'He's a millionaire now': Team Leader asked to motivate worker by arrogant manager, motivates them to leave for a better job

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    Posted by u/mdlapla Manager asks me to motivate an employee into doing a job he doesn't like 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. For instance, the project we worked at was in Java 1.3, that got deprecated in march 06.
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    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 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. I knew he was unmotivated because of this, and I was also pretty bummed about having to work with outd
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    cutting edge and proposed some improvements to our manager. He 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. 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
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    extremely focused on cutting edge tech doing boring outdated stuff was probably the recipe to undesired rotation.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". 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 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 out of the company. He wasn't going to be allowed to work in cutting edge projects ther
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    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 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 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
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    feyrath 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 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. 511 Griever114 Reply Share 123 ... Bro, you clearly failed to motivate him enough to get that name Reply Share
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    yParticle 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. 235 Reply Share mdlapla OP The company had salary steps, he might have moved 1-2k above others and that's it. 119 Reply Share
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    itbeazombieyo Always good to see people lending a helping hand, especially when it's helping a knife into the back of a former employer. 332 Reply Share NoteworthyMeagerness It's always gratifying to help an employee who is trying to do the right things for the right reasons leave to find something better. Especially if they're are ways to keep them at the company but the higher ups won't do it because it wasn't their idea.
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    I managed a group of devs and creative- types for about a decade. Once I got to know my employees and could gauge how their skills were used the best, I would always encourage them to come to me if they weren't happy with anything in their job. My job as a manager was as an umbrella to keep the raining down from executives off of them. I hired them to do very specific jobs and dealing with garbage from executives or coworkers wasn't in their job description. It was in mine.
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    If I could help them find a better spot in the company, I would actively help them go there, if they desired. However, what I found was that nearly everyone wanted to stay working in my group because we moved quickly, we moved efficiently and they got to do what they loved. We had a time where our group didn't have a single employee leave in a time span of 5 years. I was, and still am, proud of that.
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    The only reason we started losing employees after that 5 years is because we got a new executive over our department and without even waiting to see that we were highly effective in our jobs, he decided they needed to start dealing with random complaints from our internal customers instead of letting me do it. I lost half of those employees within a year because of it. Many of them were helped to leave because I gave them glowing reviews when the company they were applying to asked if they could
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    aimed_4_the_head One day, managers were talking about undesired rotation (people leaving the company) and how to stop it. I brought Max up Then manager said: "it's your fault, you have to motivate him better!" what do you think this exact meeting is about in the first place? 261 Reply Share
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    BoredTTT The manager said: "you're wrong, this is totally desired rotation, we want people motivated to work here, he's not". By that definition, any rotation is desired rotation! Anybody that leaves is clearly not motivated to work there! 63 Reply Share
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    9lobaldude You did him a huge favor. Based on this story you are a good leader, I hope that you are working on that capacity. 45 Reply Share

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