Leadership, Teamwork, and Trust: Building a Competitive Software Capability

5. Motivating Knowledge Workers

This chapter is about motivating knowledge workers to manage themselves. However, because these workers are generally highly motivated, the principal thing we need to do is to provide them with self-management skills and convince them that managing themselves will help them to better do what they already want to do. Also, of course, we must consider what you want them to do. The key, then, is aligning your objectives and those of the workers and then guiding and supporting them as they strive to meet these common objectives.

Management and Worker Objectives

In simplest terms, you want your knowledge workers to do high-quality creative work on predictable schedules and for minimum costs. Because these workers ...