Saturday, June 6, 2009

Success stories in motivating developers (continuing)

      Back on this topic: motivating software developers. You are the manager or part of the team and you have to keep an eye on developers resources, keep them motivated and passionate about what they do. Is it only up to the resources? Is it only up to you? Is it your job to care and invest in their motivation? Can you do it without money?

      Money.
      I was apostrophized by a friend that I do not provide within the blog post real examples and solutions, things that worked for me. Not just the analysis and conclusions but the facts. I was also told to insist on the “no money needed” part since we go through crisis and so on. Lame excuses, I would say... But let’s detail more.

      Motivation is a subject of so many studies so I won’t generate yet another motivational story. Instead, I will tell you some examples of getting things done with passion and hard work.

      On my first job, a software development job, I was told that money are de-motivators, that passion and motivation is about something else and money are something that should come along, something that you should not care about. I was frustrated initially, denying the state of mind of the trainer, but adding up more than 10 years of work conclusion is not that far from initial statements (or... my mind went wrong meanwhile).
      When motivation means money, you are doing something wrong if you are an employer and you are not doing what you like if you are an employee.

      The best case scenario is when the manager or leader is able to motivate his team by the actual work. Humans get attached to their product, it becomes their child, they start to invest in it, not just work but ideas instead of basic execution, long-term planning instead of patching the obvious problems, thinking outside the box instead of just automating work processes, etc...

      I had more than one guy, willing to work for nothing for a while (months) just because the product we were working on was “so cool”. I met guys that were willing to take over a part-time job on an additional project, as a second job for him, without requesting any increase of salary, just because he wanted to learn that technology better. There were various cases when this happened and yes, when working in a cool, creative and flexible environment, people get attracted about several other things.

      Recruitment. Select your people.
      It all starts with the recruitment process. As a leader, you need to be involved in selecting your people. I never agreed that recruitment is a HR process or a written testing & examination process. Of course you need some filtering since you might not have the time to look at all candidates, but the filtering has to be basic.
      This area was the most surprising in my career: the BEST people I had selected would not have a chance to qualify to a corporate or intensive interview at that time. They shown willingness to evolve and grow and put passion in their work right from the beginning even if several of them had minimum relation with the IT world. This reminds me of three ideas I love:
   >   The most beautiful rose will raise up from shit. Take a seed (select the most promising resource, still, make sure it is a seed, not a full grown plant – a fool grown plant already inherits the environment it grown into), get it in deep shit (assign difficult and hard-work tasks) and put it into the light (give it the power of decision and all the tools and support it needs), you’ll be amazed. Don’t forget to poor some water from time to time (share knowledge and advices as much as possible).
   >   If you are smart and not producing, be smart on your money at home. Results are either about hard, very hard work or about inspiration, or both of them together. I do not believe in VIPs that come and know it from beginning, I believe in passionate persons that have the skills and dedication to find solutions by themselves. I prefer a low-experienced guy, that is willing to work very hard and succeed, instead of a high-experienced guy that will just fix the problem. This is when you recruit and this is when you need to build a long-term relationship, do not confuse with the temporary recruitment of a specialist. It would be hard to have a VIP, a knows-it-all type of guy passionate about his work and not acting as a mercenary. If you DO find him, you are an extremely lucky person. Even specialists get attracted about the beauty of an idea or a project, and when they do, and you are able to keep them involved from zero to the end, you get great return. Unfortunately specialists work in spikes: they get highly involved and attracted about an idea, then they burn out quick and lose their interest.
   >   Challenge everything. There it is no software tool that cannot be learned by an passionate and dedicated person (with some IT knowledge of course), especially if he takes it as challenge. This applies especially in the case when you got one guy working on one technology for a while and has to switch... Re-qualifying resources on other technologies is difficult but it always gave me great results, on a long term, it is a win-win-win solution: you as a manager will get a multi-qualified resource, the resource itself will be more confident, more experienced and happy with himself and the client, the product will definitely benefit. On the short term, though, it needs your skills as a manager / leader to handle and negotiate the factors involved in it. It is like circulating the agriculture: do not plant same seeds in the same place forever. The place will be drown by it’s natural resources after a couple of iterations. Vary a little!

      Induction. Form personalities.
      Once recruited, don’t expect full performance. Once planted, don’t expect the seed to grow by itself even if the seed was expensive. Teach. I always believed that if you as a manager did not teach the employee something you are not entitled to request and, if you do request and you do receive, you should be grateful.
      Form them the way you like, act as one of them. If you are impassionate about your work they will be, too. If you are not, give up on reading this article, it will sound stupid and frustrating to you anyway. You don’t have to be a great spokesman to induct them the passion, you just have to have the passion and show it in all you do: simple chats, work, products, presentations, communication, etc...
      Work with the guy and invest out of your additional time to grow the resources. You don’t have to know more and train him on a technology, but on the way he is supposed to work and collaborate with you. Sometimes it is motivating just to know what the manager expects from you. Therefore they need to know how to behave and what to deliver but they also have to know they did. It is a long process and it leads to either proper management or proper training or even to the concept of “leadership” but it does not have to be official, corporate, it has to be YOU to grow them and to grow WITH them.
      When working with passion along with them is like eating something with a lot of satisfaction and attention for the details: all around the table will get a bit of your satisfaction and will eat with more pleasure. Sometimes when you are not hungry and see a hungry man eating, you need to try some of same food. Passion is contagious.
If you get an already-trained resource it is difficult to form him the way you want, to induct your passion, it is like influencing a well-fed person that he is hungry. He might want to try some of the food if you are skilled enough, but that would be a challenge.
      You don’t form resources only as technology, but you form them as behavior and involvement and this is what we are talking about.

      Perseverance. Pushing to the limit. Challenge.
      Work is motivating. We spend more at work than at home and sometimes we stay extra hours just because work motivates us by it’s nature. No ore to say about this. It is our need as human beings to “prove ourselves”.

      Once you plant some seeds, once you start to train people, you don’t afford to give up. Be perseverant and consistent in passing on the information from you towards employees. It generates a bounding but also trust and return of investment.
      Of course that being perseverant and consistent in your training and push towards employee, you need to be the same with yourself. Do not give up, continue or if stoppers encountered, reset and start over. Tough to achieve but critical for building a team. Follow small steps. Big steps are always risky since you are dealing with a variety of individuals. Do not establish 100 rules, establish one at a time but make sure it gets followed.

      When you have a working team, when you are already consistently feeding it with information and monitoring its development, then is the time to try pushing the limits. Challenge team limits. Push effort intensity by requesting complex tasks, push effort duration by adding delivery date constraints, push working conditions by limited resources and tools. Don’t do this just for trying it out! Do this for real projects, for real needs that you might encounter on your day-to-day business. Be more open in taking over challenges and asking them from your team.
      When we usually go out for a beer and try to remember memorable moments at work... what do we remember first? What do you remember? What gets stuck to your mind and heart? Usually you remember a bunch of very funny moments within office, that is ok, but then you remember “how hard you worked on project X”, “how many nights you spent on meeting with Y”, “how great was the idea on project Z even if no one else besides you was able to build it” and I can continue with twisted examples on how extraordinary effort moments come back to your mind, showing that you got involved in it with pleasure and passion and it certainly represented a moment of motivation.

      I personally remember several moments of no-stop work, 24 hours in front of monitor, sleeping on the keyboard and... waking up with an idea, with a solution for the problem. If you consider that this is result of other factors and not the actual motivation, you are wrong. The actual motivation was the challenge of over passing a barrier of some kind. A barrier that was pointed out by my manager, my team, my client, whatever... something challenging, something to worth the effort.

      I would do it again and again. This makes me think that I am not alone. I found others, and others... until I realize that, if you find the proper challenge, almost everyone is into it.

      Surprisingly maybe, but pushing the limits, constantly challenging your team with complex an hard tasks, will lead to a motivated team. Lowing down the work assignment, going towards a stable or low load per resource will lead to a waste of resources and a unmotivated team.


      Rewarding. Empowerment. Accountability.
      Nothing works well if you do not reward efforts. Reward can be basically anything that the rewarded person might accept as a pay-back for his efforts. It can be a vacation, it can be a position, it can be a set of benefits, it can be an environment change, it can be a team change, it can be a present, it can be something personal, it can be something collective, it can be a “thank you”, it can be money. In any case, do not miss any occasion of rewarding efforts. One occasion miss, will generate a loss very hard to recover. If you cannot reward, do not ask.
      Rewarding can be anything and it can be much lower or much higher as importance than the actual effort. I’ve seen honest “thank you” doing miracles.
      A simple “thank you” is not enough all the time, but it certainly helps if you can explain the impact of that employee’s effort. Look into what solved that effort and try to really explain and describe the impact. In most of the cases this leads to a sincere “thank you” that is welcomed. Similar thing – if that extra-effort was done for a client, and you are the manager of that employee, ask the client to take 15-30 minutes of his time and describe directly to your employee the impact of employee’s effort. This will work 100%.

      Reward sometimes can be work. Yes, as strange as it sounds, that might be ok. I have various cases when, after a great and sincere “thank you” message, the employee was assigned to a non-billable internal project that was received as a reward because of the “coolness” of that project and the technology involved in it. He knew it is a great thing to receive this task because:
-      On the project were working two of the best architects within the company
-      The project idea was innovative, quite exciting
-      The project activities involved a lot of proof-of-concept, something he loved.
-      The project schedule was light due to various brainstorming sessions.
-      There was no time pressure: the sooner the better but no client constraints.

      Reward sometimes can be flexibility to move across projects or across teams. Maybe even chose a team. Reward sometimes can be unlimited access to company resources to build a project of your own. Reward sometimes can be an internal training delivered by someone you look up to. Reward sometimes can be a fine chocolate that you find on your desk... Be inventive. People love outstanding and surprising facts.

      If the manager is really skilled, he can always turn the reward onto something useful, he can always make the employee fell a growth in his career, participate to something important, get some more money, get some more opportunities. This leads to empowerment. Reward can be not only a management role but assigning various decision responsibilities to a person. Power is motivating for some.
Empowerment makes people feel stronger, feel growth and it usually leads to even more effort since it makes people responsible. They feel they now have to be a model or they feel their decision is indeed important.

      With reward and empowerment it comes also the accountability. It means that you are responsible for something even if it goes wrong. Motivation to do something right, to do something more comes also from negative results and the way these are presented.
      Constructive feedback and follow-up analysis on what went wrong with a project, involving the guys that were working exhaustingly on it... will not kill the team spirit, but will strengthen it up. The moment can be efficiently used to get more! To be better... Motivation to prove itself as a team is one of the strongest.

      Environment. Flexibility. Open-minded. Coolness.
      (to be continued...)
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