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Comment by duncanriach | Hacker News Reader

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To those commenters who write that deadlines are necessary because many, or most, employees are not motivated self-starters, I posit that this is a symptom of poor leadership, originally by their parents.

Yes, it's possible to force people who don't want to do things by using fear and control, but it's much more effective to use what we know about human nature to generate a 10x output that is sustainable and actually enjoyable.

Ineffective leadership is not an optimal solution for ineffective leadership. It's a downward spiral.

This reminds me of the people who spank their kids because they're disrespectful, but, as we know from research, spanking kids makes them disrespectful. Spanking kids just makes them pretend to be respectful while being increasingly disrespectful.

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I've never seen good results from coercion (such as threats, bribery, or punishment) in a workplace, and I'm suspicious of rewards, which seem like another form of bribery. Deception also seems deadly.

As you point out, autonomy, mastery and meaning are motivating, and their absence de-motivating. Coercion undermines autonomy.

It also seems that people's work suffers greatly when they are unhappy, stressed, fearful, overloaded, or fatigued.

Yeah, I think that there is a deep cultural bias against actually digging in and looking at human problems, like work, from a human-centric perspective. There's a presupposition that most people hold that management is about control. This is why we draw org-charts top-down. In my view, management is about support. I prefer to draw org-charts bottom-up. The CEO is at the bottom. The whole structure is there to support the effort of those at the tips of the branches, the individual contributors.

There are many scenarios I could posit, but I'll pick one. Let's say your pre-revenue start-up needs a product for sale within 4 months, because that's your company's runway. There's a lot of work to do and limited resources, but if you don't meet that deadline your company has no product to sell and you are out of a job. Are you really arguing that it's poor leadership to say: "we have a hard deadline- the product must be ready in 4 months"?

There are many such hard deadlines in life, and failing to recognize them and motivate your team to meet them is poor leadership.

It's just a date. Ship something by this date. I would suggest shipping more than once before this date. I would not call that a deadline in the normal sense that it's used. Of course, dates should be used as part of the planning process, when necessary. The problem is that most deadlines are overly restrictive and used unnecessarily only to reduce the anxiety of the manager at the expense of the team's motivation. So the net result is less, delivered later.

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