“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Most people have no business managing others because they have no idea how to positively motivate others. In this void of motivation, managers think the best idea is to have update meetings with their team members so the team can offer up detailed lists of what they’re working on to account for their time.
How many of these meetings have you been in? And how many of those meetings left you inspired? I find meetings like this useless. If you’re an adult and you have a job that you care about, you just do whatever it takes to get the job done in the time that you have to do it. You go to your manager when you need help or want to talk through an idea. Why waste time accounting for the hours you worked by preparing a detailed list of tasks for your boss? That sounds unbelievably inefficient to me and it communicates a true lack of trust and respect between managers and their team members.
Here’s a better idea for managers: build a team that actually cares deeply and passionately about the work. Motivate them by caring about who they are as people and being vested in their success. My former boss, Bob G., had one simple belief about teams. When he hired me he said, “Christa, I hope you are really successful at this company. But more importantly, I support you personally. I want to see you as a person be happy and successful and I’ll do anything I need to do to make that happen.”
I was more motivated to work for Bob than any other boss I’ve ever had. This belief in how to manage also presented another unintended consequence: because I was so self-directed working for Bob, I became entirely self-directed in all of the work that followed. That sense of self-direction in a job made entrepreneurship much less scary for me down the line.
Unfortunately, Bob spoiled me with this attitude. He set the bar too high. I have expected every boss after him to be this wise and supportive. The fact that I now work as a freelancer should tell you that every boss I’ve had after him failed to rise to his level. Once you get used to working for someone like Bob who has an enlightened view of management, you can’t go back to the dark days of micromanagement.
Bob’s outlook is all too rare these days. But it doesn’t have to be rare. Anyone could take this point-of-view. Anyone could decide at any moment to give their team members freedom to grow, experiment, and shape their work. What have you got to lose? Try it in small steps with small projects and see how it goes. You’ll be surprised by how high your team can soar when you give them the opportunity fly.
