EDSO

Subject

Leadership

Participants

Managers, Stakeholders, Product Owners, Agile Coaches, HR department, board members and every person who has a leadership role

Facilitator

Agile Coach / Agile Master

Unknown author, licensed under CC BY.​

Summary

EDSO stands for the four hormones of happiness: endorphin, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. If you know how these hormons work and get triggered you can use this knowledge to enable your team.

Definition

The abbreviation EDSO stands for the initial letters of the four human hormones:
endorphin, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin.
Endorphin masks physical pain. Athletes and runners in particular are familiar with this hormone. The euphoria that grips many athletes during or after a hard workout is actually the chemical substance endorphin that rushes through our bloodstream. That drives runners on.
Dopamine is what makes us happy after doing something that had to be done. A feeling of satisfaction is responsible when we have mastered a task, completed a project or achieved a certain goal. Dopamine directs us to a goal-oriented progress.
These goals must be achievable. It is often helpful to have a clear goal rather than vague instructions. It is therefore very important that a company's future vision is something that can be concretely imagined. It is also called "vision", which means you should be able to see it. A correctly formulated vision specifically explains what the world can look like after we've done everything right.
Serotonin is known as the leader's hormone. As social beings, we all need recognition. It matters. We all want to feel that we have value when we work for the well-being of others or a team. We want to feel that we and the work we do are valued by others, especially by other members of a group. Serotonin is what makes it impossible for people to be responsible for numbers. You can only take and feel responsibility towards other people. The more we give of ourselves to make others successful, the greater our value and respect within the group we pertain to.
Oxytocin is people's favorite hormone. Thanks to oxytocin, we show compassion, generosity and build solid relationships and friendships. Oxytocin is what causes us to form human bonds and act socially. Oxytocin is the basic building block of a trusting relationship with other people.

Motivation

If you want to build a strong corporate culture, you have to create an environment of security in which people can communicate with each other in a valuable way. This ensures that we can build the trust on which effective cooperation is based. If people work in an organization where the executives tell them the truth, in which layoffs in difficult times are not the norm and in which the bonus systems do not incite employees against each other, then thanks to the high oxytocin and serotonin levels, trust and happiness arise and cooperation is encouraged.

Results

A manager who understands how to make employees happy and knows how to motivate them

Benefit

To get a high performing and committed team it is all about motivation. Often it's the small things, that make people happy and applying this method you have a tool to do so.

Procedure

The agile coach organizes a 4-hour workshop with the respective managers, in which he/she briefly describes the EDSO hormone scheme. Afterwards, the participants are organized in small groups and are given the task of picking out situations from their day-to-day management that they can relate to the release of a certain hormone from the EDSO scheme. The participants are then invited to present their use cases and to discuss together different/new solutions of action and decision taking.

Tools

Flipchart / whiteboard

Hints

Understanding humans behaviour is a huge research area, this is just a very tiny part of it.

See also

Simon Sinek, 'Leaders eat last'