11 Ways To Help Geeks Stay Motivated

As a tech professional or IT manager, working in an energised environment isn’t about big speeches or made up awards – we tend to arrive at work full of motivation. Effective management should be inclusive. It should avoid demotivating tech teams through inconsistency or excessive monitoring. Here are some great tips to help IT pros thrive.

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1. Don’t exclude technicians from decision-making

Technical people’s distress at being left out of major decisions is about more than just feeling out of the loop. They often sense that their talents have been disregarded. They often sense that their talents have been disregarded. They have been insulted. And, since many decisions are influenced by technical considerations, they also feel that the decisions themselves could be suspect, since manager’s technical interpretations would qualify as demotivating.

2. Manage meaning

Another important thing a leader can do is to give a geek some sense of the larger significance of their work. Without a sense of meaning, motivation suffers and day-to-day decisions become difficult. It is easy for geeks to become mired in the ambiguous world of questions, assumptions, and provisional facts characteristic of technical work.

3. Excessive monitoring

In technical groups, there are few bigger insults than to call someone a micromanager. The feeling of being micromanaged is profoundly demotivating. Monitoring someone excessively, intentionally or not, communicates distrust for the person being overseen. And in many kinds of technical work, it can also serve as an impediment to progress. In intellectually demanding, creative work, interruptions can disrupt thinking for long periods of time. A manager’s one-minute drop-by can result in hours of lost productivity, regaining concentration lost.

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