Key Principle: Motivate Teams Through Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

ABOUT THIS CHAPTER   Agile organizations find an interplay between Agile team structure and team culture. The shift to self-managing teams requires a shift in team culture that complements and supports the teams’ ability to self-manage.

This chapter describes team-level elements of Agile culture. The “More Effective Agile Organizational Culture” chapter later in the course provides further perspective on Agile culture at the organizational level.

Most productivity studies have found that productivity depends more on motivation than any other factor (Boehm, 1981). For software development work, the only kind of motivation that matters is internal motivation. A company is essentially renting space in people’s brains, paying its employees to think about what they want them to think about. External motivation doesn’t work because you can’t compel someone to think about something; you can only set up the circumstances in which they will think about your problem because they want to.

In his 2009 book, Drive, Daniel Pink proposed a theory of internal motivation based on the factors of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Pink’s motivation theory dovetails with the support that Agile teams need to be effective.

Autonomy

“Autonomy” refers to the ability to direct your own life and work—what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with. Autonomy is related to trust. If a person believes their organization doesn’t trust them to make decisions, they won’t believe they have real autonomy. The work you do to develop cross-functional Agile teams with the ability and authority to make their own decisions also supports their sense of Autonomy.

Mastery

“Mastery” refers to the desire to learn and improve. It is not the idea of reaching a defined standard of competence but the idea of constantly getting better. This is especially important for technical staff. As I pointed out many years ago in my book Rapid Development (McConnell, 1996), the opportunity for growth has been found to be a stronger motivator for developers than advancement, recognition, salary, status, level of responsibility, and other factors that you might assume matter more. Agile’s focus on learning from experience will support your teams’ sense of Mastery.