A Day in the Life of a Senior Leader

Chapter 24. The Complicators, the Drama Aggregators, and the Avoiders

It’s hard to tell what drives each human. This is why my usual last question when interviewing a job applicant is a very blunt, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I ask everyone regardless of their amount of experience, because I want to see how they improvise and, often, get a hint at their motivation.

I usually have a working thesis by the time we arrive at this final question. “Ah, this person is motivated by accomplishment, great. Oh, this is a money person—that’s fine, coin-operated humans are very predictable, I find. Uh oh, I have no idea what motivates this person…dig more.”

The need to understand motivation is required because your job as a leader is to build a successful team that is full of individuals who want stuff. Compensation, opportunities, or just a quiet place to create. Understanding what they want is the start of understanding how to motivate them. If you don’t understand drive, you have nowhere to start.

While you figure that out, let me alert you to three drives that are going to consume a disproportionate amount of your time, frustrate your engineers, and erode your leadership credibility.

The Complicators

These humans like to fix stuff. Their drive starts with the observation that a part of the system, product, or process is broken. Some credible engineers fear finding this brokenness, and some light up because they now have a time to shine—let’s fix it!

Except they are the ...