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How to motivate your team — another in a long line of business-facing concepts that should matter to people who become managers, but often don’t matter. (Alas.) Here’s the rub on this whole deal: we love us some “teamwork” and “collaboration” in organizations of all sizes, even though we’ve got straight-up research that people don’t really want to collaborate with others that much at work. (While we are social animals, and that’s true, there’s also a lot of assholes at work — and that’s even more true.) So we force people into these collaborative, “cross-functional” boxes a lot of the time and ask them to come together and hit targets. That’s often a massively flawed, extremely fraught process involving a lot of no-context deliverables and backstabbing. And then what happens at the end?
We promote individuals, not teams.
That’s kind of where this whole deal on “how to motivate your team” starts to collapse. It’s hard to motivate a team when the individuals are the ones who reap the benefits. Think of this math, right? If you bring together 10 people “cross-functionally” on a project, and the project is a massive success, how many of those 10 people will get a salary bump or bonus from it? I would guess 5 at most. In most companies, it would be 1–2 — and those 1–2 wouldn’t even be based on performance. They’d be based on who was closer to the power core…
