At the latest AgileØresund meeting we had the usual mix of new and old people representing both devs/techleads and project managers. I (again) wanted to talk about team morale. Being a consultant I get to move between company cultures quite often, which allows me to more easily see and experience differences among them. Having worked for some of the larger traditional companies in Sweden, this is a most fascinating aspect. It is fun to reason about how the company culture has been devised and/or emerged, and what the logic behind it is - what must have been the benefits the leaders saw when promoting some values inside the organization? Morale in a team comes both from the context - from "upwards" if you like - and from within the team. A team needs a vision in order to believe in the work they do. If you do not think that the work you do will matter to anyone at all, then you are not likely to invest heavily in the work. From within the team, a breach of morale will spread: If someone looses faith in the project, that may spread and will at the least affect the others.

I think there is a junction where these things meet; how we express our faith and passion can become a heuristic that is then expected - a mindless rule that the team has to work overtime at some point, that the team has to do this and that. (Well, blindly following rules is almost never good, nothing new there.) This junction is basically where acting and appearances are more important than actual results. Acting and appearances are naturally very important, but are not directly related to the results.

Anyway, Chris mentioned this post from Kathy Sierra (I don't read her blog regularly anymore myself) that talks about the target of passion - company or work. I really see a connection to her post.