Maybe it's the game that's the problem

Watching the season premiere of Celebrity Apprentice last Sunday, one of the contestants made a comment that shocked me. (I watched the kickoff last year too, and that was the only episode I saw.)

The comment was that Dennis Rodman should be fired from the team because Rodman didn't have a good work ethic. What?

We're talking about one of the greatest rebounders and defenders in the history of basketball. He won two Defensive Players of the Year awards. He once had 34 rebounds in a single game. His contracts often contained memberships to 24-hour weight-lifting gyms, because he worked out so much.

Clearly, he does not suffer from a work ethic problem.

But, it is also true that Rodman contributed very little to his team on Celebrity Apprentice. He required heavy coaxing for every small effort.

He stated that it was never clear to him what everyone's role was, including his own. He could have been just rationalizing his bad behavior, but there is still some truth there. Rodman's the kind of guy who needs to know his role, who likes to focus. In his basketball career, he didn't look to score very often.

The primary challenge of a software development manager is to motivate the team. People aren't successful, and often the reason is, "He wasn't motivated" or "She wasn't a hard worker." This is particularly relevant to software development because most companies want only self-motivated coders, due to the solitary nature of so much of the work. "Here's the source code, here's a problem description, go to it." Frequently, there's no training. If you're the right person, you'll figure it out.

Yet, how many Dennis Rodman's get the boot as a result? No doubt, motivating someone like Rodman is a huge challenge. (Fortunately, he would surely hate coding.) On the wrong team or with the wrong coach, Rodman was only a disruption, a "bad apple." Instead, he was a major factor in 5 championship teams.

Some people really do have a poor work ethic. A software manager has to distinguish the ones who aren't motivated from the ones aren't getting the right motivation.

So let me change that sentence. The primary challenge of a software development manager is to figure out what motivates each team member. Everything else flows from there.