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What ‘nose digging’ teaches us about our team engagement

PURPOSE

It’s almost always a ‘calling’. A compelling one. An enjoyable one. No matter what you are doing, in meetings, while driving, or on your desktop responding to an important mail, the tendency is to respond to that call readily & immediately. There is an un-explainable nobility to it.
Is it true for your team and their work? In what ways can you create that compelling calling? What components of their work gives them energy to get up from their beds? What proportion of their work is aligned to their natural traits, values and beliefs?  It’s a great idea to have conversations with your team members on this note, once in a while, different from performance conversations.
 

AUTONOMY

 
The sole decision maker – you! You decide the depth, the stress, the angle and the strokes.
 
Who decides your team’s work and how it has to be done? The more you let them take a call, and decide their course of action, better engaged they are going to be. As a leader it is an art to let your team feel as if they are in control, though you are getting the business/organizational priorities through them.
 

MASTERY

 
You feel like a master. You’ve done it many times. You know your contours and textures well, you know the process – find, pick and dispose, with finesse.
None of us like to feel incompetent in our work. We all would like to feel like masters. And so does your team. What efforts are you taking to ensure that your team members are competent and experts at what they do? Yes. You heard me right – this is certainly in your scope of responsibility.

So, it is the PAM – Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery that is going to keep your team intrinsically motivated. It’s such a familiar concept, and we have always demonstrated it through our many every-day habits and actions – nose digging is one of them. It’s just a matter of conscious effort to translate into other areas of our life and to into our teams!

All the best!

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 18, 2018 at 10:54 PM

    Hi Naveen!

    Quite a hilarious and informative take on a common practice we all indulge in.

    ReplyDelete

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