14 Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose (aka "DON'T DIE!")

The Innovation Engineer Podcast

What motivates people? Obviously there is the need to eat and pay your bills. But we often do things where we are not paid, we work longer or volunteer. You don’t find motivation, nor do you get motivation, but you create motivation. But how? Well, today we talk about Master, Autonomy and Purpose - the Motivation 3.0 framework defined by Daniel Pink in his book drive.

Does Mastery mean writing three unit tests for each line of code? Does every company need a big purpose like saving the world? Is it even worth working for an agency? Can you even be a good engineer if you don’t program in your free time? Do all product owners micro manage their engineers? And remember the basics: Don’t die!

Actually thinking about what mastery, autonomy and purpose means helps us to see why people are doing the things that they are doing. And not only understanding others, it’s also like looking into the mirror and understanding why I have this passion for this specific project or the passion to go into that one direction.

Or in leadership, understanding the people you are working with, why they are driven to a certain direction, or why they are behaving in a certain way, and trying to map this into their drive for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. You are not a manager anymore managing people. You are a leader and those are your new tools.

Hosted by two former CTOs who decided to stay hands-on, both veterans of the industry with decades of experience as engineers. You can expect many stories from current and past ventures. Meet Innovation Engineer Tarek Madany Mamlouk and Principal Engineer Sebastian "Waschi" Waschnick.

Key Takeaways

• Read this book and understand what motivates people, it’s the first step as a leader.
• You should own your drive to become happy. Happiness in what you’re doing in your job, in your daily life and can be supported by understanding your own Motivation 3.0
• As a leader: Try understanding the people you are working with, why they are driven to a certain direction, or why they are behaving in a certain way. Try to map this into their drive for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
• By understanding others and seeing what other people are driven to helps creating empathy and a very collaborative culture and this helps you align with other people.
• How good you are at your job has nothing to do with if it's your calling, you just do it for money or whatever reason. There is no direct correlation between it. There are software engineers out there who don't do programming in their spare time. And they can still be great. They could also be bad. But there's no correlation if they do stuff in their spare time or not.
• Be open for purpose. Purpose might not be that obvious, like saving the world. Your personal purpose, the things that you are striving for, can be very abstract. So be open to anything that you are striving for. It might not be obvious.
• As a manager and in every role, try to always delegate decisions down. Don't make decisions on yourself, except if they were delegated to you.

Show Notes

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:00 Bitly is a great place to work
• 2:07 Let’s talk about Drive and what the book is about
• 8:45 What type of book is it?
• 10:43 How good you are does not depend if it’s your calling or just a job
• 11:58 From playing with Lego to building software
• 14:05 The best podcast for software engineers
• 14:35 How extrinsic rewards or penalties undermine intrinsic motivation
• 16:03 The Tom Sawyer Effect
• 17:57 Purpose - New Work Wokeness
• 24:58 OKR to the rescue (again)
• 27:37 Micromanagement kills motivation
• 29:10 Always delegate decisions down
• 29:32 Micro managing Product Owners (how dare you)
• 34:14 Mastery - the hardest topic to get your head around
• 38:29 The goal is not only the Purpose, but also becoming good (Mastery)
• 39:53 Mastery is not writing tests for everything
• 34:38 Using Motivation 3.0 to think about cultural fit while recruiting
• 45:55 I’m a Java developer, I don’t care about anything else
• 48:50 Summary and Key Takeaways

Stuff we mentioned

We really need to talk more about cool gadgets - I promise we will do this more in future episodes!

• 📘 Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• 📘 Rework
• 📘 Management 3.0

What should we talk about next?

• YouTube: The Innovation Engineer
• Leave a review/comment on YouTube; it's like podcasts, but with video.
• Check our website and find everything you never knew you needed

---

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.