To motivate people, talk about the context of the work to be done

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders.

Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Cynical take: this is all great until it becomes clear to people that the context is actually "one of the executives wants a promotion". Or increasingly common: "profits matter more than any of our purported 'values'".

It gets hard to motivate people when they know they're working on things that are detrimental to the public in some way, or that only exist to make other people look good. Trying to fluff the context in these cases tends to just make people even less motivated because they're not stupid.

This isn’t bad advice, or wrong, just recognize that it’s not universal. Motivations vary from person to person, team to team, company to company.

If you want to know how to motivate a person, start by asking them. Maybe they will be self aware enough to identify what it is, maybe not. If they don’t know what motivates them, ask them to take some time over the next week to reflect on a time where they were motivated at their job, and you can discuss it further in your next one on one. Then, take that scenario and start to deconstruct it. What was it about this time that was different than other situations? How long did that motivation last? Who were they working with at that time, and how much did the people play a role in keeping you motivated? How much do factors like stress and salary impact motivation for them?

Motivation is also fluid. What motivates someone at 25 is different than at 35. At 25 I craved recognition for having potential. At 35 I crave autonomy. Some fundamental components haven’t changed, but the overall story has.

So, when in doubt, and even when not in doubt, start by asking.

The subtext of every article like this is "How to motivate people (without paying them more or giving them equity)."

In many, perhaps most, situations, people are working to build things they don't own. That is the context. Any other spin on the context is just manipulation.

This stuff might work on some people, but, as a regular employee, I'm most motivated by frankness from my bosses. Nothing turns me off faster than platitudes about the purpose of our work or why I should be motivated by it.

When I think about people I've managed or observed, along with the way that clients or managers have treated me, I see a fallacy where differing expectations or needs are substituted for motivation. For example, I recently walked away from a project where the client kept restating the priority and the work context, both of which were well understood. The problem was that the project needed a legit budget and team - it wasn't a question of motivation, but reality on the ground. Likewise when I think about people I've managed who on the surface seemed unmotivated, the real problems were more subtle - one guy was clearly depressed but also didn't have the skills for the job. Another was going through a bad divorce and really needed a lot more money for the legal war chest. Still another was tired of so much work travel and really wanted to be in a different career. I'm sure there are people who legitimately lack intrinsic motivation, but more often than not my experience has been is doesn't have anything to do with not understanding the context of the work (though I'm sure that was itself be demoralizing).

I find ownership to be motivating. Good leaders inspire me to own results, but also empower me to own the “how”. When I do not own the method of obtaining success, I do not feel like I truly am responsible for success. The truth is, with more complex work, good leaders realize they’re at the mercy of those that do the work, because of the complexity only the people actually doing the work have complete understanding of the system. Therefore, the best card to play is to be very clear about the desired outcome, including the whole strategy and context behind it, and hope the team owns it all.

Boeing tried this a lot back when I worked there. Our managers would talk about how their airplanes enabled people to trade with people across the globe, and brought people together.

It's hard to see the high-level talk as anything but just talk when the systems you have to deal with on a daily basis are a tire fire. Initech tried to talk a good game, too.

I suppose some people are motivated that way, but I care most about my daily process. If the process makes me miserable, no amount of "context" will motivate me.

Best way to motivate people? Trust them.

Trust is extremely rare in the modern work place. From grueling interview loops designed to weed out "fakers" to open offices, to micro managers, to always on Slackers...

A little bit of trust goes a long way. Find good people and don't treat them like they're out to rip you off and their motivation will flow.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

--Antoine de Saint Exupery

I have always found that as an employee, I can play an active role in this. Ask questions, do research, find out how your work relates to the bigger picture. This (and yes, sometimes combined with some mild self-deception) can go a long way towards staying motivated. It does sometimes bring up the question whether I shouldn't be asking those questions for myself and work for myself though ;)

Maybe I'm an outlier (being a wannabe intellectual), but I feel like for me I honestly don't care too much about the grander scope of stuff as much as the actual individual problems I want to solve.

I like solving problems with concurrency and networking stuff, and typically don't pay much attention to how it affects the rest of the organization. I have some ethical issues with marketing, and worked on the adtech team of a company for two years for this reason.

I suspect this drives virtually any employer who I work with crazy, since they typically try and motivate me by telling me all of the cool stuff my work is going to do.

I've encountered this being used as a crutch for poor employee performance on a software project focused on replacing a legacy application.

An employee with little programming experience used his supposed lack of context as an excuse for poor work and disinterest despite having been given an overview of (1) what the legacy software does and why, (2) the broader project goals, and (3) the immediate project goal (i.e., replacing the existing software). The employee similarly hid behind their lack of technical understanding, asking questions to "learn" but ignoring the answers.

It's funny. I've never really gotten on with working at large companies. Fundamentally I think this is why.

Most large companies do not have a context for work done.

If they do, risk and reward is detached from it entirely.

The rest of the company forms a huge buffer such that you can do really well, or really badly, and it normally won't matter that much.

If there are levels of management that are "too important" for me to speak to, I'm out.

I interned for a major defense contractor on a top secret contract. I did not have a security clearance, nor did several of my coworkers, and we had no idea what it was we were doing, at all. My job consisted of "Do this task" with absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. I hated that job passionately and definitely agree with the author that contextualizing your work matters.

More fundamental than context, stop telling me your sole purpose is to make money. That's a one-way ticket to turning me off of any attempt to ever increasing my engagement as an employee.

Your business exists to solve a problem, which then makes money. Otherwise, I expect your business to be in finance or the government's treasury--then your #1 is "to make money".

In my opinion, every great work needs its justifying myth. If you don't have that, you won't have the confidence to pursue it further.

That doesn't mean that the myth is necessarily a good, ethical or healthy one. A lot of myths are of the form of "worthy sacrifice." Others are of the "defending oneself" sort, or the "ascent to greatness". The myth is made to fit the times and the task.

Organizations, and teams in those organizations, often take on their myths without consciously thinking about it. But it's absolutely critical to have them there to set the tone and allow everyone to proceed on the same page.

This doesn't paint the entire picture.

One way to motivate people is to make sure they understand the 'why' behind the work.

A step in making them understand the 'why' is talking about the broader context (which the article is about).

Auftragstaktik - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics

Reminds me of the military concept of "commander's intent". By knowing the broader purpose of a mission, subordinates are able to take initiatives if and when necessary.

Sometimes the product/context isn't very meaningful. Sometimes the company's end goal is negative. E.g: Facebook. Their employees are probably more motivated if they suppress the fact that the context/goal is to suck as much information as possible from their users to target ads at them.

In my experience, one reason this doesn't happen is because it's a lot easier for middle managers to carve out tasks and assign them then it is to corral and coordinate a bunch of enthusiastic people trying to help. It's easier for them to take credit for the work done in the end as well.

Looks like they’re mostly talking about Task Identity from Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Theory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_characteristic_theory

This reminds me of the people who are/were working on building weapons, they are/were not aware of the context of their work, for example they were building small pieces of large weapons but not knowing the full plan.

I really need this article! I tried to start a startup with friends multiple times already, but the end result always was they cancelled. I think I overwhelmed them listing all the things needed to do in order to succeed.

I've had two jobs for more or less public sector entities, and they were conspicuously more interested in new employees understanding the complete organization and its purpose.

This is spot on. Unfortunately in my (long) experience often the aspiring motivators do not understand the context, leaving it to the underlings to attempt to reverse engineer it.

It's funny, and sad, to see this on the front page at the same time as the story about Google cancelling TGIF.

This works great when you are developing the polio vaccine. But in the wrong hands this is just an illegitimate tool of power. Plenty of people joined companies like Facebook because they were made to believe that they were truly changing the world for the better... the ability to fool people like that is just corporate demagoguery.

we can’t conflate nor confuse the interrogatives (who for what for when for where for why for how) ...

things being talked about are merely distinct, and certainly not interchangeable either / ors .

Leaders inspire, managers motivate.