I somewhat agree, but where I worked people were motivated to improve themselves, and you can't build an effective organization assuming your new hires don't care; you at least have to try.
(ie. I can't go to my manager only ever with complaints and no action)
Most people in an organisation have, very roughly, the same desire to do their jobs well. There are outliers in either direction.
If most people in an organisation are not interested in doing their jobs well, then something about the organisation is incorrectly set up. Humans have intrinsic motivation driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. If the masses of people don't want to do their jobs well, the organisation has taken too much autonomy, mastery, and purpose away from their employees.
If most people in the organisation are willing to do a good job, but some outliers misbehave, there are, as another commenter mentioned, standard ways to deal with that. (Mentorship, counceling, retraining, warning, firing.)
But critically, the standard ways to deal with struggling individuals should not be applied if there's a large majority struggling, because then the problem is in the organisation, not the individual.
That is true to some extend for the employees’ motives, but the reality is that most just clearly don’t care beyond their paycheck or resume building.
Even the leadership doesn’t want to do what is best for the company/product, but what is best for themselves. It’ll be dressed up nicely of course, but that doesn’t change the reality of the thing.
> Instead you blame the process and fix it methodically.
You blame the process, but are unwilling to really change it, so you just keep repeating the same kind of fixes ad nauseam.
A finding I had when I took a management role was that it's really hard actually getting anyone to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required. I've found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I'm dealing with micromanaging the rest and trying to educate them.
I've spoken to managers in other sectors and it's the same for them too.
I think the other part of what he's saying is that if they don't already know whether they have "the right people", it's because they've got mediocre management that has allowed them to skate by without setting concrete goals and building a culture of achievement.
I get that metrics don't always work well, and they may be harder to enforce for people you don't see day-in and day-out, but there's nothing stopping them from setting a goal of "complete work on X by day Y", and hold people to that, regardless of whether they're in the office or at home.
Almost everyone I have ever worked with was unmotivated. It stems from the adversarial employer/employee relationship and top down "innovation" where managers have ideas and then force them on their subordinates. Pure taylorism rot.
it's everyone's fault, but that's not the issue here.
the real issue is you're working with people who you are not satisfied with.
in my experience, if you have to motivate people you work with in order to get things done, it's already over, because it means the culture is fucked. I've never seen it work. The ideal picture is if you work with people who inspire you every day.
Next time try to be careful when looking for who you work with.
This coaching fallacy is actually quite toxic in my experience... many/most people in the workplace don't want to change, and they don't want constructive criticism.
Every ineffective manager that I've ever known thinks that they can coach people into being more productive, better team members... but in the end those managers simply pat themselves on the back while the employee goes on causing headaches for the rest of the team.
Hate to sound trite, but it often is the culture. If people feel siloed it's really easy to fall into not caring very much if you're not intrinsically motivated to succeed. However, on a closely knit team, where you put in the effort to get them included and owning things and be supported by the rest of the team in it, many start performing better (even if that starts by just asking for help earlier) simply because they don't want to let the team down. Not always, perhaps, but I'm not convinced that "poor employees" are innately reflective of the individual, so much as the individual + environment. Certainly, I personally have been in environments where I was a rockstar...and environments where I mentally checked very quickly (and sought to leave as such). And the former were the higher output environments, I might add; it wasn't just me being "out of my depth" in terms of skills or similar, but rather me not doing well when I was set up without any real empowerment or support structure and still expected to at least put on a show of trying.
Of course the organization doesn't want to improve things. The bosses would have to be humble enough to receive feedback. Most people can't take feedback, let alone the bosses who feel that those under their management are beneath them.
At my last job, the bosses ignored everything even the smartest employees suggested. Changes only came when customers, news outlets, vendors, or auditors made suggestions. Anyone external had more influence on company direction than the most experienced employees. A person leaving an anonymous review on an app store had more influence.
It was clear that we were ignored because the bosses didn't want to take direction from those they manage. Their arrogance and fragile egos wouldn't allow them to.
"gives them the resources and authority they require to turns things around"
They probably could have given the same resources and authority to the existing staff and they might have turned things around too. It really annoys me that in so many cases the existing guys know what's wrong but are not allowed by management to do anything about it. Then management hires new people, gives them authority, and suddenly these guys are heroes and the existing people look like idiots.
There seems to be this tendency to think that existent workers are all idiots and the only way to do better is to hire new people (preferably young and from ivy league schools). In reality it's a leadership problem because they have set up dysfunctional environments that don't allow people to perform.
Sure, if there's an issue that's actively harmful or prevents stuff getting done, it would make no sense to let it go unaddressed. But having managers trying to optimize culture leads to open plan desks and mandatory office parties - shit that might improve the cohesion of the team, sure, but if your 10x left because they don't like it, then it's not entirely focused on productivity.
> If you don't, then you're letting the culture be dictated Lord of the Flies style.
Moreover this is implying that you think of your team as a bunch of children stuck on an island. I'd have more faith in professional adults to do their job. Hopefully, nobody is under the illusion that money comes out of the office printer.
Honestly, I'd want to hire someone who hates being an employee more than someone who doesn't. Then, I'd at least know that they're under no illusions, and smart enough to know that they'll have to work.
Told them to start acting human or sod off? I can wish, can't I?
Trying harder is never the answer to anything. People already are doing their best, whatever that means in a specific context. And however far from whatever expectations.
Pushing harder might very well lower productivity overall, since everyone now likes working there even less than before. And it's very difficult to regain trust and loyalty.
These aren't comparable situations necessarily. How you fix a mostly functional organization with problems is different from how you fix a fundamentally dysfunctional organization. If you have a functional organization then it makes sense to get rid of all the low performers, regardless of how much "effort" they're putting in. And if you end up with someone who is able to work fewer hours and still be as productive as other team members you would be silly to get rid of them even if other team members were upset.
I couldn't agree more. It's disheartening to see that in some workplaces, the organization and support resemble a daycare more than a professional setting. This pattern of behavior involves offloading responsibilities to others to create a productive environment, and it's not an approach that leads to successful outcomes.
For every success there is a failure. Instead of celebrating the failures and trying to show the world they should follow you (like cattle) try and well educate people better on how to make it work.
It's just shameful because you don't always explain to people that it's your situation that made it fail. It's also possible that it's person oriented.
I've had the person oriented failure where the boss wastes his other employee's times by constantly brain storming. So it requires people to be in the office (to him). That's more like bullying
Poor performers are demotivating, yep. The challenge of a manager, and really, the whole management system, is making reasonable efforts to get employees back on track, if that's possible. I mentioned the life events thing because it's real. Sometimes a PIP (performance improvement plan) gives people a jolt and gets them back on track, sometimes not. It's the job of management to separate true under-performers from temporary ones and to find the best roles for members of the team.
What Zuck wrote had none of the nuance or understanding that one would expect of someone with even a moderate amount of experience managing people. It's true that firing people is hard, which is probably why these companies should not have focused on eating the world so voraciously for the past N years.
There’s so many normal people out there who are basically motivated to do a good job, even in boring industries.. why would anyone go out of their way to build out a team of uninterested people who don’t want to be there? Seems like we’ve just found another path back to bad management.
This is kind of sad to read, and certainly not a manager Id like to work with, is this even a company that is profitable? Didnt someone buy this for a stupid amount years ago?. Back on subject, an unmotivated employee is usually a symptom a problem with the company or culture, especially if he/she is an experienced hire that has many years of real world experience, why were they motivated/productive before and not now?. Perhaps the company is blind that they have a problem? Perhaps they tick many boxes on Stackoverflow check list and many employees are HN followers so I can't be a culture problem? Just food for thought..
(ie. I can't go to my manager only ever with complaints and no action)
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