Motivation to Change
25 July 2010
How do you know when it’s time for a change of organization?
I recently changed my organisation. A new job in a totally different ‘vertical sector’, for a company with a very different culture to the last.
For five years I was happily earning good money1, travelling regularly for work to exotic locations, and working on difficult and interesting problems in a very demanding and dynamic industry.
I had fun, worked with interesting people and helped to deliver the odd project successfully. My career seemed to be progressing along a socially acceptable curve.
It wasn’t all roses though; the hours were insanely long, to the point that my social life was literally non-existent. The dizzying deadlines, budget constraints, finicky clients, difficult consultancy firms and legacy software were all starting to become a real drag2.
Slowly my priorities were changing3. The company’s motivations appeared to drive its culture and shape our working environment, which I recognised as an obstacle to me doing work I could be really proud of. I was becoming increasingly aware that my motivation was quite different from that of my employer and many of my fellow employees4.
I stuck with it and tried to figure out the cause of my discontent: After all, the people were pleasant, I was ‘succeeding’ and I still found the work interesting.
At first I thought we could work better. Perhaps there was a formula for this; a secret sauce5 that could make us deliver amazing software, keep our customers happy and help us leap tall buildings in a single bound. If we all pulled in the same direction, change was possible. Right?
I started researching the ways other people were working in the software industry, joined mailing list discussions, took some training, attended a couple of conferences and met with like minded people. It was an eye opener but not in the way I expected.
A new perspective
Rather than discovering a series of rules or perfect methodology for success I found that the people I looked up to were actually motivated by a genuine passion for the work and a desire to better the industry.
They wrote books for almost no financial gain, they contributed with great care to open source software, they shared their knowledge in helpful blogs and articles, they spoke at conferences for little more than the cost of their hotel room, they recorded themselves programming and shared it for free and they patiently fielded questions from a wider community of frustrated software-industry workers.
And it was infectious. Just being around people like this seemed to switch on bits of my brain that had long since been suppressed by following the path of least resistance.
My priorities began to reorder themselves almost immediately: Building great products, working with like-minded people and customers, contributing to communities and working with joy, all took on new meaning and bubbled to the top of my list.
Towards the bottom of the list went the social-norms of the motivational world; salary, bonuses, ‘perks’, big companies and impressive sounding, but ultimately meaningless, job titles.
Realising the truth
At first, it was frustrating and depressing. Realising that your motivation is incompatible with your employer’s can make you feel quite isolated. You want to behave in a way that befits your new priorities but doing so will likely not endear you to your co-workers and management (trouble maker!).
This was the moment when I knew it was time for a change. The company and I were just too different to make each other happy. We wanted different things now. I could continue doing good work for them (they were very happy with me) and they could continue remunerating me more than adequately, but we’d be living a lie.
They were the same as they’d always been. It wasn’t them, it was me. It was time for a change.
1 I got into ‘IT’ quite late, when I was thirteen, because I’d heard that there was a lot of money to be made. The dot-com bubble bursting as I left University was an excellent grounding in reality.
2 Yes, I can hear the tiny violins now. I understand that this is probably the software industry norm. But does it really have to be this way?
3 For context, my fascination with making piles of money evaporated at University where, ironically, I learned about the joy of self-education, which continues to top my motivational priority list today. I certainly learnt very little of any value from the lectures I attended but used the unlimited Internet access to teach myself about things I was interested in. I also played a lot of Quake.
4 I’m certainly not saying that if your motivation is different from mine that we can’t work together, or that you’re ‘wrong’. I suspect we will, however, naturally not see eye to eye on certain things. If those things happen to be important motivators for either or both of us, then that might cause friction.
5 For what it’s worth, I originally hoped that the magic formula for software success (there probably isn’t one) was buried somewhere in Agile (it isn’t), but I think that’s more a failing of the way Agile has been marketed and people’s – mine included – belief in marketing rather than a failing of Agile, per se.