In coaching and consulting teams, people usually want to know

How to motivate the team? How can I stay motivated?

The quick answer is that you cannot motivate people and teams. You can adjust the system they work within, meaning the environment, work itself, rewards and tasks, management, etc. By changing the work system, you will adjust the behaviors and, hopefully, increase motivation.

You will ascribe value to the areas of the work you find relevant and be motivated to do more of that stuff. The parts of the work you find to be irrelevant you may still do. And will eventually try to stop doing because they are of little value to you – causing un-motivation.

The Relevance Enneagram Process may be helpful.

• It starts with looking at what you value about the work.
• Then moving to the team.

What is relevant to the team? How can we align team members’ values with the relevancy and valued output from the team?

Below are some questions to discuss. The responses you gather are the system-that-drives motivation from the team.

1:4:7 Relevant to Team

Definition of Relevance: Something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the likelihood of accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T. (Hjørland & Sejer Christensen, 2002).

1 = What is relevant to people on the team?

1: Explain & explore the skill sets and why each person was chosen to be on this team.

• What about this team project (task, goal, etc.) is relevant to people on the team? Why are they on the team? Why now?
• What is the goal this team is tasked to achieve?
• What are the goals of the individuals on this team?
• What challenges does the team leader have? What challenges does the team leaders manager have?
• What are the shared values of the people on the team?

4 = How is it relevant to people on the team?

3: What is in it for them? How will each person be able to know and engage with the team goal?

• Who will benefit from the success of the team?
• How will they benefit?
• What is the feedback process for performance & underperformance?
• How can the team ensure that each person has tasks that are of value to them?

7 = Application to tasks (team).

7: Implementation – getting work done;

• What is successful in keeping the work relevant to the team and people when working on teams?
• If you arrived tomorrow and, unknown to you, everyone on the team found this project personally very relevant, what would you notice was being done? What else?
• What is the 1st step the team can take to quantify the relevance of this project?