Season 2 - Episode 11: Nurture Employee Passion
Sometimes employees can be stubborn. And whether or not that’s a bad thing, really depends. In some cases that stubbornness is actually disguised passion. There’s something they’re good at, they understand, and know could help move the company forward - if only, those pesky founders would listen. It’s time to swallow your pride, give your employees autonomy, and ride the employee passion bus to startup glory station.
Background Story
Chris again. It was 2020, shortly into the pandemic, and our mobile development platform provider decided to call it quits and sunset the platform we’d used to build all our apps. It was a shitstorm. We punched the glass of the figurative fire ax.
We were facing a complete rewrite of all our mobile code to a new platform, but the question was “which” mobile development platform should we move to? One of our developers stepped up, and was passionate about using React Native as our new mobile development platform. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but I could tell that since this developer was so passionate about React Native, it was a great opportunity to let the developer take charge of the project. It couldn’t have worked out better.
Outline
It’s not About You: Good leaders don’t do all the work, they find ways to get the best out of others. In this case, leverage passion to get the most out of staff.
Intrinsic is the Best Trinsic: It’s not about money either. If the employee believes in what they’re doing then both the quantity and quality of their work will improve.
Crisitunity: Never waste a great crisis. Rewriting all our code gave us an opportunity to “elevate” our code and make improvements that we wouldn’t have ever done before.
Busted Myths
The myth is that the founders, CEO, CTO, etc need to always make all the big decisions for the company. Wrong. Don’t make decisions in a vacuum. Make the people around you better.
Learnings
The reality is that there are incredible opportunities to leverage the passion of your employees to move your company forward. They’re your employees - implicitly you trust them or why did you hire them? They can and will contribute to the strategic direction of your company, no matter their seniority or experience.
And at times, it’ll be tough because you might not know a lot about the thing they’re passionate about. It’s on you to listen, learn, and work with those employees.
This idea that employees can be more productive, engaged, and do great work, doesn’t always need to come from extrinsic motivators like salary, title, etc. Instead, giving your employees the autonomy to drive the direction of the company in the ways that they think will be most successful can have a huge impact. Their productivity - that is, the quantity and quality of the work will increase tremendously if you can tap the intrinsic motivators, the employees personal and psychological growth.
This is backed up by some very old research from back in 1985 by two American psychologists, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci. They developed the theory of self-determination that asserted that intrinsic human motivation is the foundational catalyst of human success and fulfillment.
Going back to the re-write of all our mobile code. Most companies would see this as a huge potential problem. Some companies, depending on the stage of growth, might see this as a WFIO moment. It’s true, having to rewrite all your mobile code is a crisis. But let’s keep a few things in mind:
Never waste a great crisis: Rewriting all our code gave us an opportunity to “elevate” our code and make improvements that we wouldn’t have ever done before.
We were able to simultaneously implement all mobile code related items on our product backlog.
Since we had an existing codebase, albeit becoming obsolete, we had a very clear scope of work for the development. There were very few “unknowns” in the project. So the amount of time required to rewrite our mobile codebase was a fraction of the time required to do the initial implementation.
We empowered the employee who was super passionate about this to do it! And she ran the whole thing and crushed it. We didn’t know she had it in her. She was a solid coder but she had never taken on anything of this scope or importance.
Summary
Keep your eyes open for opportunities to engage your passionate employees.
Intrinsic motivators are far more powerful that anyone expects.
A product that was built by a motivated passionate employee will always be far better than the alternative.
Never waste a good crisis.
Data And References
The intrinsic motivation of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci
By Delia O’Hara
American Psychological Association - Date created: 2017