People can read their manager's mind

People generally don’t do what they’re told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Managers often say they’ll reward something – perhaps they even believe it. But then they proceed to reward different things.

I think people are fairly good at predicting this discrepancy. The more productive they are, the better they tend to be at predicting it. Consequently, management’s stated goals will tend to go unfulfilled whenever deep down, management doesn’t value the sort of work that goes into achieving these goals.

Unless I’m a masochist or a fool, if I have $n discretionary hours to pursue “nice-to-haves”, I’ll choose something that’s rewarded by management, or something I personally find rewarding to do. If management wants something that’s not one of those two, it will not happen.

If something is rotten in an org, the root cause is a manager who doesn’t value the work needed to fix it. They might value it being fixed, but of course no sane employee gives a shit about that. A sane employee cares whether they are valued.

There’s a subtle wording here. If 10 people work equally toward a goal but only one or two deliver the finishing blow, that one or two will tend to receive the whole of the reward. The completion is rewarded, but efforts leading to that completion are mostly moot. Prisoner’s dilemma, moral hazard, arbitrage of effort, see it however you’d like.

Managers who can’t make themselves value all important work should at least realize this: their goals do not automatically become their employees' goals. On the contrary, much or most of a manager’s job is to align these goals