Comment by johnfn
1 day ago
> Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers motivate people is in management books.
This seems entirely false to me. To be honest it is so incorrect it significantly puts into question the rest of the article.
1. I have absolutely had managers motivate me to work harder. I have also had managers completely demotivate me and cause me to quit. How on earth can anyone who has worked in the industry for any amount of time say that "The only place where managers motivate people is in management books"?
2. Of course most of the facile strategies mentioned in the article (like 996, micromanaging, etc) won't work. The article then generalizes this to all strategies - but "if terrible methods can't solve it, nothing possibly can" feels like a shaky argument at best. A good manager understands this, and motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company. (If success of the company isn't something you're interested in, then yes, it's going to be hard to motivate you.) A poor manager sabotages motivation in a hundred different ways - he makes you feel like your efforts are totally wasted, or fails to articulate why they are important.
I’ve been working for more than 30 years. I was seriously demotivated by managers, but never motivated by them. The beat I got was protection from them to give me free space to work. But the motivation was always internal.
Being a manager myself, I never got to motivate anybody do anything they didn’t want to. If they wanted to, it worked, but the motivation AFAIK was internal.
Of course that is one person speaking. Milage can vary.
This is a core part of systemantics [0]! People are going to do what they’re going to do, as a manager the most you can do to help is to put people in the right teams and to get distractions out of their way.
It’s a difficult idea to accept but once you accept it, it’s kind of liberating. It follows that hiring and then work-assignments during roadmapping are the two points of highest leverage in making a mutually-successful employee-manager relationship.
The problem you’re solving there is a search problem. You’re trying to discover if the employee’s motivation landscape peaks in any dimensions that align with the roadmap. They can be the most skilled person in the world, but if the peaks don’t overlap, the project will never run smoothly. It also follows that in extreme cases where you have a tenured employee that you want to retain for future work, you should absolutely let them drive and shape the roadmap.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
I read that book as I was 8 or 10! Must be still in my head!
You're making a nuanced point but it's correct. Good managers can give a little motivation (mostly by talking about and finding the right areas to work on for those people that don't otherwise already know). But for the most part good management is buffering the core that allows individuals own motivation to be self-sustaining (and productive over time) and also making sure that people aren't on a path that won't be useful (i.e. the manager knows the company will never fund phase 2).
Good managers will help you find your own motivation and set you up to follow it. Bad managers will kill it.
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Great managers absolutely can provide motivation. They can have a genuinely compelling vision for a product - "we're going to build the best damn FooGadget on the web". They can figure out what motivates their reports and work to make it transparent to them - for example some engineers like to see positive client feedback, whilst other engineers like having thorny problems to solve.
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I want to hazard a guess that a motivational manager is just like a well-oiled cog in a machine. You essentially never notice them as having influence over your motivation and only pay attention to the squeaky and rattling and faulty ones.
The best one I had in that regard was just a nice dude who I wanted to help as much as I could since he'd help me when needed. I don't think any other way would really work in the current landscape. Whenever a manager talks about our grand product and the clients dying to get a taste of our artisinal code stew, even they can't take themselves entirely seriously. The only thing that seems to help is just being liked so your team wants to make your life easier. (outside of money/benefits/promotions and maybe short term gaslighting)
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>> I never got to motivate anybody do anything they didn’t want to.
I'd be willing to bet that as a manager you've gotten people to do the shit work no one wants to though, mostly by explaining why & how it's important, sharing it across the entire team, working to eliminate dumb parts of it and stepping in to do some of it yourself - and yes, occasionally assigning it directly. To me, that's motivation: sustainably coordinating energies in a shared direction for the greater good.
I think you can indirectly motivate, or is that something else? If you create a good working/team environment and reduce the factors that demotivate people, then you will indirectly motivate them. This includes working on yourself as a manager. There are of course edge cases, but most people will thrive if the environment is good.
I agree with the parent because what you're describing doesn't indirectly motivate people, it merely avoids demotivation. If the person doesn't feel motivated by themselves (e.g. someone burned out or who does not care) they won't suddenly be motivated because the environment is good. It's still an internal force.
> A good manager understands this, and motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company
Your definition of a "good manager" is essentially "does not actively sabotage work of subordinates". That's not motivation, that's merely absence of active demotivation. A person knowing how and in what ways their work contributes to the success of the unit and the whole are absolute basics and if a person is not aware of those either their manager is incompetent as hell or actively hostile.
Reminds me of those job ads where "benefits" section contains gems like "salary paid on time". That is not a benefit, that is such a basic that even mentioning it puts into question everything about such company.
Disagree. This is explicitly active: "helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team". It could include building out a team dashboard that tracks the consequences of bugfixes, for example.
Sorry, I do not understand which part do you disagree with.
> This is explicitly active
Is merely being active (hopefully towards eventual success) automatically places a manager among "good managers"? What defines an "average manager" then?
I have explored this in more detail in a reply to a sibling. I see "helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team" as a critical work of any manager, therefore I find it strange when such duties are attributed to "good" management.
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Not really? At a small startup, sure, this should be obvious, but a manager who is able to articulate how my work bubbles up to company success at a 1000 eng company, in a way that makes sense, is a pretty rare breed.
> Your definition of a "good manager" is essentially "does not actively sabotage work of subordinates".
This is not even remotely what that person said. They said "motivates by helping you understand how the things you are doing are actually critical to the success of the team and the company". That is not nearly "does not actively sabotage".
> A person knowing how and in what ways their work contributes to the success of the unit and the whole are absolute basics
Oh please. If you reject every single thing good managers do to motivate people as "does not count" then of course you will end up with nothing. It is super easy to not see how this or that contributes to the success of a thing. It is also possible to be in position where you are in fact not contributing to the success - while you created an illusion in your head about how important you are.
> They said "<...>". That is not nearly "does not actively sabotage".
We seem to be misaligned on some fundamental level here. We are in a thread countering the notion that motivation is primarily intrinsic. My stance is that understanding the impact of individual contributions is crucial to net positive contribution towards overall success and is a tool in IC toolbox. Therefore, I value lack of such alignment as demotivating and alignment being present as motivation-neutral. In my book this is one of the core duties of a manager.
> Oh please. If you reject every single thing good managers do to motivate people as "does not count" then of course you will end up with nothing.
If you include every single thing managers do then you will simply end up shifting the definition so that every manager is "good". What's so suddenly wrong with being everyday average Joe? I do dismiss some things that not being done would reduce motivation below baseline. If a developer is expected to build a notoriously slow to compile template-heavy, multi-million sloc c++ codebase multiple times a day, a latest and greatest workstation managing the build in reasonable times is just a tool, not some motivational perk. On the other hand, a potato running the build for 4 hours would be demotivating.
So yes, I do reject alignment on things critical to overall success from things good managers do as that is something everyday regular normal manager should be doing anyway.
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I'll agree with you that the author tried to put in a sound bite and it failed to clarify the author's point.
The author is trying to argue for hiring early engineers who have exhibited ownership values and who want to take ownership for their work. These are the people for whom you establish "extreme transparency" (see: late in the post), a Google Doc for them to help align with others on high-level plans, a kitchen for people to informally talk in, and then get out of their way. That kind of environment is indeed in and of itself quite motivating for a certain kind of engineer.
Of course, it doesn't scale to BigCorp-size. Eventually you have too many cooks in the kitchen. The truth is that the vast majority of engineers really do want someone to tell them exactly what to do, so that they can come in to a highly structured 9-5 job and earn a paycheck that pays their mortgage and feeds their family. Author's prescriptions do not apply to large companies or to most engineers, and Author makes it clear as such.
I have experienced both.
I d argue its not the manager that motivates people that can only be found inbooks. Its the manager that can come in and mend a toxic and dysfunctional team.
The toxic teams end up breaking good managers in the end and they either become part of the problem or leave.
The hero manager described in the phoenix project is a myth.
The motivational one imho is very real but they need a good platform just like everyone else.
In my experience, no manager can fix a toxic, dysfunctional team.
That team is doomed and the best course of action is to disband it and let the worst people go.
I've only experienced de-motivation from managers, personally. At least for me, motivation comes from ownership, impact, autonomy, respect. You can cause me to lose motivation in a lot of ways, but you can't really cause me to gain motivation unless you've already de-motivated me somehow.
You can de-motivate me in a lot of ways, some examples:
- throwing me or a coworker under the bus for your mistakes
- crediting yourself for the work of someone else
- attempting to "motivate" me when I'm already motivated
- manufacturing a sense of urgency, this is especially bad if you try to sustain this state all indefinitely
- using AI or market conditions as a fear tactic to motivate the team
- visibly engaging in any kind of nepotism
Honestly this list could go on and on, but those are some that come to mind.
> manufacturing a sense of urgency, this is especially bad if you try to sustain this state all indefinitely
Sadly, I have seen this in almost every startup led by founders without an engineering background I've ever been a part of.
In my personal experience, this is often caused by overeager sales team promising the world for the next deal, only to fob it off to the engineering team who now "urgently" need to build "features" and "work hard" to make it happen. This is when your intrinsically motivated engineers start looking for the exit.
Also:
- not letting me have ownership of what I build and dictating features
- not giving me autonomy of how to solve a problem
The point is that the 'maximum motivation level' for an employee is an inherent trait. It is a ceiling. Some people have high ceilings and some don't. If an employee has a low ceiling, no manager can motivate that employee higher.
But if someone has a high ceiling, the most a manager can do is create an environment that allows the employee to achieve their max potential. A bad manager on the other hand, can very easily bring a normally high-potential motivated employee down to mediocre levels.
If you are one of those self-aware leaders that knows how to create an environment where people can excel, then hiring highly motivated people is the winning strategy.
The author seems to lack any sort of understanding of motivation beyond some sort of vague, blackbox "fire in the belly" concept. This is definitely not true. My take aligns with yours: motivation is a vector, having both magnitude and direction. You want individuals with the fire and then somehow need to figure out how to direct the combined heat. In the earlier stages of an externally-funded venture this is the difference between building a jet engine and pouring gasoline on a campfire. I agree you don't need a manager to do this, but also feel strongly that by the time you're at multiple teams your CTO-founder is also the wrong person. They're probably a core developer who earned the title with limited experience; don't make them learn how to manage a dev team's day-to-day while they also learn every aspect of engineering management. I wish every CTO started as a team lead, but in this scenario it's too late. CTOs largely lead the parade, but you're devs need a servant-leader in the trenches who can articulate from the front, constrain the sides and push from behind.
A lot of those books are more about persuasion than motivation - they can look similar from a distance.
The author seems to be thinking of word "motivate" in the way that someone in the olden days would motivate a donkey - with a whip. Every example they're listing is not "motivation", it's effectively forcing additional work and hours. No motivation is happening there.
It is.
Motivation is a whimsical thing.
As a lead or mgmt I set my highest priorities to:
(a) make sure that the goals are set to stone and crystal clear
(b) the team can do their work without any unnecessary distractions
(c) try to remove some of these "necessary" distractions as well
It can be really hard. And it can very ungrateful. I aim to be a nightwatchman, and I'm really proud of myself when the team thinks I'm getting paid for nothing. The bigger the structure the bigger the drama and I don't want them to be any part of it.
Meanwhile I struggle with stakeholders who are like "c'mon, you already build the skyscraper, we just want you to move the parking lot from the underground to second story, how hard can it be, you have all the parts in place, just move them around".
So what did those managers do to make you more motivated?
In addition to what the other responses said:
1. Share a cohesive and inspiring vision for the project.
2. Understand your skills, strengths/weaknesses etc and try to give you work that challenges you / help you grow / are interesting.
I think these are rare and can be hard to do (I'm now trying to do it myself!), but when it happens it's very motivating.
Cared about anything other than their own upward movement, actively worked towards my professional development, made sure I had actual, not hand wavey, feedback, and made sure my compensation reflected my growing responsibility.
I am aware that all of those things may not be in their power to give, but some combination of that in any org that is somewhat functional would be motivating.
I had one manager who got extremely excited about whatever you were working on. It was infectious and motivated most of the team including myself. He’s an innately curious person, but also whip smart and surely developed this skill deliberately.
I had another boss, a founder, who had a difficult relationship with engineering but was extremely gifted and had a great vision. I found myself highly motivated at this company as well, but for wholly different reasons. There are many paths to success.
Both startups had successful exits, and I felt as though I contributed meaningfully to both.
I have read the sibling comments here and it is so saddening. The general expectations for management are, apparently, so low, that a manager attempting to do some duties in their job description is lauded as some savior. <crying-cat.jpg>
Treat me like a human being, work with me to set reasonable expectations, share blame and focus praise.