Motivational Anti-Patterns
Posted September 23, 2008 
Comments(17)
Comments(17) I’ve decided to take a 2 part stab at answering Jurgen’s question about what motivates me in the work place.
To start with, I decided to meditate on a few things that tend to grab my motivation by the metaphorical gonads and squeeze.
In no particular order…
Sunshine-Up-the-Arse Speeches – Luckily these are most decidedly not part of the culture where I currently work, but I received enough of them at my prior job to hold me over for the rest of my career. I find impromptu homilies by CIO’s that are ripe with football analogies and dramatic pauses to be particularly loathsome. There are only so many happy mental places a developer can go to during these trying times before nervous ticks start developing and homicidal tendencies start to go unchecked.
- Paper Certificates – At the successful conclusion of a 3 year project, I actually received a paper certificate of appreciation that my manager downloaded from the internet. Despite being laminated with great care by the secretary, these certificates were not received with quite the enthusiasm hoped for my management. I think I did actually hang mine on the wall for a little bit, but only because it made me giggle every time I looked at it.
- Inappropriate Praise – I would rather have a boss that gives out too little praise than one that doles out too much. With the emotionally stingy boss, at least you know that the praise is honest on the rare occasions that it does come. With an overly effusive boss, however, even the truly genuine compliments will get lost in all the sickeningly positive noise.
- Random Public Recognition\Rewards – Publicly praising a person in front of their peers during a meeting and then handing them a $50 gift certificate for some random bit of overtime or good work they recently did is one of those ideas that sounds good in theory but only leads to trouble. The chances are that one person left that meeting feeling awkward, while the rest left feeling bitter.
- High Friction Environments – I can’t remember how many times I wasted the day in an inane HR, audit, or department meeting and thought to myself…’I just want to do my job…if only they would let me do my job I would be so happy’. I had similar experiences of feeling that my company was one of the major roadblocks to getting work done while chasing down forms and signatures for piles of paperwork that were required to do the simplest of tasks. It’s amazing how much of an affect that just canceling unnecessary meetings and streamlining inefficient processes can have on morale.
- Cancerous Team Members – Nothing saps motivation faster than a team-member who is allowed by management to consistently be abusive, arrogant, lazy, or incompetent without any repercussions. If you are a boss and want to motivate workers, then get a back-bone and deal decisively with the department’s resident problem child. Remember, we just want to be allowed to work in peace and sometimes people are the biggest roadblock of all.
- Habitual Forced Overtime – As I argued here, I think overtime is rarely a good idea and is almost always preventable. However, if you are backed into a corner but still don’t want to incur the motivational penalty that inevitably goes along with overtime, then make sure it is infrequent, as flexible as possible, and compensated in some way (preferably with extra time off after the goal is met).
Feel free to chime in if I left any major gonad-squeezing anti-patterns out…
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Dang, man! It sounds just like you used to work at… Oh wait…
Paper Certificate Day! I used to deliberately take those off, so I wouldn’t have to walk up there and act all happy-cheery. Especially when–like the credits of a movie–everyone and their dog gets one. Hang ‘em up? No. Then people would think they actually meant something.
Working all weekend, and getting $10 worth of gift certificates to the local mini-golf place. A whole 10 bucks! Wow, I feel so valued! Uh guys, it costs $5 a person, and I have _four_ people in my family.
Re: 6: It’s flat amazing how blind management can be to the effects of this.
And one of the biggest anti-motivators: incentive plans that drop dead when you miss The Date. “Well, we blew that bonus. There’s no point working on this thing any more.”
And a personal anti-motivator for me: lack of sunshine. I think I’ll be like Joe and choose the volcano.
@Dewayne
Re: incentive plans that go away when you miss the date – I especially liked that they tied the bonuses of the whole user department to the project even though only a few were involved with the project. There’s nothing like getting venomous stares from employees you barely know whose financial well-being lays entirely in your hands. No pressure…
…
LOL – I don’t know anything you are talking about here.
I used to like certificates…at least somebody gave a shit enough to create it. better than nothing
And let’s not forget being responsible for 99% of the product that’s going to single-handedly “save the company,” shipping it on time after working all weekend to add back a feature that was put back on the schedule two days before shipping after being cut because there wasn’t time to do it, and then not having a single member of management stop by to say congratulations, or good job, or thank you.
incentive plans, certificates, awards….isn’t all them suppose to make you slog further
Another one:
trying to share some pattern love by hanging the poster of the Head First Design Patterns book on the office wall. Only to have colleagues laugh and have a good look at the girl on the poster. Not having the impression that they learned a new pattern or something…Hmmm. Wait. What’s the anti-pattern in this story: not hanging beatiful girls on your office wall, or the devs not interested in patterns? Well, hope you found the story funny at least
[...] Motivational Anti-Patterns – Russell Ball ‘ I had similar experiences of feeling that my company was one of the major roadblocks to getting work done while chasing down forms and signatures for piles of paperwork (…) ‘ So true. How many of these wonderfully described anti-patterns have *you* seen? [...]
You forgot Condom Friday. My old boss use to give out boxes of condoms at out weekly TGIF meetings.
[...] In part one, I approached the question backwards by describing seven motivational anti-patterns. [...]
@Mikey – What did your boss think you got up at the weekends? He didn’t think you’d be home perfecting your VB skills all weekend then?
Re Condom Fridays: just say “you didn’t bring any XXL”.
Paul.
#3, yes, yes, yes. I remember the only time the President of a past company ever talked to me was to congratulate me for essentially operating a compiler.
Pres: “So you managed to get the program running?”
Me: “Yeah. Got everything set up on the test machine”
Pres: “So you figured out how to set all the timestamps?”
Me: “Yeah, Jim did all the work”
Pres: “So you got it to compile and everything, good job!”
Russ…OMGWTF! Name names! E-mail me back, this is hilarious.
[...] consultants, all of whom are charging “go-away” rates, and listening to your CIO give a sunshine up the arse speech about how the new TCII (Text-Colorization Improvement Initiative) is going to revolutionize the way [...]