Her Manager Said She Couldn’t Motivate An Employee, So She Made Sure He Walked Out
Shutterstock
Imagine being a supervisor at a company, and you have an employee who reports to you who is clearly bored with the task assigned to him. He’s a great employee, a hard worker, but clearly unhappy with his current job.
Would you go out of your way to try to make him feel like a valuable employee so that he would keep working for you, assign him a different task he’d enjoy more, or encourage him to quit?
In this story, one supervisor is in this situation, and she tries to talk to management about people like this particular employee. She thinks the problem is that the employees need to be better matched with the tasks they’re assigned, but management blames the supervisor for doing a bad job.
She definitely doesn’t think she’s doing anything wrong, but she takes management’s words to heart.
Keep reading to see how the story plays out.
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 3 each.
The client was a bank, if you’ve ever worked with a bank, you know that technology moves pretty slowly on a bank.
For instance, the project we worked at was in Java 1.3, that got deprecated in march 06.
The story involves a guy on OP’s team.
One of the guys in my team, let’s call him MaxPowers, was the kind of guy that’s always always trying to be on the cutting edge of everything, and 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, 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I knew he was unmotivated because of this, and I was also pretty bummed about having to work with outdated technology, so we both started researching open source tools to use in the company that were cutting edge and proposed some improvements to our manager.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 tasked force was Max and myself.
However, this was a side job, our main responsabilities were still on the bank project.
OP told management about Max.
One day, on 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 Maxes case up, saying that having someone extremely focused on cutting edge tech doing boring outdated stuff was probably the recipe to undesired rotation.
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 it to a project with better tech, plus, he’s one of our best assets by a mile, he’s doing the work of 2-3 people and the task force, we wouldn’t want him to leave, it would be a problem”.
OP disagreed with the manager’s response.
Then 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 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.
She did the right thing.
So I did.
I motivated him to get the hell out of the company.
He wasn’t going to be allowed to work in cutting edge projects there.
He found a new and exciting job in no time.
Good for Max!
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
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.
We struggled to cover him, we had to hire 2 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).
Wow! I’m glad OP saw Max’s potential and motivated him to actually find a job that would be a better fit instead of trying to motivate him to stay at a company that didn’t appreciate him.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person found themselves in a similar situation.
Another person loves how OP handled the situation.
This person expected a slightly different ending.
Another person would’ve done the same thing.
A good boss wants what’s best for the employee even if it means encouraging the employee to find another job.
Staying stuck in a job you hate isn’t good for anyone. The employee would be better off at a job that’s a better fit for their skills and interests. The employer would be better off with employees who enjoy working there or at least aren’t bored by the work.
Enjoyed this story?
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
