Why We Work

I remember reading lots of emails with the super passive-aggressive opening sentence: “As you may already be aware…” Usually, I am not aware. However, I want to take advantage of that opening this week.

As you may already be aware, I did not succeed in writing a blog post on Sunday. This is probably the correct use of that opening statement. You may award me five stars on Yelp.

Instead of offering a miserable excuse for the delay, I am just going to write today and pretend that the delay never happened.

You will hear me frequently blibbity-blabbiting on the subjects of Hiring and Team Building. These are things I love to do. Today I want to talk about people’s motivation to work.

I always try to understand people’s motivations for showing up to work and doing their very best. That is the ultimate goal of the first five or six questions I ask people when I interview them. I think this is very important because your motivations for work are one of the big reasons some people get bounced out of the hiring funnel. I am speaking a little from experience here because one of my motivations for working really hard is that I have many mouths to feed and “getting paid” is a very important thing for me. I know this has been used to bounce me from the hiring queue in some places. “John is a family man with many children and is an expensive employee” is something that my spies have told me when I have been rejected from a role. I can respect that from some people, and from others who have had “the Silicon Valley exits”, I do feel a little hurt by it. I guess I managed to survive, but I do have a few professional acquaintances who I will avoid for this reason.

Another motivation for people is passion. I agree that there is a high correlation between passion and career success for a lot of people. I also think it is a huge false-negative filter that is costing many companies very talented candidates. I am okay with this because I have my own unique way of looking at employee motivations, and a subset of replacement motivations if they are not highly passionate about a work subject.

Wanting specific work experience is another motivation for people. I make the joke with some people that if you want a job at EA, you need to work three years at Activision, and if you want to work at Activision, you need three years at EA. I have been blessed with many opportunities that have let me create “gateway jobs” for people to explore careers in the games industry. Some people filter out candidates who do not have the required experience for a role.

I also think that people look at the size of a company. I learned late in my career that there are some big benefits to having at least one large-scale company as a previous employer. It is hard to qualify for some interesting jobs if you have twenty years of burning startups to the ground. Many human resources people just look at the shape of my LinkedIn profile and quietly throw up in their mouth—just a little.

The one motivation I like the most, and one that I think is not very heavily considered by a lot of hiring managers, is curiosity. I have written previously about how I will break apart an interview as a candidate as a part of my own process. I have not met many leaders who love that kind of behavior. I think that curiosity is among the most important qualities a knowledge worker of any kind can possess, and I love people who ask questions. Quite often this is a symptom of being a lifelong learner and helps people adapt to new roles and new domains. This is generally the one that gets me hired somewhere, so I have some real bias toward wearing my “I heart curiosity” t-shirt.

So when you are looking at a new job, you should always sit down and ask yourself what will motivate you to be successful. I see lots of people tilting at FAANG jobs where they broadcast stupendous pay packages. I also see lots of other people who shy away from some jobs because the company is in a space they consider boring. Whether it is a paycheck, passion, career experience, the size of the company, or just pure curiosity, you should understand why someone is interested in working on your team. It will help you to hire them and more importantly it will help you to retain them in the long term. It has helped me to identify people I would want to hire again and again.

This was a little late, and I want to thank you for your patience in addition to thanking you for reading along.

I am down to just a few more weeks of interesting posts. It is time for me to start reloading my monitor with Post-It notes for future conversations.

See you next week!