Answer: Help them to find the 3 Ms of engagement
I recently read an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review in which Rosabeth Moss Kanter described the happiest people she knows as those who are dedicated to dealing with some of the most daunting problems the world has to offer, and who face those challenges with the conviction that they can do something about them. Happiness, she says, comes from the feeling that they are making a difference, and she goes on to say that she sees the same spirit in business teams creating new initiatives that they believe in.
This struck a chord. At Digital Opinion we’ve run engagement workshops that start by asking people to think about a time in which they felt fully engaged, and to recall the circumstances and feelings associated with the experience. Very frequently they talk about being seconded to a small team set up to solve a specific difficult problem. The feelings they describe are:
- A sense of ownership and responsibility
- Feeling part of a cohesive team united by a common, clearly defined goal
- A shared belief in the goal and how its achievement would benefit the broader organisation.
In fact these feelings mirror almost exactly the three primary sources of motivation that Moss Kanter has identified: mastery, membership, and meaning. Money, she says, is a distant fourth. Something that “acted as a score card, but it did not get people up-and-at ’em … nor did it help people go home every day with a feeling of fulfilment.”
Of course, these kinds of challenges are not available to all employees every day. However, if leaders keep these three M’s of motivation in mind and seek out the kind of project-type opportunities I’ve described they could, perhaps start inspiring people with stretching goals and a renewed sense of meaning and involvement. It’s a way of engaging people while at the same time finding innovative solutions to difficult problems.
