Every working environment must grow and change over time if it is to remain relevant and profitable. But at a very basic level, the work must provide a sense of security and confidence in the minds of those doing it.
Show Me the Money!
Just as the Intraprenuer is motivated at a base level by the total remuneration package, they and their team members need to know that the paycheque will be there and the job is (relatively) secure if they are to be engaged. If a team leader can help to meet this need, they're far less likely to experience resistance in leading change.
Gallup's research shows that employees who have high confidence in their organisation's financial future are nine times as likely to be engaged in their jobs than those who have lower confidence.
Meet My Needs!
For team members, there are four basic needs that must be met which contribute to stability:
- Their PURPOSE as a team must be clear
- EXCELLENCE must be clearly defined for themselves and for the team
- They need to feel SUPPORTED in their team environment
- They need to have confidence in the team and the organisations FUTURE
You can track these four basic needs through a simple engagement tool called the Engagement Pulse Survey.
You can access the Engagement Pulse through the StandOut portal that I recommended back in my post Take the Standout Wheel
Beyond the four basic needs, what are the most effective ways you can create stability within a team in a world where the only certainty is more uncertainty?
Power My Progress!
This is where I turn to the work of Dr.Jason Fox, a thought leader in the world of motivation strategy and design. When work is inherently motivating, it sets a context for your team where engagement (the most powerful intrinsic motivator) can happen more easily. His book The Game Changer is one I encourage all of my clients to read. According to the fantastic Dr.Fox, all engaging work has three inherent elements.
- Challenge: which must be set at an appropriate level for each team member. If there's no challenge, people get blunt because their skills aren't being used.
- Stimulation: while some work by its very nature repetitive, we need to allow a degree of autonomy in how the work is achieved. This is where you can allow other people's strengths to come into play. Without stimulation, people get bored.
- Reward: don't think gift vouchers and bonus payments. The work must connect in a way that is inherently rewarding and meaningful. If team members can see how their effort contributes to something bigger than themselves, and especially if it aligns with their values, then it's very rewarding. No reward? Team members get burned out.
In addition, when designing work that is inherently motivating and engaging, you need to have three elements in mind:
- Goals: there are many levels of goals, from SMARTA (great for tasks) through to purpose based, and often a number of them are in play when agreeing on an outcome. Learn all you can about the different levels of goals and how they co-exist depending on the time horizon you're working towards.
- Rules: these are used to set the level of challenge and reduce uncertainty. Rules are very powerful forces in creating stability (especially for people who have Discipline and Focus in high in their strengths profiles!). Rules shape the experience of doing the work.
- Feedback: two kinds, with the best approach being a blend of both.
- Quantitative - essentially numerical, but the key is to use it in a way that gives a clear sense of progress while the work is being done
- Qualitative - this is non-numerical, and is best structured in terms of "look at what we've learned", or "look how far we've come", or "let's look at what we still need to do". It will always come with a degree of bias, but as a team leader this kind of feedback is vital to your teams.
The most powerful way to create stability that is dynamic and motivating is to change the way you view progress by looking at it through different productivity lenses.
To do that, you need to understand the basic formula for productivity (for which I'm indebted to one of my old employers, Priority Management):
RESULT = TASK + PROCESS + TOOL.
As an Intrapreneur, you're responsible for generating results through your team.
Every result you're seeking depends on the three constant variables (yes, you read that correctly) on the right hand side of the equation.
I say constant, because they're the only three inputs that contribute directly to a result.
I say variable, because depending on the result you're seeking there will be different types of input.
Let's take a personal example to illustrate. The RESULT I'm working on right now is the completion of my book manuscript - a project that's going to take about 90 days.
(I know it's a bit meta-meta cognitive to write about writing, but stick with me).
Within that result, there are several PROCESSES that need to be followed, depending on what stage of the project I'm up to. For example, I've broken the book up into multiple documents for each section and chapter, from Foreword through to Index.
Currently, each day my TASK is to write at least 750 words (For the record I'm tracking an average of about 1,000, and it's a c.60,000 word book, so I'm we'll ahead of schedule - YAY!).
The TOOLS that I'm currently using are my MacBook Air and Word Online accessed via my DropBox account through a Google Chrome browser. I could use many different tools to follow the same process. For example, I could work directly on Word Documents via Office 365, and then save them into OneDrive (Microsoft's version of DropBox), or Google Docs and Google Drive, or use Scrivener (really cool software for writers) and some other document storage tool. You get the point.
The one variable that the equation doesn't factor in is the fourth dimension - TIME.
You see, depending on the time horizon to get the result, the process you use to plan and the tools you use to support doing the tasks will vary.
90 Days is effectively a season - or quarter, if you live in the business world that has quarterly driven sales targets.
You can break a quarter down into three months, or 13 weeks.
For planning the week, I use the First Things First process I learned over twenty years ago from Covey's Seven Habits:
- Clarify your 7 Key Roles (e.g. Husband, Father, Work Roles, Community)
- Identify the top 2 most important & not urgent tasks for each role
- Put them in the calendar first at the best time to do them
So in my current situation, to write 750 words a day I schedule two 90 minute blocks of writing in the morning, with a thirty minute energy break between them.
I schedule a third later in the day if I haven't hit my minimum target of 750 (so far, so good).
This allows my daily focus to follow the old SMART Acronym (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed). SMART is perfect tracking for daily results, but its power weakens the longer the time horizon.
This leaves me plenty of time to focus on doing all the other important things I have to do in my life. And it still gives me flexibility should something else more urgent and important pop up during the week that requires my attention.
At the end of every week, as part of the process I review my total word progress so I can see how much traction I'm getting, and at the end of every month I do a total read through and edit of my work to date so I can maintain a focus on the 90 Day Result (and hopefully save myself a lot of time at the end of the process!)
While the example is personal, you can apply the same process to your team by teaching them the 90 Day Game Plan and personalising it to their work roles, then allow them freedom to play to their strengths in how they achieve the results!
The longer the time frame to the result, the more important it is for the team's stability to be able to see progress via shorter time frames. 90 Days is the ideal time frame to break large-scale projects down into smaller projects that that matter. This provides a clear sense of progress towards the result.
Which leads me to the final watchword for stability - SIMPLICITY.
The longer the time horizon, the more complex we're tempted to make the process, or the tasks too big, or the tools too unwieldy.
I see so many people enamoured by the latest and greatest bright shiny "PRODJECT" (Productivity Shiny Object, or PSO Syndrome) that they waste far more time learning how to master that tool (or only learning the basics) and even more time applying it to the task.
One of the key roles of an Intrapreneur is to bring clarity out of chaos. The more you can simplify ANY process, the better your team will be able to rise to high levels of performance.
Your productivity tools need to be both a stack (able to seamlessly handle anything from a one-step to result to building a space shuttle) and an ecosystem (able to organically grow with you to meet your requirements).
This means ideally creating a simple set of tools that can all integrate with each other.
So to create stability, confidence in the pay, and showing them their pathway via projects that matter gives you access to the bottom three layers of the super-talented ladder, and the potential to create your own team of super-powered people.
How do you access the most powerful driver of all - legacy?
That's where hope comes in.