It’s not just software development that suffers from this morale crushing side effect. Sometimes it’s not a consciously bad decision, but events such as a senior manager taking holiday at a crucial part of a project do adversely effect the moral of a team. I’ve seen some shocking examples of this:
- An overheard conversation between two senior manager: “We’ll terminate one contract a week until morale improves” (this moral boosting tactic started and lead to the majority of contractors in the development team not renewing their contract)
- Being assured that a large insurance company was OK financially, despite a poor underwriting technique that didn’t look at the sudden rise in claims, to then find in the Sunday newspapers that the firm was technically insolvent
Whether it’s intentional, accidental or incompetence, reducing the moral of a development team will slow progress and possibly create such a bad atmosphere that it can never be recovered from without significant change of leadership.
So what motivates people? It’s not money, although this plays an important part, it’s:
- Respect - self respect and the respect of their peers and management
- Making a difference - having an influence in the progress of the company and more fundamentally being listened to
- Challenge - developers like the challenge of a new development environment (e.g. .NET from C++ and VB6) so it’s important that there is a roadmap for software development that provides this challenge
- Advancement - this won’t apply to everyone, so developers want to stay as developers and have no interest in management, but in both cases there needs to be a recognisable career path
- Money - if your team makes the company do well, shouldn’t they be rewarded?
- Security - most people need to know the next month’s pay cheque is safe. The events at the insurance company I mention above causes a long queue at the fax machine on Monday morning. Having been lied to and not knowing how secure their job was caused most people to abandon work and look for another job
- Work environment - we’ll cover this in a later classic mistake, but suffice to say smart calm environments are productive. Dirty and noisy environment aren’t
Style of leadership makes all the difference to morale:
- Understand individual team members - knowing what motivates different team members is vital in having a productive team, make sure you cater for all the team’s needs
- Celebrate success and learn from failure - I talked about this a lot on this blog, so, so important
- Give praise - organisations where senior management only appear when there’s a problem will never have fully motivated staff. A long lunch after a successful software launch does so much to strengthen relationships and build morale
- Be visible - during good times and bad, but be aware that your reactions and expressions in public have a direct effect
- Stay positive - leaving a successful meeting with a glum face can send all the wrong messages, an a positive view in a storm gives hope to your team, but never manipulate this to give a false impression
- Generate enthusiasm - enthusiastic teams are generally productive and resourceful, they will try to find better ways of doing things and much more likely to produce better quality work
- Lead from the front - in good times and bad show that you have control
- Set goals and achieve them - this is so important for the advancement and challenge aspects of your team’s motivation. Don’t pay lip service to goals, they are a powerful tool, make sure they are well known in your team and company and that you frequently measure progress towards them and make decisions that assist in their realisation
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