Recently an acquaintance was asking me what he could do to make sure that his team members were more "engaged". He felt that they lacked enthusiasm or motivation for their task. As the team leader, he wondered if there was something he should be doing to his management style to make them happier or more satisfied.
My response was that he should first look at the task they are doing.
When I was in junior high school, one of my favorite books was "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams. One of the characters is a robot named Marvin, who is absolutely brilliant but generally quite depressed. Marvin is repeatedly asked to do menial tasks (because that is what robots are for after all), and as he trudges off to complete the menial task he mutters "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me if I can (insert menial task here)".
Well, we often do this same thing to our employees without realizing it.
Many years ago, Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham came up with what they called the Job Characteristics Model. They posited that employee motivation would be based upon the task(s) that employees are being asked to perform. Their model statest that motivation increases when employees are given a "meaningful" task (meaning that it requires a variety of skills, the task is significant in some way, and it has a specific identity), which is then combined with autonomy to perform the task in way the employee decides, and followed up with regular, specific feedback about task performance.
This model can be found in almost any organizational behavior textbook. But we often fail to take it into account when we design teams/tasks or when we look for ways to increase "engagement".
Designing teams and tasks properly takes work. More work than most of us ever want to do. Our business environments push us to start accomplishing things yesterday, we don't have time to do things properly just start doing them. However we often forget that teams are a technology that we have borrowed from sports and the military, and those two industries know that to have a high performing team you need to spend time with it, redesigning the team, working with the individuals, running it through simulations. Practicing managers don't have that amount of time to invest into a team before they get results. However, as a team leader, you need to find at least some of that time to think about how the team and the team members should approach the task at hand, in order to keep everyone's engagement levels up.
So stop thinking so much about your "management style" and focus on the task!
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