Motivation for excellent work; can also be applied for team work

Today I was speaking to a group of excellent engineers in my group. I have immense respect for their many years of professional software development - architecture, design, execution, and results. I am delighted to have this opportunity to work with them. Interestingly enough each had a healthy desire to gain more mastery and depth in their area. There is slowly an interest in collaboration and how to do the same. I am excited about the possibilities ahead for the team.

I was reminded of this animated video presenting a summary of ideas from Daniel Pink's Drive book. Daniel Pink does a fantastic job of explaining the motivation for what drives us to be excellent. For long time I had been a fan of the purpose being essential for work to be done. Purpose, often derived from Vision, provides the focal point for us to drive and achieve results. And everyone desires to gain more independence (Pink calls it the autonomy) and more depth (Pink calls it mastery). I believe the same three motivations can be used for gaining more collaboration results in the work groups.

In a collaborative setting:

• Purpose - strengthen team delivery by working together.
• Mastery - we gain more depth by sharing, caring, and working together.
• Autonomy - besides operating individually, as a team the organization can gain next levels of autonomy as well. So the dependability on the team goes up over time. And such teams achieve repeat success.

A great recent example of team work is the recently concluded FIFA Worldcup Soccer semi-final match between Brazil and Germany. As written earlier in my Quora post, German team displayed fantastic team work and won spectacularly big. If we go back and watch past game plays from Germany there are many repeat examples of team work.