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Reading timdellinger.substack.com/p/hey-wait-i... has me thinking about “performance” in employees more generally. A mistake that irks me (which this article does not make) is when people speak about “high performers” and “low performers” as some mostly-static state of being.

There are other factors, of course. I’ve cared deeply about products I’ve worked on and still resigned due to disagreeing with the CEOs ethics, or how we were forced to meet unrealistic and artificial deadlines. I’ve also had bullies for managers, which makes it challenging to perform.

In my ~18 month stint being a manager myself, the key thing I focused on was my team’s motivations. One of them had aspirations to take my job one day, another wanted to work on features they could show their mum, another just wanted to learn a new industry through building.

I met most of these motivations head on (unfortunately it was difficult for reasons outside of my control to get the person who wanted to show their mum their work onto projects that would achieve that, and I’m gutted to this day), and typically received glowing feedback from my team.