Aligning and keeping aligned Duck 2
Duck 2, Motivation: All members of the team implementing the change must be motivated to see that the change is successfully accomplished.
Just because every member of the team agrees on what the end objectives are, what success and failure would feel like and what special actions and constraints get added to get and keep everyone aligned, does not mean every member is motivated to the extent required to make the project successful. Any project will always be just one of many things a team member is motivated to see happen, and it may not be important enough to get the investment of attention, sweat, and tears to make sure the project is a success no matter what.
Because Duck 1 gets aligned first, the leader starts out with some important information: what each member will feel if and when the project is a success or a failure. The leader also knows some things each member doesn’t want to see happen. These help the leader understand some—not all—of the motivations of each member.
To align Duck 2 a leader should hold a series of 1:1 meetings with each member of the team, asking:
What do you aspire to get from playing a key role in making this project a success?
What other things are you involved in that could get in the way of you doing anything and everything possible to make our startup a success?
What can I do to help you have more time or enough time to make this an exciting and rewarding experience?
What a leader needs to get beyond with these questions are answers along the line of, “It’s my job to do my best for you.” You do not want your project to be just about doing a job. As we describing in our Motivating Others session and blogs, you want and need the people you work with to feel helping you has an important purpose.
You want to go beyond just building a sense of purpose to building a strong relationship with each member of your project team. These are important people, and you want to use your Relationship Building skills to build powerful relationships as described in the Powerful startup relationships require a mix of cooperation, competition and retreat blog post.
With a strong relationship built on many shared objectives, each shared objective is an additional motivation for the teammate to be motivated to see a critical or important project succeed. While you may have a good sense of many of your teammates work-based motivations (we assume you talk about them!), you may not have a good sense of their motivations to achieve certain things outside of work. It may be none of your business what your teammates do when not at work, but it is important that they have a sense that you care about them being as successful in their private life as in the work life.
Keeping Duck 2 aligned
People’s circumstances change. Be sensitive to your teammates that seem to struggle with keeping up with their work and deliverables. As soon as you notice a change, ask them what has changed. If they say “nothing” then press them on what you can do to get them remotivated to achieve at the level they had been. People’s personal lives can be a higher priority than work—and that is okay—but if that is the case then cooperatively move the person off the project team and bring on somebody with somewhat similar skills who is excited to be part of the team.