It’s a tough position to be in…

Being in charge of employees and wanting to push them to be their best…but you know the company you work for isn’t good for them and they should be thriving elsewhere.

So, what to do?

Well, if you ever find yourself in this position, perhaps you’ll take a page out of this person’s book.

Check out what they did!

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.

Things were exactly moving along at a fast clip.

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 2006.

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I knew he was unmotivated because of this, and I was also pretty bummed about having to work with outdated technology, so we both started researching open source tools to use in the company that were cutting edge and proposed some improvements to our manager.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 taske force was Max and myself.

They still had other work to do.

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

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I brought Max’s case up, saying that having someone extremely focused on cutting edge tech doing boring outdated stuff was probably the recipe to undesired rotation.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

They spoke up.

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”.

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.

It had to be done…

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. 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).”

Let’s see what Reddit users had to say.

One person shared their own story.

Another individual loved this story.

This Reddit user nailed it.

This person shared their thoughts…and asked a question.

Another reader didn’t hold back.

That story warmed the heart…

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.