My clients spend an inordinate amount of time wondering how to motivate their teams when such simple answers sit right in front of them–and cost nothing.
Approaches to this abound, and I’ll focus on one of my favorites here: Free Motivation in Five Minutes
John Gottman’s research shows that healthy, satisfying relationships are characterized by ratios of at least 5 positive interactions to every 1 negative interaction. This is key to motivation.
I’ve written a lot about feedback, but as Gottman’s research highlights, feedback doesn’t mean criticism.
It just means giving people visibility into their actions and the impacts of those actions.
Think about a relationship you value: what’s the ratio of appreciation to critique?
For every time you ask them to do something different, how many moments are there where you are just expressing gratitude for something they have done?
Free Motivation in Five Minutes: Impact Shares
One of the simplest and most fun ways of getting the feedback flywheel going is an appreciation exercise called Impact Shares. We’ve done this exercise with teams in less than 5 minutes and, as one engineer put it, “It felt like opening presents on Christmas morning.” (So apparently feedback can feel like a gift!).
Here are the instructions we give:
In 2 minutes, write as many impact shares for colleagues in the room as you can
Use the format:
[Their name] When you did X, then it had Y impact. Be as specific as possible.
It can be for anything they’ve done recently that you appreciated, including in this meeting.
Rapid fire, ask each person to share aloud what they wrote or, if it’s a much larger group, paste them in Slack/Teams or the Zoom chat and give a minute to read them.
Debrief: Ask, “What’s coming up for you as you read through them? How do you feel?”
The impact of 5 minutes of impact shares can be extraordinary: in one study of fundraisers by Adam Grant, a 5-minute interaction with a recipient of past fundraising efforts increased funds raised the following week between 171% and 406%. Yes, you read those figures right.
Thank you for…
This is free motivation and positive reinforcement rolled into one, and if 5 minutes is too much some days, here’s another simple practice to increase the frequency and impact of appreciation:
Each time you say “thank you,” just add “thank you for…” and fill in the blank with their action and the impact it had.
Creating structured moments for sharing feedback can radically increase the frequency and flow across teams and hierarchies. Structures also decrease the need for courage to give difficult feedback and make it a matter of course, as much a job expectation as writing code for an engineer.