Moving Motivators

What is it?

Moving Motivators is a practice to uncover what motivates your colleagues and yourself.

Moving motivators is a deck of 10 cards. Each card represents an intrinsic motivation: Curiosity, Acceptance, Power, Relatedness, Goal, Honor, Mastery, Freedom, Order, Status.

Why use it?

The practice helps you to understand different perspectives. Something very important for one person could be futile for another. Accepting that there is no good or bad is part of the game.

Steps

First, download and print the cards from the Management 3.0 website. You can also buy sets of cards if you prefer.

Once you have the cards, play the game alone. This is your training.

Sort the cards from left to right. The most important motivation factor is on the left; the less important is on the right.

Consider a change in your life and how this change affects your motivation factors. Move the card up if it is a positive effect and down if it is a negative effect.

You can try with different changes like:

  • Change job,
  • Change company,
  • Buy a car,
  • Learn to play a musical instrument,
  • Move to another city or country,
  • Meet old friends, make new ones, and so on.

Consider the transformation you would like your team to commit to and look at how it affects your motivators.

Bonus: Use the power of the game and play it with your team. Discuss what motivators are least or most important to each team member, and how they are affected by changes.

Further Information

Author

  • Alexis Monville

    Alexis Monville worked in multicultural and distributed environments for years, coming back from the US and now based in the southwest of France. When asked if he misses the work in the office, he usually answers that he spent half of his 30 years of management experience in diverse sectors outside of the office and a lot of that working from home. Alexis is Chief of Staff to the CTO at Red Hat, a long-time hybrid open-source software company with more than 100 office locations in 40 countries, where half of the 20,000 people work remotely. Alexis is a firm believer that change starts with the self. He is the author of two books: Changing Your Team From The Inside and I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge. Alexis facilitates successful playful collaborations. He designs and builds sustainable and high-impact teams and organizations.