‘Yes, sir!’: Manager demands team leader motivate an overqualified employee to do boring tasks, so team leader motivates him to quit

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    "I hear you loud and clear..."
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    Manager asks me to motivate an employee into doing a job he doesn't like
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    This happened around mid 2006. I was a low level team leader in a tech consulting company. I was in charge of two teams of 3 each. The client was a bank, if you've ever worked with a bank, you know that technology moves pretty slowly on a bank.
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    For instance, the project we worked at was in Java 1.3, that got deprecated in march 06. One of the guys in my team, let's call him MaxPowers, was the kind of guy that's always always trying to be on the cutting edge of everything, and we had him working on the project and he
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    asked several times to migrate the project to a newer version of Java or be assigned to a project with more up-to-date tech (there were, he just was assigned to this one) but I couldn't do any of those things.
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    I knew he was unmotivated because of this, and I was also pretty bummed about having to work with outdated technology, so we both started researching open source tools to use in the company that were cutting edge and proposed some improvements to our manager. He
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    liked the idea so he formed a "task force" to create tools for the company, the tasked force was Max and myself. However, this was a side job, our main responsabilities were still on the bank project.
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    One day, on a team, project leaders and managers meeting, we were talking about desired and undesired rotation (people leaving the company) and how to stop it. I brought Maxes case up, saying that having someone extremely focused on cutting edge tech
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    doing boring outdated stuff was probably the recipe to undesired rotation. The manager said: "you're wrong, this is totally desired rotation, we want people motivated to work here, he's not".
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    I said: "But he's not because you're unwilling to move it to a project with better tech, plus, he's one of our best assets by a mile, he's doing the work of 2-3 people and the task force, we wouldn't want him to leave, it would be a problem".
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    Then manager said: "then it's your fault, you have to motivate him better!". I stopped arguing, to me, Max leaving was totally a case of undesired rotation, it was a problem to my planning and, furthermore, it was losing
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    someone whom I saw as one of the top assets available in the company. But the manager said that I needed to motivate Max better. Cue malicious compliance. So I did. I motivated him to get the h l out of the company. He
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    wasn't going to be allowed to work in cutting edge projects there. He found a new and exciting job in no time. He's a millionaire now, he got called by Google to interview with them (he rejected the offer), he could have been retired by age
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    38, but he kept on working because he still loves what he does. We struggled to cover him, we had to hire 2 more devs and the task force came to an end (I couldn't do it just by myself and
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    the rest of the devs weren't as interested in it). TLDR: Manager told me to motivate a bored employee without tending to the underlaying problem at the company, I motivate him to leave the company. EDIT: changed "cutting edge companies" for "cutting edge projects".
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    feyrath 18 hr. ago In my stint as a director/manager I basically had to do that. One guy was fresh out of college and had pursued a master's degree in his own time. But we were working on old mainframe systems. I straight out told
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    him to find a position that fed his passion and interest. He did and I am glad. I couldn't convince him to name his kids after me though.
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    Griever114 14 hr. ago Bro, you clearly failed to motivate him enough to get that name
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    yParticle 19 hr. ago . One of my favorite "quitting as MC" variants I've seen on here. Nicely done. I was half expecting your "motivation" to be to pay him the salary of the 2-3 people that he was worth, but I doubt that's something you could have done unilaterally.
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    mdlapla OP 19 hr. ago The company had salary steps, he might have moved 1-2k above others and that's it.
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    C 9lobaldude 17 hr. ago You did him a huge favor. Based on this story you are a good leader, I hope that you are working on that capacity.
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    still-dazed-confused 17 hr. ago And you stayed? I'm amazed. I was expecting you to follow him out the door :)
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    Blue_Veritas 73116 hr. ago I'm so glad that this went where myself! The only correct response was to motivate him to leave the company. Kudos to you! I would have taken it,
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    Remote_Presentation6. 15 hr. ago "Undesired rotation" means quitting? I hate corpo-speak to the depths of my soul...
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    Techn0ght 12 hr. ago Sounds like upper management was all about maximizing profits while minimizing (their) efforts. They probably actively discouraged the client from introducing new tech because it would have required additional effort on the part of the company. Worst place to be. I hope you got out.
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    toforama 11 hr. ago I am told there used to be a time where blind loyalty to a company paid off in the end. I'm in my 50s tho and have yet to experience that. You did well. Kudos
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    Pyehole 11 hr. ago A good manager has the best interest of the people they manage in mind. When the company ...it's time to change the company whether they want to or not. In this case the company FAFO'd.

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