Today I was in a coaching call with a high achieving senior project manager who I’m mentoring. She wanted to talk about the “messy interpersonal stuff,” specifically how to help one of her high-performance project teams stay that way. So we talked a bit about motivational theory. One of the pioneers in that area was organizational psychologist Dr. Frederick Herzberg, who over 50 years ago studied what motivates workers on their jobs.
Over the ensuring years Herzberg’s work fell out of visibility among business leaders, but his basic principles have stood the test of time and have been rediscovered by a new generation. (See Daniel Pink’s TED talk on the puzzle of motivation.) Phrased in a way that Herzberg might have appreciated, people get AMP’ed up about their work when it has these characteristics.
- A – they have autonomy in how to define or do the work
- M – they can develop mastery, such as learning new skills
- P – they see its contribution to a larger purpose
But there is something missing. We humans are social people. We prefer to travel in groups instead of alone. Being able to connect with others in a positive, personal way is a big motivator for most of us. Social connection is as important at work as it is in other parts of our lives, and this has become especially apparent during the Zoom calls and work-from-home adventures of the COVID pandemic. So add a new letter to the beginning of AMP:
- C – they are connected to other people
Leaders arrange work and teams so that they connect people to each other in meaningful ways. Use the CAMP acronym to help you motivate your team. CAMP may be an unwieldy, but adding the C is especially important during these strange and disconnected times.