Leadership — The Two Great Obstacles to Motivating Others

The two great obstacles to motivating others

The series moves into part three: motivation — the M in MOI. The innovation part was about ideas and direction; the motivation part answers something more basic: why doesn’t anyone move when you say something?

The book’s answer isn’t kind: the problem usually isn’t “them”, it’s you — and there are two obstacles you can’t see.

Obstacle one: other people are invisible

The first obstacle is that there are no other people in a top problem-solver’s story of their own success.

An engineer who got here on raw ability easily comes to believe their achievements were produced alone — everyone else was either invisible or in the way. That isn’t a character problem, it’s a perspective problem: while you’re solving, your eyes are on the problem, not on the people around you; so when you turn around and tell the story, naturally it contains only you and the problem.

But motivating people starts with being able to see them — seeing what others contributed, and seeing what you look like in their eyes. This is the mirror image of the first wall in the innovation part: not seeing yourself blocks innovation, not seeing others blocks motivation. Weinberg’s mirror was the same mirror all along — this time it’s pointed at “are there other people in your field of view”. The first gate for an individual star turning into a leader is realising this: from here on, everything you achieve happens through other people — they can’t be invisible any more.

Obstacle two: treating people like computers taking instructions

The second obstacle is believing people receive and execute instructions the way a computer does.

Engineers step into this one especially easily — we spend every day issuing instructions to actual computers, and in that world input equals output. People don’t run like that. What you say has to pass through a whole chain — heard → interpreted → felt → response decided — and every step can distort it, while the whole chain is invisible to you.

That chain explains two counter-intuitive things:

1. A more precise instruction doesn’t make things go more smoothly. The more precise it is, the more frustrated you are when it still comes out distorted — and the more you’ve squeezed out the other person’s judgment and creativity. What you actually want isn’t precise execution; it’s for them to understand the purpose and then use their own judgment to get it right — which was the reason you kept a person instead of writing a program in the first place.
2. The “people versus task” trade-off is a false one. You often hear people sorting themselves into “am I task-oriented or people-oriented”, but in complex work the task is made of people’s interpretations, feelings and judgments — people are the task. Setting people aside to focus on the task means setting aside the mechanism the task actually runs on.

Two obstacles, one underlying illness

Not seeing other people, and treating people like computers — underneath, they’re the same thing: never actually understanding the person. Obstacle one is not looking at all (they’re invisible); obstacle two is looking through the wrong model (a person as a predictable executor). Motivation doesn’t start with phrasing or with designing rewards and punishments. It starts with admitting that every person has a chain inside them you can’t see, and that you have to understand it before you’ve earned the right to talk about “getting people to move”.

Reflection

Re-reading a sentence of my own

Writing the last post, in the peak-moments section, I ended with this: “not every member understood any of this, and I was happy and proud anyway.”

I wrote it as a virtue — pride doesn’t need an audience, B = 9, the purity of the craftsman. That reading holds completely in the craftsman’s frame, and I’m not taking it back. But hold this chapter’s mirror up to the same sentence and another layer appears: where are the other people in my peak-moment story? It contains me, the problem, and the beautiful solution — the teammates are background. And “the members didn’t understand it” is something I slipped past as a neutral fact, without ever asking: if the team couldn’t see the value of that optimisation, that means I failed to translate why it mattered — which isn’t their homework, it’s the leader’s.

It also taught me something more about my own vision. “Understand it, then leave it in a form other people can take away” — I used to think that line was about diagrams and tests. Now I see it has another meaning for leading people: making people see the value is a precondition for motivating them. Nobody is ever motivated by something they can’t see the point of.

From KPIs to understanding people

I’d already believed in obstacle two’s distortion chain; I just hadn’t connected the two.

Years ago, watching Simon Sinek on leadership, one point became a conviction: a manager can’t look at people only through KPIs. Say it again in this chapter’s language: a KPI is the very last output of that chain — “what they do” — and judging a person by the output alone skips every step in between: what they heard, how they read it, what constraints they were deciding under. It’s the same move as defending that official who couldn’t answer the question in the last post: reconstruct the structure a person sits in, then decide how to judge them. Instructions and KPIs are the same laziness — a convenient proxy that saves you the effort of actually understanding someone.

So “understand it before you judge it” walks into the motivation part with the object changed from code and ideas to people, and not a word of the rule needs changing: before you judge someone, understand their chain; before you try to get someone moving, understand why they aren’t. Issuing an instruction is fast, understanding a person is slow — but the fast road leads to execution, and only the slow one leads to motivation.