Understanding individual motivations unlocks team performance

Understanding motivations is, in my opinion, one of the keys to running a team successfully and driving an idea forward.

Anytime someone joins my team, especially on the engineering side, because I think this is where there's the greatest variance, I will literally ask, 'How much do you like being involved in product decisions?'

When you hear people say, 'That's not my job.' That's actually the reward system speaking, saying, 'I get rewarded for the things in this list and this thing that you're talking about is not on my reward list and I therefore am not interested in it.'

The primary thing that people are negligent in is answering the question, why should I do this, to their team. And saying, you should do this because it's your job is a form of negligence.

If you ask everyone on the team what engagement means separately, you can compare answers and most likely, people are saying different things. And if you guys can't agree internally on what to do or what engagement means, it's very difficult to build a product by which your users understand what to do.