The Influencer Blog

Motivating Team Members

This is the fifth post in a series on Improving Teamwork within your organization. In earlier posts we’ve clarified the results we’ll use to track improvements in teamwork and identified two vital behaviors that can drive these improvements. These vital behaviors are:

Whenever anyone has a concern, he or she speaks up and explains the concern in a complete, frank, and respectful way.
Everyone holds everyone accountable for meeting expectations, for commitments, and for bad behavior—regardless of role or position.

We also discovered a number of challenges that could prevent people from acting on these vital behaviors. We looked within each of our six sources of influence, and found the challenges in every one. In this post I’ll outline influence strategies that focus on Source 1 of our model--Personal Motivation. The goal will be to make the undesirable elements of teamwork more desirable.

Source 1: Personal Motivation: We want people to derive enjoyment, fulfillment, identity, and self respect from employing these two vital behaviors. We want them to take pride in speaking up and holding others accountable, to see these behaviors as essential parts of who they are, and to feel a loss of self respect every time they fail to speak up or hold another person accountable. In short, we want these two vital behaviors to be intrinsically motivating.

Connect to Human Consequences: In lab studies we’ve asked people to “think out loud” as they decide how to approach a crucial conversation. Here is what more than four out of five of them do. They total up all the bad things that could happen if they speak up. They end up talking themselves out of saying anything.
What we need is for people to reverse the math—to think of all the bad things that will happen if they don’t speak up. But here’s the challenge: These bad things happen mostly to other people, not to themselves.
The solution is to connect them to the human consequences that happen when they fail to speak up or fail to hold someone accountable. Think of ways to have them connect with the victims who are hurt by their lack of action.

In this extended example we’ve been using medical teams. Arrange to have team members meet with patients who have been injured by their team. Have them lead post-exit interviews with groups of people who have chosen to leave their team. Make sure these meetings happen face-to-face, that they aren’t delegated or held over the phone. You want the maximum human connection between the team members and the people their actions impact.

Get People to Try the Vital Behaviors: People catastrophize. They imagine that speaking up and holding people accountable will be far more painful than it really is. Get them to try the vital behaviors in small doses in safe environments. Once their confidence is a bit higher, try hitting them with a few zingers so they can experience setbacks and realize that even failures aren’t too painful.

Use Motivational Interviewing: Ask people to explain all the excuses they use during the crucial moment to excuse themselves from speaking up and holding others accountable. After they’ve made an exhaustive list ask them to, “Look at each excuse objectively and decide whether it’s really good enough to excuse you from speaking up and holding others accountable.” Ask them to argue against their own excuses. They can change their own minds far more effectively than you can.

In the next post we’ll look at strategies designed to improve Personal Ability.

Improving Teams: Breaking the 20 barriers to speaking up

This is the fourth post in a series on Improving Teamwork within your organization. In this post, we will build our influence model, and we’ll begin by analyzing why our vital behaviors aren’t already pervasive in our teams.

The mistake most of us make at this point in an influence initiative is to assume that our current problems stem from a single root cause—that there is a simple cause, and therefore a simple solution, to our complex problems. But this is rarely the case with influence problems—problems that are profound, persistent, and resistant.

Profound: problems that are worth solving and not trivial grievances.
Persistent: problems that have been around a while and not one-time efforts at
Resistant: resilient problems that have defied your previous attempts to solve them.

In short, we’re interested in the kinds of problems that destroy lives, relationships, businesses, and societies—problems that are caused or worsened by human behavior

A key insight we discuss in chapter 10 of Influencer is that these influence problems are “overdetermined.” They don’t have one single root cause. They have multiple root causes. The reason they are so persistent and resistant is that, even when you get rid of one of their causes, there are others that continue to maintain them.

Successful influencers look for a conspiracy of causes in six different areas, or six sources of influence.
Below are twenty questions we’ve used to look for the causes involved in not acting on our two vital behaviors. First, remember our two vital behaviors:

Whenever anyone has a concern, he or she speaks up and explains the concern in a complete, frank, and respectful way.
Everyone holds everyone accountable for meeting expectations, for commitments, and for bad behavior—regardless of role or position.

Explore these questions with team members to understand why they aren’t acting on these vital behaviors. I’ve grouped the questions into six categories to reflect our six sources of influence model.

Source 1: Personal Motivation: Do people derive enjoyment, fulfillment, identity, or self respect from the vital behaviors?

1. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because they don’t like to. It feels uncomfortable, awkward, or even a bit risky.

2. Some people see problems as “other people’s problems.” They don’t feel personally responsible for solving them.

3. Some people fail to speak up or hold people accountable because they are burnt out or disengaged. They have a perspective that prevents them from taking action. They say, “Why should I try? Nothing will change anyway.”

4. Some people don’t see “speaking up” or “holding people accountable” as an important part of their role—they don’t take professional pride in these aspects of their jobs.

5. Some people see their work as “just a job.” They don’t see it as defining who they are or as a moral imperative. So they don’t see “speaking up” or “holding others accountable” as an ethical responsibility.

Source 2: Personal Ability: Do people have the knowledge, skills, and emotional control to perform the vital behaviors?

6. Some people find it difficult to speak up or to hold someone accountable when it’s a person who has a bad reputation or seems frustrated right now.

7. Some people find it difficult to continue to explain a concern when the other person has tried to cut them off. They don’t know how to maintain professional dialogue when the other person doesn’t seem to want their perspective.

8. Some people find it difficult to speak up when they know they might be wrong—when they are clearly not the expert, or when they aren’t sure how to describe the concern.

Sources 3 & 4: Social Motivation & Ability: Do others—peers, managers, friends, relatives, etc…provide sources of motivation and ability to perform the vital behaviors

9. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because, when they do, the people they confront get hurt feelings, get defensive, or get angry.

10. Some people have given up on speaking up or holding others accountable because, the people they confront don’t do their part to help solve the problem. They don’t feel listened to or respected, and the problem continues—so they give up.

11. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold others accountable because they doubt that leaders will back them up if they do.

12. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold others accountable because, if they do, they think they’ll be on their own. They doubt that anyone around them will come to their assistance.

13. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold others accountable because they would have to be the first. There isn’t a critical mass of respected people already speaking up and holding others accountable.

14. There are large power differentials based on pay, education, experience, and authority. People don’t speak up because they find these power differences intimidating—even when there’s no intimidating behavior.

Source 5 Structural Motivation: Do the formal selection, appraisal, promotion, reward, and discipline systems motivate the person to perform the vital behaviors?

15. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because speaking up and holding people accountable doesn’t get you a better performance review, better pay, or help your career.

16. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because no one holds them accountable for doing so. There are no costs or sanctions for staying quiet.

Source 6 Structural Ability: Does the environment make the vital behaviors easier or more convenient, and make the wrong behaviors tougher or less convenient.

17. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because there aren’t enough opportunities. It’s too difficult to find the right times and places to meet and talk about these kinds of issues.

18. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because the people they need to talk with are never around when they need to talk with them.

19. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because the people they need to talk with are physicians or patients or members of other departments who don’t really need to listen.

20. Some people don’t speak up or try to hold people accountable because it’s not in their job description. They don’t think they are supposed to have these kinds of conversations.

If you are like most people, you’ve answered “yes” to many, if not all, of these questions. In most organizations these twenty questions represent twenty barriers to speaking up and holding others accountable. No wonder problems involving teamwork are so persistent and resistant!

In the next several blog postings I’ll build a robust influence strategy that will overcome every one of these root causes.

The vital behaviors to improve teamwork

This is the third post in a series on improving teamwork within your organization. The first two posts framed the overall issue and identified the measurable results we want to achieve. This post will focus on finding the vital behaviors that drive the results.

A key insight at the heart of our book, Influencer, is that a few behaviors can drive a lot of change. Even the most pervasive problems will succumb to a handful of high-leverage behaviors. Find these high-leverage behaviors, the ones we call “vital behaviors,” and you can drive amazing levels of change.

Here are the mistakes to avoid:

Too many behaviors. Limit yourself to three or four vital behaviors. This is an optimal number. Of course there will always be additional behaviors that are also important, but limiting the number to three or four will focus your efforts to great advantage.

Results or qualities, instead of behaviors. Here are some “vital behaviors” that aren’t really behaviors at all: “Respect all team members,” “Achieve all team targets.” The first is a quality, while the second is a result. The vital behaviors describe actions people can perform. A good test is to ask yourself, “If I told 10 people to demonstrate this vital behavior, would they all perform the same actions?”

What makes a behavior “vital”?

Sometimes a behavior becomes vital because it leads directly to desired results. For example, 30 minutes of aerobic exercise daily leads directly to improved cardiac fitness.

Other times the behavior is vital because it stops an escalating or self-defeating pattern. For example, recognizing that your spouse is going to silence or violence, stepping out of the discussion, and restoring safety stops the escalating patterns that lead to divorce.

The vital behaviors that improve teamwork

First, remember we’re using a specific set of Measurable Results to define “improved teamwork.” You might want to review last week’s post on results to see the dimensions we’re measuring.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of research on the characteristics of successful teams. However, most of these studies focus on qualities instead of behaviors. Our own research on teams has used the “crucial moments” and “positive deviance” approaches.

We’ve identified crucial moments in a team’s life—times when it’s especially likely for the team to switch from the right path to the wrong path and especially costly to their performance when they do. Examples of these crucial moments include: when a team is given an unachievable goal, when a powerful team member tries to dominate the team, and when a team member fails to keep a commitment to another team member.

We’ve observed positive deviant teams—teams that succeed against the odds in these crucial moments. What we find is that successful teams face just as many of these crucial moments as unsuccessful teams—but they behave differently when they do. Here are the two vital behaviors that we repeatedly observe among successful teams:

Whenever anyone has a concern, he or she speaks up and explains the concern in a complete, frank, and respectful way.
Everyone holds everyone accountable for meeting expectations, for commitments, and for bad behavior—regardless of role or position.

These two behaviors differentiate the best teams from the rest. So, these vital behaviors will be the focus of our teamwork initiative. In the next blog posting, I’ll begin building a six source influence strategy for making sure everyone on the team acts on these vital behaviors every time.