Q: What's the difference between a chicken and a pig?
A: In a bacon and egg breakfast, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
In psychological terms, involved team members observe failures, such as missed deadlines and unrealized goals, in a cerebral and detached way, as if from the outside. These folks offer great comments at post mortem meetings.
On the other hand, committed team members feel such failures as emotionally painful, and this spurs them to act pre mortem, often heroically, to prevent failures.
Various theories of psychodynamics postulate a mechanism, cathexis, to explain the committed individual's investment of their mental and emotional energy in playing an activist role in making their team successful.
A growing school of management theory, Servant-Leadership, suggests that, by persistently demonstrating selfless service to their colleagues in joint pursuit of the goals of their team, committed members can trigger cathexis in their merely involved co-workers. In other words, there are some Pigs who, magically, seem to be able to turn the Chickens around them into more Pigs. Let's call these inspirational players Superpigs, and, when it comes to getting things done, and done properly, theirs is, indeed, a very handy superpower.
So, on IT teams, there are always Chickens, sometimes Pigs, and, every now and then, Superpigs. Which begs these important questions:
- What can C-Suite executives and line managers do to support the Pigs in their organizations, and foster the emergence of Superpigs?
- What common managers' mistakes (inadvertent, of course) tend to demotivate Pigs and turn them into mere Chickens?
- What factors motivate the Pigs? How are a Superpig's motivations different?
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