building morale through extraordinary moments
A useful approach to building morale comes from Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments. The core argument of the book is that we should devote time and attention to creating the most powerful individual moments we can because those moments are where people anchor their rating and memory of an experience.
To illustrate, imagine going to Disney World with your family. Let's say on this trip, there’s an alarm that goes off every half hour. When the alarm sounds, you are prompted to rate the experience you’re having, right that moment, on a scale of one to 10.
Your 30-min ratings will be all over the map. In different moments, you'll be waiting in long lines, you'll be listening to kids whine, you'll be just getting off Space Mountain, you'll be eating something delicious and decadent.
When you leave that day, one thing that is guaranteed is that if you were to rate your overall day on a scale of one to 10, it will not correlate with the average of all those other numbers.
Instead, your overall rating of the experience (and the core memory of it that you carry forward and relay to others), will depend much more on the density of really high experiences or really low experiences that you had. Memorable outlier moments, good or bad, dominate your assessment of the whole.
Well-intentioned leaders often wonder (and worry) about how their people are feeling about their jobs overall. Their people may be doing good work regularly, have solid (or even excellent) compensation and benefits, and team up with colleagues who are similarly proficient. Yet you have a sense that morale, person by person, could be better. You worry you and the job and the organization would get a mild 3-star rating or worse from your people.
The Power of Moments suggests that leaders in this spot should look at the calendars of their people and at the time they spend with those people 1:1 with two goals:
Prepare highs: Identify opportunities to build special, powerful, memorable moments
Preclude lows: Address super low points by talking through unresolved ones from the past and mitigating future ones.
The high moment need not be exceptionally expensive or time-consuming. According to the brothers Heath, it should be something that inspires pride, triggers connection, opens insight, and elevates the participants beyond the day to day grind. (They give lots of examples and advice for each of these aspects).
Many leaders discount how mighty (and efficient) a sincere and personalized dose of their own praise can be. That precise praise may be all you need to create a magic moment that lifts someone’s morale and redefines their rating of the entire experience with you and your team.
-Ben
