
Limit bullshit jobs
We’ve discussed bullshit jobs earlier on this blog. These jobs are not just pointless, but they’re also pernicious. For example, duct-taping jobs exist because we don’t address the root cause of a problem. That doesn’t sound right, does it? Why not ask someone to address the root cause? Similarly, task masters exist just to create work for people. In self organising teams of high ability individuals you don’t need these roles. Box-ticking activities are by definition about tasks that seem good in and of themselves but create little value. Do you need all that in your system?
The fewer bullshit jobs you have in your system, the more capacity and cognitive potential you free up for meaningful work. This won’t be easy, because many organisational structures normalise such jobs. Your job is to fight the good fight!
The “Goldilocks zone”
The Goldilocks zone. Not too easy, not too hard. Just the right level of challenge.
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear mentions the Goldilocks rule.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
Clear didn’t make this up to sell a few extra copies of his book. He borrows this concept from psychology research - the Yerkes Dodson law says the same thing. To apply this principle at work, you need to understand your people intimately. Not as a collective, but as individuals. If you can’t individualise, then you’re leading too many people. In that case, devolve leadership responsibility to others on your teams.
When you know your people well through intentional interactions, such as 1:1 check-ins and regular feedback, you will learn about their skills and abilities. You’ll make the most of your people when you can get them into the Goldilocks zone more often than not. You can do this by shaping up work effectively and by then matching the right groups of people to these problems. This calls for hands-on leadership. You can’t just be an advisor. You need to understand the details.
Purpose
“Your people don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe.” - my variation on Simon Sinek’s TED Talk
Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves. So companies create the myth of culture. In my last post we spoke about the resources, processes and values (RPV) framework to define how your ways of working lead to culture. The one other thing that binds people together is a sense of purpose. I’ve always argued that it’s not enough to stop at an organisation’s purpose. Individual employees may find themselves too small to contribute to a grand, organisational cause.
Think “concrete and inspirational” when defining your purpose.
In the book “Essentialism - the disciplined pursuit of less”, Greg McKeown advises that you make your purpose; what he calls “essential intent”, both concrete and inspirational. This is different from:
mission statements which are inspirational but not concrete;
values which can tend to be general and bland;
and quarterly objectives which are concrete but not inspirational.
So I’ve used McKeown’s framework to line up a purpose for every team I’ve led in recent years. Nothing fancy. Just a simple line that everyone can understand and rally around. For example, when I was on a team building a data visualisation platform, we all agreed that our purpose was to “help our clients use data to drive better decisions”.
That simple phrase led to a sense of ownership. For every feature, every enhancement, we’d ask if it would indeed “drive better decisions”. There was a healthy tension to do the right thing. The team would come up with ideas for the product with this purpose in mind. It was at the centre of our existence.
Would your teams benefit from having their individual purposes? How can you encourage them to define and own these?
Matt Mullenweg believes that office centric organisations can be great at mastery and purpose, but no office centric organisation can be better than an organisation that’s at level 4 or above at autonomy. He wrote that a couple of years back and I have a slightly different view.
Async agile benefits from eliminating bullshit jobs and it allows people to do deep work. Deep work promotes mastery. An effective remote-first operating model delegates most decisions to the smallest units possible - teams. Teams can therefore define their sense of purpose so they identify with it. Nothing stops office-centric organisations from doing this, except the mindset of one-size-fits-all. That’s the mindset that drives an office oriented work strategy.
People bat for a forced-hybrid or an office-centric model in the name of building a motivating work culture. As we’ve seen in this post, you can motivate people even in an async-first organisation. I argue that if you pay attention to each factor in Pink’s framework, an asynchronous work culture can be far more motivating than a synchronous, office-based one.