Upping morale: Whose job is it?

One of my clients forced me into a conversation on the theory. After I started repeating myself, he bought me another beer. "So," he said, "this sounds like a decent idea. But you only mentioned goal alignment as a usable tool. Is morale all my fault?"

I looked him as squarely in the eye as I could manage. "No. It's more complicated than that."

"Why did I know you were going to say that?" He ordered up another round, and we started chatting.

A failure of thought
We first have to accept that morale is a process, not a set of unconnected actions. No single action or set of actions can create team morale. You cannot send your team to a motivational speaker or run though a bunch of teaming exercises to create great team spirit. Worse, at least from a management point of view, actions and games capable of helping one particular team could end up crushing another's morale.

In reality, morale's elements build and disperse over a period of time due to the dynamic application of social and work pressures. If the quick fixes favored by modern speakers simply cannot work, what does?

Not enough time
Logically we should look to mechanisms involving incremental changes for possible solutions. The hundreds of techniques involving incremental change all share one common element: a constant investment of hours over a long period of time.

Of course, the curse, cure, and source of responsibility is time, one of the most limited commodities in modern business. For all of our talk of productivity gains, people are working harder, longer, and in a less-personal fashion than ever before. Worse, we all know that the moment we express interest in something or spend some time on it, that thing becomes our responsibility in the business.

In terms of morale, therefore, each team member assumes responsibility for his interactions with the team, his role within it, and the social network surrounding that role. We, as managers, accept responsibility for establishing common goals and monitoring/mentoring the team unification process.

Let's discuss the first two elementsââ,¬"enthusiasm and dedication.

Responsibility for enthusiasm
It is easy to say, "Enthusiasm comes from working toward a personal goal." However, this self-evident statement only encompasses a small portion of the motivational arsenal and says nothing about whom should wield it.

The creation of job enthusiasm comes from three basic sources: interactions with coworkers, the relationship between personal achievement and job goal achievement, and enjoyment of the type of work involved.

As managers, we can affect all three elements indirectly, but the individual team member obviously invests more time in them. If he does not, then he probably needs mentoring in basic personal skills. Our indirect influence can assist our team members toward a positive dynamic, but they have to invest the time to both create and sustain the system.

In the first and third elementsââ,¬"interactions with coworkers and enjoyment of workââ,¬"we can mentor employees or engage in guided discussions, but cannot effect massive change on the skills they bring to the table already. Many of them learned their social and personal coping skills in their early childhoods; we cannot expect to make radical changes to those skills.