It’s easy to preach retention until your talent actually wants to grow.

So when a team leader warned upper management that their most cutting-edge developer was burning out on obsolete tech, the manager instructed him to just motivate the guy better.

That’s when he decided the best way to motivate was to push this developer out the door entirely.

Read on for the full scoop.

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 three each.

The client was a bank. If you’ve ever worked with a bank, you know that technology moves pretty slowly in a bank.

Before long, this archaic technology started to bog down the team leader’s top talent.

For instance, the project we worked on was in Java 1.3, which got deprecated in March ’06.

One of the guys on my team, let’s call him MaxPowers, was the kind of guy who was always trying to be on the cutting edge of everything.

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 some, 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I knew he was unmotivated because of this, and I was also pretty bummed about having to work with outdated technology.

So together, they worked on proposing a solution to the boss, and at first, he was on board.

So we both started researching open-source tools to use in the company that were 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 task force was Max and myself.

However, this was a side job. Our main responsibilities were still on the bank project.

So the team leader continued to escalate the issue of Max’ disillusion with the technology.

One day, in 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I brought Max’s case up, saying that having someone extremely focused on cutting-edge tech doing boring, outdated stuff was probably the recipe for undesired rotation.

That’s when the boss revealed they didn’t care that much about retention.

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 him to a project with better tech. Plus, he’s one of our best assets by a mile, he’s doing the work of two to three people and the task force. We wouldn’t want him to leave, it would be a problem.”

Then the manager said, “Then it’s your fault, you have to motivate him better!”

So the team leader knew what he needed to do.

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 heck out of the company. He wasn’t going to be allowed to work on cutting-edge projects there.

It didn’t take Max long to move onto something bigger and better.

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.

The managers didn’t get off scot-free either.

We struggled to cover him.

We had to hire two 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).

When oh when will bosses learn to listen?

Redditors chime in with their thoughts.

This reader shares their kudos with this manager who just seems to get it.

Good managers understand that sometimes leaving a job is what’s best for an employee.

There’s nothing worse than when cost cutting comes before company morale.

Lowballing raises seems to be a strategy employed by many bosses.

This developer is onto bigger and better things now!

In the world of business, it’s either grow or get outgrown.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.