It’s been a while since I wrote one of these. You wouldn’t know it, but I have a few draft ideas sitting in a backlog waiting to be finished. I couldn’t finish them because I was feeling more and more that with everything going on, I couldn’t focus.
However, with some of the life hurdles away, my brain feels quieter, and I’m able to stay focused and finish more things.
One of the leaders I follow once shared this thought: “you get better results if you light a fire in their belly instead of under their backside”. This is the carrot versus stick motivation dilemma.
Things go wrong when people have no idea why they need to do the work or they feel overly constrained by rules and micromanagement. And it’s the leads’ job to make sure that the right things are happening: purpose, autonomy, mastery and psychological safety.
For most of my career, I’ve been privileged to work with the leads who took this to heart and made an effort to inspire their team in a way that folks could identify with the work. For some of us, it was because the purpose of the work aligned with our value system. For others, it was the feeling of accomplishment or even something as simple as the dynamics of the team and the desire to do right by the team.
“Identity have more staying power”
Often, throughout the tech, instead of motivating people with purpose, leadership creates abstractions over work. These abstractions are often metrics, programs, rules or policies that redefine the problem space in a way that makes the work more legible to the people observing the work, but makes the objective less legible to those doing the work.
Regrettably, abstractions by the nature, distance people from understanding the problem. And without context, they can’t know what risks they can safely take. This stops them from having agency to decide how they do the work. These abstractions also incentivise the wrong things. It’s not because people are trying to “game the system”. It’s because the only view they’ve been given is the system.
“The map is not the territory”.
When we miss context on the work, we miss opportunities to creatively solve the problem. Instead, we often try to improve the “map”.
Strong leaders should always direct everyone’s view (including their own) to the “territory”.