> Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers motivate people is in management books
Initial motivation is the hired trait. It’s very easy to demotivate people. The trick is to not do that.
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Yeah this 100%.
One of my core philosophies as a manager is that by default I should get the fuck out of the way. From there, identify the biggest issues and solve them.
If you're successful hiring great people, I really don't understand the desire to micromanage them. Or do silly things that are demotivating, like 996 or trying to mislead them / market things / hide the bad stuff.
Treating people like adults is that One Neat Trick that influencer bloggers don't want you to know.
> Treating people like adults is that One Neat Trick that influencer bloggers don't want you to know.
In the companies below Big Tech in valuation at least, having been in the room with drunken executives speaking their real thoughts multiple times, I’ve found it’s because they don’t want to treat people like adults.
They want serfs to order around because they have some cultural value around being “the boss” and you can’t be “the boss” if you aren’t telling people what to do. The more things you tell them to do, the more of a boss you are.
It’s how you get executives crowing to you about all of these faang ideas like google’s 20% time back in the day, or engineers being able to vote with their feet and only attend meetings they found useful, but then have people on pips because they were consistently 30-60 seconds late to daily standups.
It’s not the only failure mode by far, but having leadership like that seems like a cause for companies getting hard stuck below a billion in profit
we used to say "employees don't quit jobs, they quit managers." i was very happy at Amazon until they moved me under a sub-optimal manager. i quit less than a month later. that manager got promoted. this will tell you everything you need to know about working at Amazon.
maybe they were trying to get me to quit. maybe that area's director was incompetent. maybe both.
Do managers ever get fired or fail? All of my worst managers seem to keep moving up the ladder from what I see on LinkedIn. I don't understand it.
Coming back to this with a late reply of more experiences, but it doesn't seem that unique for management from my perspective.
When I was an IC I dealt with a ton of software engineer peers who were pretty bad at their job and managed to stay in the field as a software engineer. I was constantly cleaning up or compensating for them. As a manager I've had to let someone go because they literally could not be demoted to a level commensurate with their abilities (there's nothing below junior, they must be able to perform commits of new work and couldn't despite months of training and support, and they refused an alternate career track in QA before being PIP'd), and yet... after a stint of unemployment that person failed upwards with an even higher engineering title at a new organization, bringing along an obviously lacking skill set and what had to be a pretty falsified resume and career experience discussion with said new employer.
The only complete exit from software engineering that I've witnessed was someone so bad at their job that they became perpetually unemployed and finally called it quits and left the industry after about 7 years of being fired or laid off back to back continuously.
The world's beginning to change but for a long time a verifiable title with the right number of years next to it would get you a long ways in the corporate software rat race.
Managers have to manage up and manage down. Lots of managers succeed in their careers by being good at managing up, despite being awful at managing down.
As a manager, yeah I’ve seen several of my peers wash out of the role for one reason or another. It happens. Usually it’s self selected though, disliking the inherent drama, having difficult to work with employees, moving up from engineering and realizing that was actually what they loved, etc.
But a bad people manager who still manages resources and timelines and expectations isn’t necessarily bad for business. Promoting them up into a more strategic role that deals less with managing a larger group of individuals directly isn’t necessarily a bad move either.
I've also seen bad "lower level" managers fail downward. But I think at some point on the manager totem-pole, you become this weird "invulnerable royalty," and always fail upward. You never see VPs get fired and move back down to 3rd-level managers. You never see SVPs get fired and move back down to being mere VPs. They always get fired and then move over to Dell or Intel or something at an even more senior level than they were at their previous company.
Yep people have all sorts of sources of motivations. One of the key ones is a sense of ownership. Many people join startups instead of BigCorp because they want voice and influence that they don't get in a larger company. I've seen so many founders, managers, leaders, etc kill that by not recognizing this fundamental fact.
Of course there's also the problem that you can find and hire people who are motivated people but there's absolutely no guarantee people are going to be motivated for your specific problem.
thank you. can i hire you to run one of my teams? i've been trying to explain this to my managers for half a decade.
A bad manager can turn a great employee into a good one. It’s really hard to go back once that happens.
I'd go further: a bad manager can turn a great engineer into a very bad one. People look up to great people, and when the strongest performers are demotivated, that spreads.
Commonly in the cultures that end up this way, leadership blames / gaslights the ICs. It's toxic and honestly kind of heartbreaking.
If they are very bad, the company can let them go. If they are simple good or fine, the company lost their great engineer, and now has a seat filler that they can’t justify firing.
For sure. At that point they have to fire them, even though it's the company / leadership's fault and hard to watch. Ultimately better for that engineer, as well, to move on.
“ It’s very easy to demotivate people”
So true. And really hard to reverse
Fully agree.
No one plans to hire their assistant based on how much they will motivate the other people that are going to deal with the assistant. Sure, it is important that they are pleasant, but that's it. Their role is actually an administrative one of brokering information. Managers are essentially the same role with higher stakes, trying to make it about anything deeper seems to be main character syndrome in full effect.
I may not be using the same definition of "motivation" as the author, but understanding what motivates your people, putting the right mix of people together to work on the right problems, and knowing how and when to apply pressure to get people to do their best work are absolutely something managers can do to motivate their teams.
To leverage their pre-existing motivations*, which is the argument on OPs side, this pre-existing motivation is hired-for, not generated on the role.
Thw word hired is doing a lot of work.
Is motivation intrinsic to a person.
Or is it a person plus situation.
Ot is it person, situation and reason (reason given in interview)
I have been most motivated when there was an aha in the interview process. Or a "cooll!" feeling. For me usually about the end product over the tech stack. I like to work on things I like to use myself.
I think motivation is contextual. When I love the mission of the project I'm working on, I'll put everything into it. When I hit a prolonged wall of politics or poor leadership, I'm not going to operate at 100%.
There's a trifecta that works well:
1. The job is what the employee wants to be doing (IC, manager, FE/BE, end product or mission, whatever).
2. It's what the company needs. (Don't let a high performer do something that's Priority 10 just to keep them.)
3. It's what the employee is good at. (This includes areas of growth that they have aptitude for!)
People in those situations, in my experience, tend to thrive. It's great that you've recognized the kinds of products (ones you use) that give you that.
Something I don't think hiring managers do enough is convince applicants not to work there. Have a conversation to discover what the person wants. If it's not this role, that's totally fine! It's far better to help someone discover what they love than hire someone into something they won't.
i stopped reading and upvoted this comment right after you wrote "i think motivation is contextual." i cannot agree with you more.