A Simple, Successful Motivation Story

A few years ago, I was managing a small team of very skilled software developers. As a group, the more experienced developers put together a list of books we felt would be beneficial for others on the team to read. Mostly these fell into the category of "I wish I'd read this book when I was just learning to program." This wasn't a terribly long list - maybe 20 titles in total - and we had a bookshelf in the office with all of these titles (multiple copies of most) and others.

We worked on a wide variety of projects, using many different platforms, tools, and technologies, so about once a quarter all of the developers would complete a simple self-assessment of which technologies they were proficient with. We added the list of books to this assessment as a simple "check the box if you've read this book" so that we could track progress and identify which books were really the most popular. One of my goals was to get as many of the developers to read as many of the "must read" books on the list as possible, since I honestly believed (and believe) this would improve their effectiveness as software developers.

Six months passed, and the difference in the number of books read during that period was unimpressive. I forget the details, but with about 15 developers maybe 3 books were checked off as having been read during this time. Doing the math, it seemed likely I would retire before a significant number of the team members would read a reasonable number of these books. We were also doing twice-a-year reviews of the team members, and some of them listed reading books as their personal goals, but that didn't seem to make much of a difference, either.

I prefer not to dictate policy to team members if I can avoid it; I find it much better to build consensus with like-minded professionals. That's not to say that as a leader you won't have to make hard decisions or tell people flat out what they need to do from time to time, but that's not my starting strategy. I brainstormed some ideas to try to motivate more team members to choose to read more of the books. I considered paying them. This is one of the more obvious motivational tactics. Maybe a $25 Amazon gift certificate if they finish a certain number of books in a period? Maybe a lottery for a prize, and each book read is worth an entry?

I discarded these ideas for a few reasons. First, it didn't seem right to me to pay employees to read books that the company had bought for them and that would ultimately provide a huge benefit to them. In addition, this would invariably put them into a position where they would be motivated to cheat in order to get the financial reward (much like splitting up sick time and paid time off motivates employees to lie about why they're not coming to the office). The Law of Unintended Consequences plays a big part in any incentive scheme - consider all of the behaviors your policies incent, not just the ones you hope to see.

Wanting to start with something small and easily adjusted, rather than creating a whole pay-for-reading program or anything more complex, I opted to simply post a leader board in the team room. On it were all of the developers' names and the total number of books from the "must read" list they had read, sorted most to least. I didn't make any big announcement or anything, I just stuck it to one of the white boards where it would be seen, and waited.

Reading List Team Leader Board

Jane Doe 9

John Doe 7

etc.

The response to the leader board was impressive. Within a couple of weeks, there were several penciled in "+1"s next to totals. By the end of the quarter when we updated our skill inventory sheet, the total number of books read was in the double digits. I made sure to keep the leader board updated, and although activity tapered off a bit after the first quarter, I continued to be impressed with how well this little bit of competition motivated the team.

Next time you're considering a motivation program to try to get your team or employees to do what you want them to do, think about whether there's a less expensive, simpler way to do it. If so, you might just try it. Experiments like this one are very cheap to put in place, and very low risk if they turn out to be ineffective.