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Keeping good employees isn’t always about paying them more.

That’s what this team leader tried to explain after one of the company’s best developers kept asking to work with newer technology. The employee loved learning new things, but management refused to move him off an outdated project.

At first, the team leader tried to meet him halfway by creating a side project that let him work with newer tools whenever they had the chance. Even then, the developer still wanted an opportunity to grow, and the company still wouldn’t budge.

Then management blamed the team leader for the employee’s lack of motivation and told him to fix the problem.

So he did, but not in the way the company wanted.

Let’s check out what happened.

Manager asks me to motivate an employee into doing a job he doesn’t like

Back in 2006, I was a low-level team leader at a tech consulting company. I was in charge of two teams of three people each.

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

For instance, the project we worked on was in Java 1.3, which was deprecated in March 2006.

At this point, he was already trying to motivate the employee.

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 technology.

There were projects like that available. He just wasn’t assigned to one. I couldn’t do either 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I knew he was unmotivated because of this, and I was also pretty bummed about having to work with outdated technology.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 we both started researching open-source tools to use in the company that were cutting edge, and we proposed some improvements to our manager.

Unfortunately, the task force was only a side hustle.

He liked the idea, so he formed a “task force” to create tools for the company. The task force was Max and me. However, this was a side job. Our main responsibilities were still on the bank project.

One day, during a meeting with team leaders, project leaders, and managers, we were talking about desired and undesired rotation (people leaving the company) and how to stop it.

I brought up Max’s case, saying that having someone extremely focused on cutting-edge technology doing boring, outdated work was probably the recipe for undesired rotation.

The manager said, “You’re wrong. This is totally desired rotation. We want people motivated to work here. He’s not.”

Then, the manager put the blame on him.

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 or 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!”

I stopped arguing.

To me, Max leaving was totally a case of undesired rotation. It was a problem for my planning, and furthermore, it meant losing someone whom I saw as one of the top assets in the company. But the manager said that I needed to motivate Max better.

Today, Max is doing very well for himself.

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. And 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 retired by age 38, but he kept working because he still loves what he does.

We struggled to replace him.

We had to hire two more developers, and the task force came to an end. I couldn’t do it by myself, and the rest of the developers weren’t as interested in it.

Wow. It sounds like such a typical corporate environment.

Let’s see how the fine folks over at Reddit feel about it.

This is so true.

That’s a sad reality most places.

It’s something they say anyway.

According to this reader, that was the only way to handle it.

The manager completely missed the point. The employee wasn’t lazy or looking for an excuse to complain. He simply wanted the chance to grow, but the company kept telling him no.

At some point, most people will stop waiting for opportunities that are never going to come, and they go find them somewhere else.

That’s exactly what happened here.

Ultimately, the company paid the price because management refused to listen.