Moving Motivators

Jurgen Appelo and its Management 3.0 help teams to better work together.

Since few months, I like to play the Moving Motivators with my colleagues and team members and they like it too. So let me share it today.

Need to make a decision but are unsure about the effects on your motivation? Want to know what motivates your colleagues? Hiring a new team member and need to know what makes her tick? It’s time to play Moving Motivators!

Discover the steps

Let’s be clear, don’t focus on the tool. This practice is a support for discussion. It helps people to understand and reveal in 3 steps:

  1. How they prioritize their intrinsic motivators
  2. See where these motivators are maximized (Up) / neutral / reduced (Down) within the current environment
  3. How can these motivators will evolve for a proposed environment change

I use to do it in 20-30 min sessions. And because the first 2 steps could create some big Ah Ah, I usually propose to do the 3rd step later on (when a concrete change is proposed to her).

Lead by transparency

In order to see the beauty of this exercise (even for your personal knowledge), let me share 2 snapshots of my own moving motivators. Please note that I prefer to sort importance from left (most important) to right (less important).

4 April 2016 – current situation (=step 2 of the exercise)



10 Sept 2016 – current situation (=step 2 of the exercise). To make it clear that I have no Down motivators at this time, the middle is represented with the deck box on the left.

From 1o1 to Team practice

While I more focused today in using it in 1o1 discussion to help people to know where they are, I will soon introduce it during Team Meetings to maximize trust and understanding in working together.

Let’s rock

Spread the practice to your teams and review the Moving Motivators homepagedownload your cards for free and print yourself, order a deck from Management 3.0 and/or search for practices usages on twitter.

And if a limited scale is not for you, try this modification from initial rules.

For any question or reaction please comment.

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