HRpedia: 'The Three Ms'
A short but brilliant engagement strategy, from a Harvard Business ProfessorThe Three Ms, n.
Looking for an easy way to talk about – and/or influence – engagement? You could do worse than take a look at Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s magical, majestic and modest strategy of the Three Ms.
No, it’s nothing to do with 3M, the multinational conglomerate, or M&Ms, the sweeties, or Eminem, the rapper, or the M3, which takes you to Hampshire from Surrey and back again.
Instead, it’s a fantastically succinct iteration of what motivates people and encourages productivity. Perfect for trotting out at meetings when someone asks you to explain – in a nutshell – how engagement actually works.
Writing on the Harvard Business Review blog, Kanter spells out her Ms thus:
Mastery: Help people develop deep skills. Stretch goals show faith that people can shape the future rather than being victimised by it, and find pride in constant learning. Even in the most seemingly routine areas, when people are given difficult problems to tackle, with appropriate tools and support, they can do things faster, smarter, and better.
Membership: Create community by honouring individuality. Community solidarity comes from allowing the whole person to surface, which means going beyond superficial conformity to know what else people care about. Encourage employees to bring outside interests to work. Given them frequent opportunities to meet people across the organisation to help them get to know one another more deeply.
Meaning: Repeat and reinforce a larger purpose. Emphasise the positive impact of the work they do. Clarity about how your products or services can improve the world provides guideposts for employees’ priorities and decisions. As part of the daily conversation, mission and purpose can make even mundane tasks a means to a larger end.
There’s a nice bit in the blog where Kanter suggests if you get these three Ms right then the fourth M –Money – will matter to your people far less.
Of course, the thoughts here aren’t earth-shatteringly original. (I still like to trot out the mantra of ‘worthwhile work’, aka ‘larger purpose’, that I learnt from Ken Blanchard’s Gung Ho! back in the nineties.) But it works extremely elegantly as a framework, particularly for those of us who like their lists alliterative and therefore reasonably memorable.
Used in practice:
‘In terms of people strategy, ladies and gentlemen, we have a choice of 3Ms. It’s either Mastery, Membership and Meaning, or it’s Moaning, Malingering and Embolisms. Board, the choice is yours.’
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