In the first part of this article on motivation and innovation for software development leaders, I talked about what motivation is, how your working environment can affect your motivation, and how to get into the zone whilst working.  In this 2^nd  part of the article I want to discuss some of Edmond Laus’ Strategies for finding meaning in your work from his blog post, “What research on happiness and motivation can tell us about finding meaning in our work.”, and how Me and My team have applied some of these strategies.

Strategies for Finding Meaning In Your Work

In Edmond’s his article he proposes 5 strategies for finding meaning in your work. I want to list them here with my own thoughts, but please check out his article to get his own thoughts on them.

Validate new ideas early and often with simple proofs of concept

This strategy really speaks for itself. Before investing a large amount of effort into something that may not work out, you should try out a proof of concept first. Generally a proof of concept will be a throw away piece of code just to prove whether a theory will work or not. When my team write proof of concepts, they don’t even bother writing unit tests for them, as the code is never destined to be production code. You can even take this POC idea further by following some of the Lean Startup ideas and produce a larger working mock-up of a system, or a minimum viable product as described in the book.

The Lean Startup – Eric Ries

We tried this in my team. We had a project that our debt recovery department wanted to initiate, which is a self-service portal on the web to allow customers who are already in debt to make a payment online, and therefore avoiding a difficult conversation with our debt collectors over the phone. The idea made a lot of sense, but before investing a large amount of money in building the portal, we did a lean start-up style set of experiments to test the theory against a minimum viable product.

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In this series of articles I want to discuss some topics for software development leaders around motivation, innovation, and the different leadership styles you can use to support your team.  When you are leading a team of software developers, or indeed any knowledge workers, you need to keep them motivated to continue getting the best out of them. There are many ways to do this, and they don’t always involve paying people more money. In the rest of these articles I am going to discuss some thoughts on motivating developers.

Motivating Developers

When I started planning this series, I was mainly going to cover how to get the developers in your team to innovate in a safe and controlled way. Then I came across an article called “What research on happiness and motivation can tell us about finding meaning in our work.” By Edmond Lau.

Motivation – Getting in the Zone

It is a really good article and I want to pick up on a few points and discuss them further. There are many different ways to get someone motivated, but by far the biggest for a knowledge worker is to give them meaningful and challenging work.

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