Roy vandeWater: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agile Weekly Podcast. I’m Roy vandeWater.

Derek Neighbors: I’m Derek Neighbors.

Clayton Lengel‑Zigich: I am Clayton Lengel‑Zigich.

Standard Patterns Of Growth

Roy: Today we are talking about establishing a growth path within an Agile organization. The general idea that you have a bunch of employees within the organization that all want to improve themselves, or maybe don’t want to improve themselves. How do you show them what they can do to get better, and incentivize them to want to do those things?

Clayton: Do you mean like get a raise?

Roy: Sure, I think that’s the classic management 1.0 way of incentivizing people to get better.

Clayton: “I want to climb the ladder, so I can make more money.”

Roy: You start out as junior developer, you go to senior developer, then you become manager, then you eventually become a [indecipherable 00:52 ] level officer. Each one of those titles is associated with a salary band. I think that’s…

Clayton: Standard corporate stuff?

Roy: Very conventional. Then you have less people at the top, so it’s a standard pyramid structure. What else can you do?

Money As A Motivator

Clayton: I guess we should talk about money as a motivator. I think there’s some literature out there, and some studies that show for knowledge work, money is not a great motivator. There are probably some people who still associate money as a status thing, or titles as a status thing, so they want that thing.

Roy: That’s still the way that most businesses do it today, so I would definitely say the majority of people think that way.

Clayton: Would an Agile organization be somewhere that people are so engaged in the work that giving them a bump in their pay is not “Make it or break it” territory?

Roy: There are definitely studies that show that once you get beyond a certain salary range, I think I heard you talking about it, Clayton. I think you said 80K or so.

Clayton: I think that’s what is in Drive.

Roy: I’m sure that number may be different, it’s probably different for every person. But that beyond a certain salary range, people are much more motivated by the work they do, and the people they are surrounded with, and the environment in which they work, than they are by the actual salary.

If you look on the list of things that they look at, as far as making a decision to switch to a new job, it’s very low on the list. They need to make enough to survive, but other than living comfortably, they don’t really need all that much money. Most people aren’t choosing a new job to get rich. The people that do that become entrepreneurs.

The Free Market Dictates Something Different

Derek: I think some of the things you potentially limit is if you have good people somewhere else that you are trying to attract, the problem is if you say 60K or 70K, or whatever that number is, the number you care about, then as long as you provide meaningful awesome work, that’s great.

What if there’s this really great person but they’re making 130,000, and their mortgage and their car payments and everything total up to that? In order to attract that really good person now, that person has to sell their home, sell their house.

I think that if everybody was level set starting at zero, I absolutely think that that works. But how do you be competitive, and luring good talent, when other companies aren’t following that same suit? What happens? How do you deal with that?

Roy: I can understand what you’re saying there, but I think there’s a difference between trying to lure people over with your culture and then dropping the salary down, and matching their existing salary but then luring them over with the culture. What I’m saying what wouldn’t work is having a crappy culture but having an awesome salary, that’s better then what their making now.

Making Great Culture The Baseline

Derek: Yes, I agree with that. But I think one of the things that you start to do is, do managers start to have a conversation where they really talk about, “Hey let’s level set, and it’s really not about money, and let’s make the culture really awesome.” You make the culture really awesome and you start to set this baseline.

What happens when there’s an incredible employee that everybody wants on the team. Everything’s great, but now you’re going to pay that person twice what the current people are there because they can’t do it? There starts to become some issues.

I absolutely agree that throwing money at the problem to make existing employees more happy is not a path to being good.

If you’re paying someone 80K, and you’re giving them crappy work and they’re not doing what you want, and they’re not learning, and they’re not growing, giving them 90K is not going to make them happy, is not going to make them grow. It might bump them for a few months or a year, but then they’re going to be right back to where they were at.

But I think it’s sticky if you just start to say, “Oh we don’t need to pay anybody more than the base that Dan says, and then life is good from there.” I don’t think that’s a very realistic approach either.

A Better Path Of Career Advancement

Clayton: Getting back to your original question about growth, or career growth. I think you had talked about how do people advance, and we were talking about the corporate ladder.

What I’m wondering is, what could a manger or management team do to outline some things, like a better path? What could they do to set expectations so that people knew, “Hey, in order to level up, these are the things I’d have to do”?

Roy: I feel like those expectations and those things to level up need to come from the team, or need to be based in the reality of that organization. Just saying “I need you to work twice as much,” if there is no demand for that, that may not be realistic.

I feel like it needs to be very applicable to an individual team. Certain teams may value a certain type of behavior more than others.

Holding Yourself Accountable To Your Team

Derek: Let’s say that, as an organization, that you decide that technical excellence is very important. Would it be fair for someone to say, “Hey, if you want to level up, and be viewed as the next level in the organization,” that you would always demand technical excellence? Here are some different ways that you could show that that’s happening. Is that the kind of expectation or metric you could use?

Roy: I kind of agree with that, but like I said, I feel like if people feel they are holding themselves accountable to the team…I am a part of a team of so many people. As a team, we run into this problem, and as part of solving that problem, I need to get better technical excellence.

Let’s say we are a team that’s having huge problems with technical debt. Because I am passionate about the team, and I demand that my team does great work, I am going to have to become passionate about technical debt in order to make my team great. But if it’s not a problem, if technical debt’s not a problem, for whatever reason, then maybe I don’t need to be awesome at technical excellence.

That’s kind of where I am coming from. It’s applicable to the individual team, and the problems that they are facing.

Encouraging People To Learn

Derek: I think there’s a couple of problems, potentially, with that. One is you are saying that “I can impose on you that you have to grow, you don’t get a choice about that, but then it is your choice on what you can grow on.”

I’d say, “If it’s so important that I get to make all the choices, why do you get to make the choice whether I grow or not? What if I think I am really great, and I don’t care, and I don’t think that I need to grow to deliver this product? STFU.”

The only reason I bring it back to that is I think that what we’re really talking about is, “How do you encourage people to learn?” My answer to that largely is, “I don’t think you can.”

What I mean is, I think that you got growth‑minded people and you’ve got fixed‑mindset people. I think that the first thing that continuous learning organizations have to do is starting to say “We’re not going to waste our time with people who don’t want to learn.”

Converting People From Fixed Mindset to Growth Mindset

Roy: But you can convert people from fixed mindset into a growth mindset. I think that the best way to do that would be through the team, and have a team really be pushing for that type of behavior.

As a manager, I wouldn’t be encouraging people to learn. As a manager, I would be demanding greatness from a team, and the team would figure out a way to help Clayton learn whatever.

Derek: But wouldn’t it be fair