Category: motivation

What Motivates (Some of) Us

December 2, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

A number of weeks ago I asked readers to tell me what motivates them. The most original/inspiring contribution was awarded with $100 worth of software development books. Some of my colleagues acted as an independent jury, and Russell Ball, the author of the Caffeinated Coder blog, was selected as the winner, because of the great blog post he wrote on this subject. (And Russell's blatant attampts at unashamed begging did not even make a difference!)

In this post I want to share some highlights of the many emails that I got. The list below should serve as a reminder that your team members' motivation is often very personal, and as undefineable, unpredictable (and ridiculous) as their tastes in food, music, and (wo)men. On the other hand, the list can also serve as a sanity check for our own motivation. Software development is a great profession. If you look at this list, isn't it hard to be not motivated...?

The original question:
What is it that gets you motivated to do your job really well?

The 12 Best Questions for Team Members

November 18, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

In their book First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman present the twelve best questions you can ask your team members to determine how they feel about their jobs.

These questions are the result of one of the largest research efforts ever performed on the topic of people management.

In order to get a feel of your team’s motivation, you would do well to use these questions as the basis for an in-depth conversation. You might want to do this in a formal way, with an objective interviewer and a linear scale of ratings, so that you can carry out some statistical analysis after the interviews. Or you can just do this informally, by pasting the list onto the coffee machine. And whenever you “coincidentally” meet someone while getting a cup of coffee, you make sure to point at one of the questions on the list and have a little chat about it.

The 2nd Law of Software Development

November 11, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

In a previous blog post I wrote about the 1st Law of Software Development. This law deals with each manager’s concern to make sure that team members have the motivation to do their jobs well. But, for a job well done, their motivation alone is not enough! (I might be motivated to work in the middle of the night, but if I'm not allowed to, then what is my motivation good for?) In creative and productive organizations people require the power to do what is needed, so they can achieve the results their managers have asked for.

The 1st Law of Software Development = Motivate People
The 2nd Law of Software Development = Empower People

To Motivate or Not to Demotivate

September 30, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

Some people tell me that "you cannot motivate a person". You can only "remove the impediments that prevent a person from being motivated". Or, in other words, "you can only eliminate demotivation".

Well, I don't agree!

Can you make a person happy? Or can you only eliminate the things that make her unhappy?

Can you make a person laugh? Or can you only eliminate the things that make him cry?

These sound like silly questions. But I have been told a number of times now that trying to motivate people is a bad idea. Yet, I simply could not imagine this to be true, given the fact that it is quite possible to (try to) make people happy, or to (try to) make them laugh.