Ways To Get People To Do Things They Don’t Want To Do

The author answers the question only partially in my opinion. Sure, we should seek to minimise the impact of crappy tasks, but the best way to motivate people to "do things they don't want to do" is to turn the lousy things into things that they do want to do.

That starts with treating people like adults, and explaining the underlying reasons for the tasks. It also means listening to the people who will be doing the work, having genuine empathy with their situation and changing or reallocating the tasks accordingly. It also means giving autonomy and control to the people doing the tasks to allow them to perform the tasks under their own terms.

If it is not meaningful work, then perhaps it should not be done at all. Indeed your job as a manager is primarily to provide aircover to team members, as getting rid of overhead tasks will allow the team time and energy to focus on the main job.

For those tasks that are not removable, the manager needs to create sense out of it all, explaining why the pain has to occur and how they are helping to mitigate the pain. At one firm, for example, we removed an onerous task from a large number of senior managers by giving it to an external consultant (me), who was instructed to do an "OK" job, as other priorities were senior. Other approaches are to have an off-site meeting to do the work, to gamify the process (hackneyed I know), but most importantly to, as managers, keep challenging the need for any make-work.

A little off-topic, but is anyone else really dumbfounded by the amount of websites lately that use a top notification header that pushes content down? It's really jarring and annoying.