Show Notes
Morale: a topic that impacts every team. But how does morale influence organizational effectiveness? And what really makes a morale event impactful?
Through humorous banter and thoughtful discussion, Andy and Mon-Chaio offer actionable insights and challenge conventional wisdom. They share personal anecdotes, explore research-backed definitions, and tackle the complexities of boosting team morale effectively. Listen to their creative suggestions and real-world examples that might just redefine how you think about morale and team building.
References
- The Definition and Measurement of Employee Morale
- Morale: definitions, dimensions and measurement
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Transcript
Mon-Chaio: Welcome back, everybody. Andy, I’m happy to see your face again. We had some camera problems during setup and I was only seeing like the side of your ear, and I don’t know how well our discussion would have gone today if I could only see the side of your ear.
Andy: My second camera is not in the best location, I think. I’ve got my main camera, which is on my monitor, and my second camera that’s on my laptop sitting next to it. But my laptop monitor is at a strange angle, and so it’s pointing who knows where.
Mon-Chaio: And it’s funny because now we’ve been doing this for over a year now. We’re in September. So yes, over a year now and yet we still run into technical problems. Like this, when we record. Wasn’t it just a few episodes ago where we weren’t using the right microphone or something?
Andy: Yep, I had not noticed that I had the wrong microphone turned on, and oh, the time I spent trying to fix up that audio.
Mon-Chaio: During editing. I’m so glad that wasn’t my turn to edit, honestly. Alright, but we’re here today. Everything seems to be working. We have an interesting topic on tap, and it is about team morale. Now, why would we ever talk about team morale? And actually, Andy, I believe we’re more focused than just team morale, right? We’re focused on morale events, morale budgets And what are they good for? Why have them? Should you have a morale budget? If you do, what you use it for?
Andy: I should say that part of the idea for this episode came from taking part in a retrospective for a team and discussing that there seemed to be low morale. People were not feeling engaged. In fact, I would say one of the things that prompted this conversation was asking the question, ” how would it be better on this team?” and the answer was, well, let’s get rid of it. Let’s get rid of the product. And then we can go and work on something else.
And that was then interpreted as, oh, the morale is fairly low, which I think I would agree with. And then the question was, “what can we do about it?” And the answer was, “oh, let’s have a fun event. A fun event will help us on this.” I … and it could, and I was skeptical whether or not that was really what was going to help us on this. I think there were many other things which we’ll get into as we discuss what is morale and how does it work. But my initial skepticism was the prompt for this topic, because I thought, this can’t be true, can it? That just having a fun event will help morale on the team.
Mon-Chaio: It works everywhere else, doesn’t it? When your marriage is having problems, all you gotta do is take a two week vacation, right? Or when you’re feeling sad, just go play a game of badminton and you’ll be done, won’t you?
Andy: All right. All right. I hadn’t thought of it that way.
Mon-Chaio: Well, the other part of it, Andy, is I think when a team identifies itself as having a morale issue, that is one time in which you can talk about how to fix it and morale events may be one way to fix it and maybe fun events are at least part of the solution, maybe the whole solution. Interestingly enough, I would say almost every company I’ve worked in since the early- to mid-2010s has always had the concept of a morale budget.
Now this isn’t to fix morale, right? It’s not oh, you get this budget if your team has low morale or has identified low morale But it is something that’s built into the way that engineering groups – and not just engineering groups, but all groups in the company – function. They have a budget specifically for morale.
And so this isn’t a fix it type of thing, but for some reason companies feel like it’s important enough that they’re going to allocate money for it. And so I think it’s two different types of discussions that might converge. One is the definitely there’s a problem then spend money to fix it. The other is there is no problem but it’s important enough to maintain. And yet in either of those cases, do we really know what our end goal is and what we’re trying to achieve?
Andy: Mm
Mon-Chaio: Usually I like to start at the most specific. But maybe here we can start at the more generalized. So the question I think would be interesting for us to discuss would be, why do you think the majority of companies think it’s important to have a morale budget?
Andy: Ooo, why is it important to have a morale budget? Or is it, why is it important to have morale? I think it would be because they would say, well, we need a morale budget because you need to have high morale. Immediately we get into there’s high morale and there’s low morale. We have these ways of talking about morale and we say that you have to have high morale because I think we’re all fairly well attuned, to low morale is probably bad. We hear it in anything that talks about war where the morale of the army was too low and then they just couldn’t fight on and those kinds of things.
Which actually makes me wonder, do armies have morale budgets?
Mon-Chaio: Do you think they go bowling?
Andy: They might! I actually don’t know, I’ve never served in the armed forces in any way. Maybe they do this well. But, uh, so why do you have a morale budget? I think one way we could explain it is because it gives an easy, specific action for a larger organization. They’re like, look, there’s a big complicated problem. How are we going to solve it? We’ll make a budget for it because the underlying problems are really difficult and gnarly and might be very specific to an individual or a small group. And so you kind of know that you can’t solve the issue centrally, so in a way you’re trying to federate the problem by saying, oh, teams, departments, whatever, here’s a budget to do something. I think that’s probably why we have a budget, basically because we don’t know the solution. So what can we do?
Mon-Chaio: And that thought process can both be good or bad, right? One is pushing decision making down to the individual levels to fix a tough problem. That’s generally good. The other is abdication of responsibility that I talk about a lot. Which is, we don’t give you any guidelines, but here’s some money.
And since we gave you money, now you’re responsible and accountable for that. Which is bad. I would go on with the five whys. So the second why I would ask is: why is morale important in a company?
Andy: And this gets to the difficulties in even defining what morale is. And as I did the research for this for my side, what I discovered was that there’s not many clear definitions in research about what morale is and what impact it has and all sorts of other things. In fact, one thing I found said that it became so ambiguous that researchers stopped using the word and instead they started replacing it with other things that they could define more easily. And so they replaced it with things like job satisfaction or engagement or camaraderie, these individual components, with kind of the assumption that morale is just some sort of combination of those. And that’s what it is. And so, it gets to the next level of question. Why are those things important?
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: And there is repeated research on morale, or this collection of concepts that then they try to label morale, that morale actually is positively correlated with organizational effectiveness.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: To the extent that there was a piece of research, Mon-Chaio, that I found but I think I forgot to link it in our notes, where they were looking at, are there various mediators or moderators between morale and organizational effectiveness.
And they were finding that these other things were not moderators. It was almost like a direct connection.
Mon-Chaio: Wow, and that’s the strongest type. We like to see that when we read research papers. It’s less ambiguous.
Andy: And if you’ve ever played computer games like Total War Rome, one of the major things you need to keep track of on your soldiers as you’re moving them around on the battlefield is their morale. Because if morale gets too low, the soldiers break and they run and your whole line falls apart. You can’t hold your position anymore because no one’s really willing to take orders. They’re not willing to do that thing for the organization over themselves.
And that gets to one of the conceptualizations of what morale is, which is that willingness to put the needs of the individual a little bit lower than the needs of the group.
Mon-Chaio: Aha, we’re starting to get into that. Okay, okay! And I think, again in this case, research seems to fit well with our common understanding or anecdotal evidence of how we think about morale And so if we arrive at the fact that companies think high morale is important because it can organize a group of people.
And as we’ve talked about, the highest performing group often is not the sum of all of the highest performing individuals, right? And so that requires you to subsume a little bit of your individuality to fit the group. And if high morale is required for that, then it is important, and important enough to put money behind it, right? Money drives businesses. And so oftentimes you can follow their budget to figure out what’s important to them.
Andy: So this brings me to a definition that I think we can use to start exploring this even further, Mon-Chaio. And this is from a PhD dissertation that looked at 50 years of research into morale and basically said, no one has an agreed definition. So, like all good people, I’m going to come up with another definition.
Mon-Chaio: Of course!
Andy: I say that facetiously. I read most of his dissertation and I quite liked it. We’ll link it in the show notes.
But they came up with the definition of morale, and I’m not going to read the whole thing, but it’s basically morale is an affective mental state that has three dimensions: affective, future goal, and interpersonal. To clarify, affective means emotional, it’s about emotions. And it says morale is contagious between individuals, a very important thing get into. And that high morale is stimulated by things which engender positive affect, when these are combined with progress towards a desirable future coupled with agreeable social interactions. Low morale results from the stimulation of negative affect, a lack of goal or progress towards that goal, and aversive or non-existent social interactions.
And like, taking your team out for paintball, that is an attempt at getting an agreeable social interaction involved. But here’s the thing, it’s really the positive affect and progress towards desirable future that is, in some ways, actually core, I think. The agreeable social interactions we can get in other forms, and what you want is you want those agreeable social interactions connected to those affects and that progress towards a desirable future. Because if all of your positive social interactions are disconnected from that thing you do day to day, I would expect you’re probably not going to have a strong morale influence because you haven’t produced that strong positive affect connected to it.
Mon-Chaio: I think I might disagree with you a little bit here Andy. I think building positive social interactions, insofar that it can help your work relationships, then make the possibility of being goal-oriented or having positive affect stronger. So unless you’re saying – and I have heard people purport that they see this in their workplaces, I don’t see it as much – I’ve heard people say, look, I get along with all of my colleagues great at happy hour, but they’re just assholes at work.
Andy: Yeah. I’ve heard this before as well, and seen it a bit.
Mon-Chaio: And so maybe people have different social personalities versus work personalities, and this might get to your point that there needs to be a stronger connection between the event and what you do, but I don’t think that it has to, and maybe this isn’t what you’re saying, but I don’t think it has to be related, like, well, we can’t go bowling because It has nothing to do with work. And so why build relationships at a bowling center?
Andy: Yeah, that’s not quite as far as I’m going. I’m saying, don’t do that and expect that it by itself will improve the morale. You need to complete that causal chain.
Mon-Chaio: I agree with that. I agree with that. I think sometimes it’s difficult to complete the causal chain because cause and effect are difficult in these types of morale situations. But I do agree with that. And I will simply point out that I do think that that third part, positive relationships is really important. And so completing the first two parts while leaving out the third part, I think is also problematic
Andy: So I would say, yes, go ahead and do those team building activities, the nights out or the go karting, but use them as a way of promoting the relationships that already have a seed of being there because that will help them strengthen those relationships and those positive emotions that they can connect to something else. And now, the real difficult part is, now that you have that, having it by itself, it isn’t enough. You need to put it to use. And in my view, putting it to use means connecting it for people to that desirable future or that progress to that desirable future.
And I think this is where the ideas we’ve talked about before around involving people in decision making and storytelling, having a narrative about where it is you’re trying to go and why you’re trying to go there, all of that contributes to the morale.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: But if you just have people having fun, I think you’re leaving out the thing that actually gets you morale. It’s the thing to tie it all together to say, why are you here as a group?
Mon-Chaio: I agree with you. And it feels a little kitschy sometimes to say we’re going to go for our off site, often can be a morale event, which is the ropes course or paintball or whatever, but first we’re going to sit and we’re going to do quarterly planning or we’re going to talk about the big goals of our organization or we’re going to do a retrospective. And a lot of people look at that and say, what are we doing, right? You’re taking my morale budget and you’re renting a conference room at a beautiful place. And we’re sitting there talking about the things we did wrong or the strategy that like, I don’t even understand and don’t care about, uh, what am I doing? I just want to shoot some people with paintballs.
But I think what you’re saying is that is important. Maybe not that action, maybe not that way of executing that. Perhaps sitting in a conference room doing a retrospective is not great, but I think I do agree with you. How can you build in that future looking goal in your morale events, right? And maybe we can start to give some examples of that, because I do have problems with morale events a lot, and I feel like the majority of them are done actually quite poorly. I’ll give you an example. I think the last morale event I went to was a knife making event.
Andy: Ooh!
Mon-Chaio: There’s a forge in Seattle. They have these propane ovens, which are much, much smaller than I would have imagined, they’re really tiny. And so then you take this horseshoe, and they teach you how to cut off one end of it, bend it straight, and then make it into a knife.
It’s not a great knife, right? Anybody who knows a little bit about knife making knows that if you take an iron horseshoe and you pound it into a point,
Andy: It’s not exactly right kind of steel.
Mon-Chaio: Right and the blade will not last long and whatnot. So, but it’s fun, right? It’s fun. Uh, I’ve never been to a forge before.
And so the morale event was go to this forge place, make a knife, and then go out for pizza. Now, how did that end up working? I’ll talk about the mechanics of it. It was during the day, so everybody skipped work. So they all came from home. Everybody arrived at sort of different times. You get there, there’s a safety thing that you have to watch and listen to and sign waivers. People wait around while they’re waiting for their colleagues to get there. Where do they congregate? Well, you might imagine, they congregate with the two or three people that they work with every day. Of course we had invited product, we had invited design, and the other parts of a product organization. And product people kind of talk to product people, design people kind of talk to design people, right?
And so then it was time to make these knives. And so everybody has their own individual little anvil, and it’s about an hour and a half event where the instructor goes, stands up in front, shows you how to do it. You do it. They go back, stand in front, you do it. And there was some interaction. People sometimes had challenges and they would turn to their neighbor and they would say, is this how yours is going? Or they’d raise their hand to their instructor or maybe they’d stay silent. And at some point, everybody had a knife, and what happened then? They kind of gathered back into their two or three person groups.
And then it was time for pizza, right? And then half the people left. They’re not going for pizza, they’re going home. The other half go to pizza, they’re sitting down, it’s a long table, and people congregate in their little two to three person groups around the table, right? Long tables are challenging for conversations anyway, but you can section off this long table into two or three section groups, and that’s where conversations happen, and then people went home.
So let’s debug here. People all had a great time. The reason we went to this knife making place is at the company I was working at at the time, which was a large company, this knife making forge place had high recommendations from every group. ” You have to go there!” “It’s so much fun!” “It’s really great!”
Andy: Yeah. It sounds like fun.
Mon-Chaio: But how was that, Andy, from a morale building perspective?
Andy: From a morale building perspective, to me, it doesn’t sound like it did much of anything. It gave everyone a great experience and a great time out, but for building the morale of the group at the company, I doubt it did anything. In fact, it might have even been detrimental. And the reason I say it might have been detrimental is because it could have, going from this definition of what creates low morale – it could have stimulated negative affect in individuals in thinking like, oh, the cliques are here too.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: And it also could have caused people to sit there thinking like, oh my God, I’m under time pressure to get this stuff done, and I’m being asked to waste a day here, so I don’t see any progress towards that goal that I’m supposed to be working on, that everyone has told me is so important. And so it could be that that day actually produced lower morale rather than higher morale.
Mon-Chaio: Okay, Andy, so can we take this knife-making class and design it better? Is it that we’re saying we shouldn’t go to a forge like that? That’s not a great venue for a morale building event? Or can we say, yeah, that’s pretty good, people had fun, but what can we do to make it more concrete and to make it actually effective as a morale event?
Andy: So ways that I can think about it are to make it instead of the event is the knife making, to make it as the knife making is a way to break your mode of thought.
Mon-Chaio: Mhm. Mhm.
Andy: So if we take this idea that we’re looking for positive affect, we’re looking for progress towards a desirable future, and agreeable social interactions.
So the enjoyment, you’re going to get positive affect from saying like, hey, this is kind of something new and cool. But then I would use the knife making more as a break than the full thing. And instead I would combine it somehow with some sort of discussion about where are we? What are we trying to do? How have things been going? What can we do?
Let’s have an activity for a bit. Let’s mix up the groups to create different interactions. I wouldn’t do an individual activity. I think I’d try to figure out some way to make that more of a group activity.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: But not like a trust fall type thing, but actually try to do something together.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: And then I’d try to combine it with some sort of activity after. So something to go back to finding that purpose. And there’s various techniques for this kind of stuff. There’s things about coming up with what can the future look like, where have you been, and all of that. And that one, for instance, goes in three stages. And so you kind of need to break it up. So you could do the first stage, and then you could do your forging, and then you could do the second stage, and then you could do your pizza party, and then you could do the third stage. To try to bring it together where the fixing on the goal is now combined with the positive emotions.
So that’s kind of the way I would think about it. But even that on its own isn’t enough. Then you need to follow through. You need to make all of that talk turn into something real, and make it so that people actually believe it, going onto that narrative. Cause in some ways, almost what you’re doing, I think in many cases is you’re coming up with that shared narrative that everyone can tell each other that will feed on itself. And so you’re looking for the positive one, the one that increases morale rather than the negative one, the one where everyone’s like, well, yeah, we have no money, so we have no people, so we’re just under pressure and there’s no getting away from this because that’s what our customer demands all the time. So this is all just going to get worse. You want to find a way to change that story that they’re telling themselves because, as we said, morale is a contagion between individuals. So you kind of need to get the whole group moving into the same morale direction.
So that’s the way I would think about it, but Mon-Chaio, what would you do? Like, how would you change that around to have a stronger influence on morale, positively?
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, and I’m cheating here a little bit because I’ve obviously thought about this a little bit more. It is my situation that actually happened, and I was responsible for it. This was the morale event for my group that I delegated to somebody who was interested in running it. And this was the result, which wasn’t great, right? And so as a leader, you take responsibility for that. This was a few years ago, so I’ve done a lot of thinking around why and what.
And I think a lot of the points that you talked about are exactly the way that I would think about improving this event. I think not making the knife making the central thing, I think about it a little bit differently, but it is essentially that. I don’t mind making the knife making activity the thing, but the outcome that you want to get out of it, I would say shouldn’t be that I myself made a knife. That shouldn’t the goal. If that’s the goal, I think it doesn’t touch anything probably except the positive affect part of, look at me, I’m great, I made a knife. Right? The second thing I think a lot about with these morale events is, like you were saying around how morale is contagious, oftentimes within insular groups, there’s very little need to boost up the morale. Morale tends to be high in these two to three people groups already. And so going to an event and reinforcing that probably isn’t the best use of your time and dollars. I would say that inviting an external group …
So we were sort of a platform-type team and we had some product teams that depended on us. We also had this other platform team that was weird, they were sort of platform and they sort of worked on stuff that we did but they sort of didn’t, and we always had disagreements about who owned what. Inviting those teams into our morale event and actually splitting it up a little bit more. Because those are relationships that were important if the entire organization was going to accomplish its goal. Those relationships needed to be stronger. And so using the morale event as a way to build those social ties instead of reinforcing the cliquey social ties, I think, is something that would have been important.
I also like what you were saying around events before or after. I was thinking a pre-launch event before we went to the thing might have been a good thing where you start to break into these groups and you say, hey, the four of you or the six of you are going to make a knife. And it is these groups that aren’t already necessarily strong, but need to be strong in order for the business to accomplish their goal. And so you can sit down and you can say, well, every group gets an hour and you together, you’re going to sketch out what’s the best way. How are we going to build a knife faster and stronger than the other groups? Or you don’t have to make it a competition, but something that gives them a little bit of autonomy and forces them to work together. And then when you go to the knife making event, then they get to action that maybe they have built an assembly line. Maybe they figure out, Oh, well, the strongest person will end up doing all the pounding, and then the more facile person will end up doing the stretching or whatever, that problem solving aspect of it.
Andy: Mmm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: And so, I’m not sure that in this case, I would have necessarily talked about the business as a future. I think maybe a little bit. I’d like if you can build that in, but I think I would have used the pizza party as sort of a debrief about how things went. So maybe that’s a demo of like, hey, what were the interesting things that you all did as a group? Was it that you divided into assembly line? Was it that, you know, you staged it somehow? Was it, I don’t know what it is, right? Maybe a group of five has to make five knives. So how did you do it? Did you do all five at the same time? Did you do it sequentially, like, what did you do? So to be able to share some of those, but the one that I really do agree with you on also is, then what are you going to do?
Because at the end of that, you’re going to have high morale, hopefully, if you did your job, right now, how are you going to action that, right? You’ve put some work in, you put some money in, you have high morale, but it’s going to decrease over time because of entropy. So what can you do while you have high morale? Not as like a point solution of, I have high morale so I can work them to death for the next two weeks. Great! But what can you do with that high morale that raises the floor of morale? Is it a reorganization? Is it a redo of your strategy documents or your roadmaps? Now that people are more willing to share, can you exchange some things on your roadmaps? Can you build different AAA teams in order to make your floor higher and keep growing that floor every time you do these events?
So that’s kind of the way that I think about it.
Andy: And that brings up two different quotes from that dissertation that I want to pull in here because I think you’ve touched on at least one of them and the second one I think is related. So I should say a little bit about how that research was done. It was actually quite a bit of research.
They did basically a grounded theory qualitative research to come up with a theory of what is morale. And then they did quantitative research and all of this and came up with a measurement of morale and all of that. Out of the qualitative research, they said: ” the relationship between the individual and others appears to be an important factor in maintaining morale. Often in their descriptions of critical incidents, high morale individuals would mention that they got on well with the group and enjoyed their company. Similarly, In low morale, the respondents would point to fractured social relationships, particularly with their superiors.” So what you’re looking for there is you’re trying to build up a stronger social relationship network and remove as many of those fractures as you can. So your idea of pulling in the other teams, that’s where the fractured relationships probably are.
Because as you were saying, within their team, they probably have fairly good relationships. Maybe they don’t. Maybe that’s what you need to work on. But between the teams, that’s more likely to be somewhat fractured. And so getting that wider morale going seems quite beneficial.
The other one was, they actually had specific advice. When trying to raise morale, practitioners should concentrate on trying to support the individual’s sense of identity and self worth. It is important to note that this does not mean lying about bad news or glossing over a poor situation. Rather it means treating the workforce as the sentient responsible beings that the organization presumed that they were when hiring them.” And I, I highlighted it because I just loved that, I loved that, uh, that sentence. Sentient responsible beings. Yes. High morale comes from people feeling that they are sentient responsible beings.
Mon-Chaio: Yep! I mean, I think about autonomy a lot, but that goes way beyond autonomy. Autonomy is a big part of that. But yeah, and we talked about that in our hiring episode. You hire people based on this promise of them being sentient, responsible beings. And then you tell them, well, actually responsibility is tiny and please don’t come to me with problems.
Andy: Don’t come to me with problems. All you have to do is finish this ticket and when you’re done with that ticket, ask for the next ticket. And you better do it to the time frame that I decided.
Mon-Chaio: yeah. And, oh, and the minor things within the ticket, you can ask about, and so that gives you autonomy, right? Like, can I use a brace here? Yep, you see, you have autonomy. Don’t tell me you don’t have autonomy.
Um, one other thing for you, Andy. I’m curious as to your thoughts on this. I’ve seen this type of individual a lot. The archetype for this individual is more common than you might think, and I will explain the archetype. When we were proposing morale events, this individual said, well, I feel great. I have my thing to do. And as an aside, this individual argued a lot for what is something that they could be responsible for and ship, something that they could own. That was a big thing for them. Something I can own, I can ship, I can be the leader on, I can be the expert on.
So this was that type of individual. And so when we were talking to this individual about morale events this individual said, look, I don’t have any other real dependencies on other people. I have a few and I get along well with them. I feel like we should just spend my morale budget on like a branded water bottle or a fleece hoodie or something. That would make me really happy.
Does this person go against the definition of you need affect, you need strong relationships, and you needed a future? Or are they some sort of outlier? What are your thoughts on individuals like this?
Andy: I think that they are mistaking morale for happiness. Morale does not necessarily mean you’re happy. Doesn’t mean you’re unhappy.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: The positive affect actually sounds like that means happiness, but that’s not really what it means. And so I would say that’s what they’re mistaking. One is they’re mistaking that morale means that they’re happy. And it’s a slightly different thing. It’s connected, but it’s not the same. And then I think the other one is that they’re missing that morale is individual and group.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: That their actions impact the morale of the group around them and they’re trying to find a way of being independent of their surroundings.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: And unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way.
Mon-Chaio: Well, I was just about to ask you, is it possible if somebody wanted to design an organization, an effective, for some definition of effective, working organization, is it possible to design one where you can populate it with that type of archetype where everybody is basically independent?
Andy: I think you could do it. I mean, there’s nothing physically stopping you. I don’t think it would be a very effective organization for the most part. And I won’t even tie that to morale. I would tie it to Seven Habits for Highly Effective People. I use this quite a bit when actually I’m talking to very junior people because, quite often, if I’m talking to a junior developer, someone who’s just getting going, they sit there and they’re all caught up because they can’t do anything on their own and they think about, oh, I just need to get better and then I can do stuff on my own and then I’m good.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: And what they’re feeling is that they’re dependent on others. And what they believe is that the pinnacle of achievement is to become independent of others.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: Now, becoming independent is an important step because you’re no longer in this dependency relationship where you can’t do anything without someone else to assist you.
But if someone gets to that independent stage and believes they’ve hit the pinnacle, they’re now actually very limited and they’re limiting the group around them.
Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.
Andy: Because the next step after this is that they’re interdependent. And the interdependency is admitting that you can do more with others than you can on your own.
And so that’s kind of the mistake that that person is making. They’re making the mistake that the pinnacle of their ability is when they’re independent.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I agree. I think that if you somehow build an organization where everybody is independent and that is the pinnacle of the organization, I agree with you that it’s possible and likely not very effective. I think there’s research that talks about how collaborative organizations are generally more effective. So most organizations are not that. And then I think it’s very problematic when you have individuals within an organization, even if the organization is mostly independent. but has a small part that’s interdependent, then you’re going to start to get the clashes because as you were saying, morale is infectious. And so then you will get that infection going on and that will drain all the rest of the people. So I think that’s a really good diagnosis.
I feel good, Andy. We have strengthened our relationship, have we not?
Andy: I think, I think we have. We’ve shared some stories. There’s some positive emotions going on here.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. And it didn’t even require paintball or knife making.
Andy: Damn it! We should have worked that in somehow.
Mon-Chaio: And as for the future, I don’t know that we actually have another episode topic already in the queue. But that’s never stopped us before. We will have another episode next week. I hope you all have enjoyed this episode talking about morale, morale budgets. And honestly, a lot of the stuff we talk about may feel less actionable, right? Well, how do I build AAA organizations? I only have so much control over the way that I can shape my organization. Oh, I would love to implement your hiring strategies, but I have this HR-imposed or manager-imposed hiring rubric that I have to follow. These types of things.
Morale budgets and how you do morale, my guess is almost every leader who has one has a lot of autonomy around it. So think about the things that we’ve talked about and if you agree with them, action them and then let us know how it went. Did it go better for you than your previous morale events? If you disagree with us, we would also love to hear from you. Is it really just about an individual making a knife and having fun? Talk to us!
Andy: And I would love to hear, can you be even more creative with that morale budget and come up with things that aren’t the traditional event? Can you be more creative in what that budget is used for than just like going out and buying pizza?
Mon-Chaio: I really, really love that. I love these out of the box, creative solutions. Please think about it. If you have one, let us know. We want to hear about it. Maybe we’ll even have you on our podcast. You can present your idea to the world.
Andy and I also help individuals and companies work through these types of issues. So if you’re an individual, an individual leader, or you’re a company and you’re saying my morale events aren’t really going well, should I continue to have a morale budget? How do I set up something that actually increases morale? Also reach out to us. You can always get in touch with us at hosts@ttlpodcast.com. We read every message, we try to respond to every message, but we love hearing from people.
Okay, I think that’s it for today. Until next time, be kind and stay curious.
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