Successful businesses and new companies have a lot of key elements contributing to their success. One of them, and a really important one too, is MANAGEMENT. Many businesses started to change the way they are managing people, or they started with a “workers as people” type of management from the beginning. Workers are valued as individuals, they are given more power and more trust; also, the decisions are not taken somewhere at the top and communicated to the workers, instead they are taken together with the workers; managers talk to their people and take decisions based on their feedback. We started to understand that two or more heads are better than one. It was about time, right?
There are many types of management, but if we think about how these types of management see people, we can divide them into two categories. Let’s dive a little bit into these two and see how they influence our company and our company’s success. For the sake of example I will talk about management in a software company, but the examples and observations apply to other types too.

“Engineers as Resources” type of management

Many companies, mostly older companies, use the type of management where they treat engineers as simple resources. No one is irreplaceable or even important and management treats them like faceless people, with no individuality. They don’t care what an engineer does as long as it works fine, to them he’s a simple, replaceable resource. It’s not important if that engineer likes what he’s doing, it’s not important if he’s motivated to do that, it’s not important if he’s better at something else, it’s not even important if he’s looking for another job. All that’s important is for the project to be finished on time and on budget.
Some of these companies try to say that they believe in collaboration, trust, talent, but these are empty words. How can you believe in and pay for talent when you don’t value each individual?
This type of managers also tend to lie to their people. They tend to tell and repeat unclear things and keep their people into an uncertainness. They think that it’s better to lie than to tell the truth because people are not smart enough to understand certain things. Like for example “if this project is not delivered on time and as requested we’ll all be fired”. Instead of transmitting this message, managers say “it’s very important to deliver this on time because … or …”. I think transmitting the truth does more than enough and it motivates people enough to do their job right. If telling the truth doesn’t do the job, than no other lie would.

Problems caused by the “Engineers as Resources” type of management

People working in these types of companies don’t enjoy their work. They don’t enjoy what they’re doing. They don’t feel motivated and they don’t contribute to innovation. They simply execute their tasks and wait for the day to be over. The management team is responsible for creating the right environment. It’s your job to start care about your people, it’s your job to start knowing what they like, what they’re good at, what stimulates them and where they want to go, where they want to evolve.

“Engineers as People” type of management

This type of management cares about the people. They care about each and every engineer. They care about what stimulates his imagination, they care about what motivates him most, they care about his plans or even help him plan his future. This type of managers don’t lie to their people, they are straight forward and honest to their people. Even more, they make decisions based on the team’s feedback and give engineers the opportunity to work on what they want. Let’s take Google for example. Engineers at Google have 20% of their time allocated to work on whatever they want. This means that they can work on anything they want, they can work on new products, they can work on new services, they can work on whatever they wanted to do but probably didn’t have time to do it. From this were born most of the Google’s services. They believe in empowering people. They believe in letting the engineer evolve in whichever direction they want. That’s why they’re so successful. There are many other examples. I’ve read an article a while ago about managers at BMW talking to people on the assembly line, about workers submitting new ideas and being listened by the managers.

Problems solved by the “Engineers as People” type of management

The biggest problem into a company is motivating people. Making them more efficient. Well, here’s the recipe. Let people work on what they want. Listen to them. Give them the possibility to be creative. Involve them when making decisions. Show them that their opinion is important (and I mean really show it, not just tell it). Give power to your team and they will surprise you. Also, allow them to change the environment. Don’t just put them into cubicles with no individuality. How can an engineer feel creative into his own cubicle when all the cubicles look the same. Better yet, stop using cubicles . Start creating the right environment and you will get the productivity that you’ve waited for so long.

Adaptability Century

What type of management to use in the adaptability century? We thought that the 21st century is the speed century, but actually it’s the Adaptability and Speed century. Deliver quickly and with real features. For this you need innovation, you need you’re people’s full capacity, their full intelligence and their full imagination. Start stimulating that. Make people work at their full capacity and make them enjoy it and you’ll be able to achieve anything.

Do YOU need to change anything?

Think about your company, and then think about this: do people at your company wait for 5 PM to go home? Do they start looking their watches every 5 minutes starting from 4 PM or even earlier? Then you need to change something and you need to start right now. Don’t invest lots of money on consulting some specialized companies, instead start asking your people what they want. Ask them how to improve their life and their experiences at work. It might be hard at the beginning but it will pay off in the end.

Why Motivation?

Ok, I know your first question: why another blog on personal development? I know a lot of great blogs or websites focusing on personal development. My favorite ones are www.stevepavlina.com, www.paulgraham.com, www.jamesray.com and others. I read regularly blogs about personal development and the main topics are: making money, loosing weight, starting your own startup, and I agree these are very important topics. Though I’m pretty sure we all stop at some point and ask ourselves: am I capable to start my own business? am I capable to improve my relationships? am I capable to become a manager into the company I work for? am I capable to change anything? am I capable to make the next step? or even worse: I cannot start a business, I will never be a manager because I don’t have the skills, I will always have lousy relationships, I will never be capable of doing this or doing that.

What is Motivation?

I see all day people complaining about how hard their life is, how they don’t make enough money, how they are caught inside a bad relationship, how they are stuck into a lousy job. What’s very interesting to me is that when you say: “Life is hard and nothing comes from thin air” everyone will agree. But if you say: “Life is easy and you can have everything you want”, people will start laughing.
Starting from childhood, we’ve been told that our life has already been decided, that we’re very small and we don’t have any power, that there’s something called Destiny and we have no control over it. So when we see a successful person we say “that’s a lucky person, and that s/he’s been destined to be successful”. Or we simply say “s/he’s got lucky”.
The only difference between that person and the ones still waiting is MINDSET. That person has found the MOTIVATION for what s/he’s doing. That person has started to write her/his own destiny.

The difference between those that do and those that talk about doing is MOTIVATION. Motivation is the engine that drives all the great things in our lives and without motivation nothing spectacular will ever happen.
Probably a rushed answer will be: money is the motivation for all this. Well…actually it’s not. Money is only a vehicle to whatever it is that we want. The motivation is different than that and it’s personal and might be different for each one of us.

How do I find the Motivation?

Allan Pease has made an interesting list about our primal motivations. Your motivation might be: Financial independence, Having your own business, More income, Traveling, Having more spare time, Personal development, Helping others, Meeting new people, Retirement, and so on. Your primal motivation might be on this list, or it might be something else. In order to find it, think about what drives you, what would you like to achieve if you didn’t have any constraints? do you want money? or do you want freedom? do you want to travel? do you want to sail? do you want to run your own business? do you want to be a manager? do you want to be a great technical person? do you want to have financial independence? What do you want? When you find the right answer you will know what is your primal motivation.

How do I use the Motivation?

There are two discussions here: motivating yourself for achieving a personal goal and motivating the ones around you for achieving a common goal.

Motivation is our engine, it’s our fuel and it’s our direction. If motivation is strong enough, the engine will not stop, the fuel will not finish and the direction will not change until we get where we want. It’s easy to understand this, and most people start on this path. But if and when they fail, most of them start thinking: “I knew I couldn’t do this”, “I knew there’s no reason to try”, “I knew I would fail”. Do you see the mindset here? This is a closed mindset, it’s the mindset that separates greatness from mediocrity. It’s the mindset that separates success from failure. Let’s take businesses for example. Do you think there are any successful businessmen who didn’t fail at some point? The number of failures is probably equal or even bigger than the number of successes. Though, how did these successful businessmen succeed? How could they, if they failed? Well, they never stopped. Their mindset was: “I will keep doing this until I succeed. I will never stop until I reach my goals”. And they didn’t. And sooner or later they achieved their goals. The MOTIVATION was strong enough, so the MINDSET was the right one.

If we expand that, we can think about motivating people around us. Let’s say I’m a manager in a successful company and I have a team working on a project. What’s my role as a manager? Do I have to keep pushing people around, keep stressing people with the deadlines, do I have to ask them day by day what are they doing? I think not. All these are effects not cause, they are effects of people not being motivated enough. Project management is all about creating the right cause, motivating people, it’s about creating the right environment, and if we create the cause of motivated people, the effect will be great deliveries and respected deadlines. I will come back on this subject in a later article, I just wanted to stress out the role of motivation inside teams.

That’s all for now on motivation. I will focus on motivation most of the time but I will also write about New types of businesses, New types of management, New types of startups.

What’s next?

My next articles will be:

Find the power to achieve your goals or WHY do people keep saying “I don’t have the power to change anything (at my job, in my business relations, in my personal relations)”.

Advertising Industry Crossroad - why not sharing the money with the consumers? After all, they are the ones clicking on the links or watching the adds, right? Share with them and you’ll achieve the main goal of advertising: people will stop ignoring the adds (text, video, pictures).

New type of management in the Adaptability Century

Motivation inside your company - creating the right environment for a productivity boost

Why some people excel and others don’t - mindset, believe in your own potential

All these articles and what comes after them, will focus on motivation and mindset. So stay tuned!