Question: After three years of downsizing and cost cutting, how do I motivate my management team and build a high-performance organization?

Our advice: Let's address the effects of downsizing and cost cutting within a context of motivation and team building, since the principles behind motivating and team building are constant, while the issues affecting them vary with circumstances.

Motivation
Motivation is an inner drive that causes a person to behave in a way that leads to the accomplishment of goals, whether personal or organizational. All action comes from motivation. Motivation within any given situation is dynamic and complex: what motivates some or all team members once may not another time; and needs that are satisfied no longer motivate.

With the recent history of cost cutting and downsizing, a leader should look for re-emergent employee needs in the areas of workload relief, compensation, job security, and helpfulness toward coworkers. Focus on satisfying these fundamental needs first. Until these are met, most employees aren't concerned with higher-level motivators such as empowerment, group membership, creative work, planning, and advancement opportunities.

Designing IT jobs with built-in motivators for today's environment would therefore include factors such as:

• Direct feedback that is prompt, objective, constructive and actionable
  
  
• New learning and skills that are valued by the employee for his growth or security
  
  
• Efficient work processes and scheduling to alleviate deadline pressures
  
  
• Control over scarce resources, i.e., mini-budgets
  
  
• Open communications to counter the rumor mill
  
  
• Accountability
  
  
• Elimination of unnecessary threats and punishments
  
  
• Tasks and group missions that are related to both personal and organizational goals, and that pay off in results
  
  
• High levels of trust, respect, and encouragement
  
  
• Recognition of accomplishments and
  
  
• Re-matching people to jobs based on the new vision and direction.

Consultants and other outside arbitrators are often better positioned to analyze the situation because of their expertise and nonthreatening posture. They can help in each phase of the motivation process, from identifying relevant needs and creating drivers to training managers. Success in motivating team members leads to improved productivity, better product quality, higher morale, and overall organizational success.

Team Building
Team building focuses on helping a group of people achieve a common goal that is higher and more complex than an individual can achieve alone.

Once a team has been formed and its roles and relationships identified, the stages of team building are:

• Clarifying team goals
  
  
• Identifying issues that inhibit the team from reaching those goals
  
  
• Addressing those issues, removing inhibitors and enabling the goals to be achieved

Some characteristics of good teams and team-building are:

• A high level of interdependence among team members
  
  
• Willingness to contribute
  
  
• A relaxed communication climate
  
  
• Mutual trust
  
  
• Risk-taking
  
  
• Clear goals and targets
  
  
• Clearly defined roles
  
  
• The ability to examine errors without personal attacks
  
  
• Creative problem-solving and ideas, and
  
  
• An individual impact on the team agenda and decisions.

IT managers can be poor at delegating responsibility, which doesn't empower their teams. To be more successful, the IT manager should practice his or her people skills and be committed to the team approach.

Well-built teams are capable of remarkable results that can exceed previous levels of achievement. Witness the team of 4,000 engineers who created and launched the space shuttle, which can take us into space and back!

-- Peter Taglia