Improving team performance
In this chapter, we have learned powerful techniques to focus your efforts and work toward ideal outcomes as an engineering manager. Along with your success definition, performance targets, and desired emergent states, you need ways to motivate, mentor, and coach your engineers.
Motivating your team
In Chapter 6, we introduced the importance of motivation in doing our best work, but only in the context of supporting production systems. Maintaining and encouraging motivation in your team is helpful in all aspects of their work, so let’s look at motivation more broadly now.
If you believe that workers are inherently lazy, then you have what Douglas McGregor dubbed a Theory X management style. McGregor’s hypothesis calls managers Theory Y if they make positive assumptions about their teams, believing they are genuinely interested in and committed to their work. Theory X managers make negative assumptions, viewing their team as self-serving...
