#3: Learn How To Drive

Summer's over. Back to work!

Last spring I outlined two suggestions for how our industry can quickly go about improving the business of development. (If you'd like to refresh, check out them out: Get Naked and Unplug The Blender) My first two suggestions focused on how our industry tends to approach its management of client relationships on development projects. The reason I started there is that my own experience unequivocally shows that much of our industry’s anemic performance can be attributed to a general lack of capacity to manage client relationships effectively.

With this post I switch gears and focus on some important dynamics that our industry needs to get better at cultivating inside its project teams around the world in order to really get serious about achieving meaningful development results.

I decided the best way to start the discussion was to share an excerpt from an article in a leading Project Management Journal that I read this summer. The article analyzed the influence of cultural patterns on professional behaviors in Ethiopia. (click for link to the article)  The authors presented the table I've inserted below midway through the article to summarize their findings. 

Any of these sound familiar to you? ... Thought so. Do any of them sound unique to Africa? … Didn't think so. 

Development professionals are trained to see that every situation we encounter is unique. We've learned to account for cultural idiosyncrasies all around the world. We've figured out how to adapt ... we've embraced the need to acclimate. In fact, our industry has worked so hard to accommodate the cultural habits and associated behaviors of the developing world that it has become disconnected from the habits and behaviors that are now being practiced in the developing world. I think our industry has let the excuse of “its their culture” become a scapegoat for outdated, ineffective management practices and an inability to provide leadership to projects.

Of course, while vacuous generalizations can be fun to make, they typically aren't all that useful, so I'll be a little more specific. I think the most serious consequence of our industry's cultural and behavioral dysfunction is the negative impact it has on workforce motivation. To illuminate this point I'd like to draw upon the conceptual framework for motivation outlined in the book Drive, by Daniel Pink (Link to the Book's Homepage), because I've found Pink's framework explains my own experiences with management and leadership very well.

Pink argues that motivation levels are generally determined by a combination of four factors:

1. Money ~ Increasing someone’s wages is the best way to motivate them, until they achieve the threshold of a comfortable living wage. Once someone crosses this wage threshold, improvements in other factors have a bigger impact on motivation than further increases in wage.
2. Autonomy ~ People that are given some discretion in deciding how to approach their work - and where/when to do it - are more motivated than people who are micro-managed and policed.
3. Mastery ~ People that are afforded the opportunity to develop real competence and refinement in something are more motivated at work than people who find themselves doing the same thing, the same way, over and over.
4. Purpose ~ People that feel they are working towards a mission, or a higher calling are more motivated than people who simply feel they are exchanging time for a paycheck.

Does motivation really matter? Its a fair question, and Pink gives the best answer I've ever seen: Performance = Ability x Motivation (P = A x M). I like it because its a simple, yet powerful, way of showing that we need motivation to perform.  A good reminder that we can bring all the ability in the world to the table (e.g. A=100) but if we can’t motivate our teams (e.g. M=0) our industry will never truly perform (e.g. P=100x0, or P=0).

So how does our industry do in the context of Pink’s framework for motivation? Let's quickly go through the four part framework - one part at a time - and find out.

1. Money In my experience, development salaries tend towards the modest end of competitive. I have yet to encounter anyone in development that feels overpaid, but I’ve also never been in a situation where my staff or colleagues appeared unable to sustain a fairly comfortable standard of living.

In terms of motivating teams to perform it means that salaries are generally large enough to enable high levels of motivation, but they are not sufficient to motivate high levels of performance on their own. In order to motivate development teams we need to bring more to the table than money. In the context of Pink’s motivational framework, it means our industry needs to harness some motivational influence from other parts of the framework in order to really perform. 

2. Autonomy In my experience this is an area where our industry really tends to struggle. A major culprit is the fact that technical approaches to project work tend to be conceived through top-down processes that often fail to consider input from the staff or partners that are actually implementing the work. The practice has been institutionalized through the industry’s over-reliance on “experts” who typically feel accountable for their ideas, but not for results.  Development really suffers from a fallacy that good ideas somehow implement themselves. If you take a look at any service industry where results aren’t “optional” you’ll find a much more inclusive, bottom-up process for formulating approaches to work.

Our industry's capacity to provide its workforce with a motivating sense of self-direction is further limited by its devotion to the 20th century’s concept of “workplace.” Much of our industry - including the biggest bilateral donor out there - still believes that “working” is best defined as someone being in an office, sitting at a desk.  It is true that people who are not motivated are unlikely to show up to work, if given a the choice, but turning an office into a prison is a band-aid for symptoms, not a treatment of the underlying cause. Strict regimentation can provide the appearance of work happening (and we need to recognize that for much of the industry, that's enough) but it never addresses the real problem of nothing real ever being accomplished.

Our industry could take enormous strides in the direction of AID effectiveness by recognizing and embracing what’s been unfolding this past decade across the developed world. We have to migrate away from our old 'expert-oriented' management model and embrace an approach that emphasizes critical thinking in key leadership roles and assign management responsibilities to people that have been professionally trained to motivate people and teams to step up and deliver. I have lost count of how many clients I’ve had that were shocked to discover the biggest challenge leading a highly-motivated team is getting people to stop working at night and actually leave.

3. Mastery This is another area where we really tend to shortchange our workforce. I have been surprised to see how many development contractors still seem to be operating these days under the assumption that in order to survive they need to stay tethered to same things they’ve always done, the safe things that the industry already widely accepts and understands. What gets pitched as “innovation” turns out to be nothing more than re-mastered rhetoric, compressed deadlines and curtailed costs. 

What's the solution? There are a few things I think we can do fairly easily to better exploit the motivational potential of providing opportunities for mastery. One big thing is our proposal efforts should start focusing only on identifying management talent, not the entire project team, in the solicitation phase. Upon award, a new project’s management team should spend at least the first 8 to 12 weeks “ground-truthing” the proposed approach and framework, building out a staff and operational capacity, and establishing a well articulated plan for the first year’s implementation. We all have to keep in mind that each additional increment of time invested upfront in thinking, planning and organizing will enhance opportunities for mastery across the board, and in turn generate increasing dividends (i.e. more real development results) over the life of the project.

4. Purpose This is where development should be knocking it out of the park, but its another area where we're striking out! We tend to forget that in order to be truly motivating a purpose needs to be more than just meaningful; it needs to seem relevant and it has to feel achievable - we ignore the nuance of purpose to our peril.

In the development industry our sense of purpose is shaped largely by the way our teams perceive the things they are asked to do; whether or not they believe activities matter; and, the perceived likelihood of success. It is impossible to maintain the coherence required to sustain a project’s sense of purpose if a project's leader lacks the skill and/or courage necessary to communicate openly with stakeholder and clients. Once a project team finds itself spending most of its time on activities it knows will not lead to any meaningful results, or working against deadlines and/or expectations that it knows are impossible to meet, its sense of purpose will quickly deteriorate into cynicism. In fact, the best predictor of whether or not a team will feel a strong sense of purpose is the project’s capacity to build and maintain effective client relationships. Sound familiar? It's why I started out last spring with Get Naked and Unplug The Blender.

I am intrigued by the debate taking place these days between USAID and its implementing partners about the FORWARD initiative. It's interesting that nowhere in the discussion is the important role that international firms could and should be playing in terms of motivating project teams to step up and perform. I don't think the omission is an accident; I think the industry recognizes that, with few exceptions, genuine leadership is not an industry strength. For contractors like me this debate has some pretty serious implications - business is pretty slow! Putting self interest aside, I have to admit that given the kind of performance I've seen by our industry the last few years, I am sympathetic to the Agency's reluctance to continue to engage us in our traditional roles.

I do think we can tip the balance back in our favor if we recognize that the most valuable thing the developed world can bring to development at this point are solid behavioral examples of empowering management and courageous leadership. We can silence the critics by finding new ways to introduce opportunities for autonomy and mastery on our projects, and new ways to preserve each project team's sense of purpose.  Let's face it. If we can’t learn how to drive there’s really no reason for the donors to keep us around.

The Bottom Line

If you want to get serious about development results invest some real time and energy modernizing the way you staff, manage and motivate your people, especially your teams on the ground. If you treat your people like adults they’ll act like it ... as long as you also give them a couple good reasons besides their paychecks to care.