The difficult/fun part of management is identifying each person's personal motivations and making sure you tailor your "style" to match. Someone may be best motivated by bonuses but it's also equally likely that someone on your team may best be motivated by attending a conference, ability to work from home, working on new technologies, raising their personal brand by blogging, writing articles, etc.

Without the "soft" side, management can be done by a machine, which is why I really dislike management-by-the-numbers. Why should a "manager" get paid more money than "doers" if all the manager does is print out a Gantt chart, say "Improve performance!" and crack the whip "Work harder!"? Makes no sense.

One important thing: Do not treat them all the same. While this is convenient, individuals need different ways of acknowledgement.

Related: http://www.5lovelanguages.com/

can't repeat this enough.

I want acknowledgement in two forms.

1) personal respect

2) pay me

Number one makes me happy, number two makes me think you value me. When I'm happy and feeling valued then I don't think about leaving.

Other people I work with are different. They want management positions or titles or nights out.

That makes sense to me. Nothing like being treated in cookie-cutter fashion to make you dubious about the sincerity of feedback/rewards/whatever.

In my experience, managers don't know how to do my job. So it's nearly impossible for them to give feedback other than "fine" or "it's working, so it's good enough for me".

The people that do know how to do my job don't become managers - because they prefer to be engineers.

So while the idea of this seems good, I don't think it's really practical...or I've been working at the wrong places.

Respectfully, I think you have been working at some of the wrong places.

The manager may not know how to _do_ your job, but she probably can tell if (a) you got good results (b) you put a lot of energy into it (even if it didn't achieve the results you hoped for) (c) you contributed to the team in a visible way (e.g. "I really appreciated how much time you spent with the intern").

None of that means the manager could write code (or whatever) as well as you do. She has you on the team because you do that task well. But letting you know that the work you do is appreciated and valued and makes a difference... that doesn't require that the admiration be for your elegant indenting style or your brilliant use of recursive descent.

A good manager who didn't necessarily understand the tech involved often can bring out the best in her people by getting _them_ to talk. I had one manager ask, after a project was done, "What would you do differently, if you had this to do again?" Asking that doesn't mean that he would have made decisions any better than I did, but it does mean that he was doing his best to help me self-assess and get better at my job.

That's an interesting angle I hadn't thought of—-thanks for bringing it up. I would imagine that in such cases a manager doesn't need to know the intricacies of how an engineer does the work. More like, the manager just has to define and gauge the results. Work with engineers to define rational deliverables, say? Quality of product? That's a whole science in and of itself, but I can't imagine how a boss would have the ability to give you feedback without going through that process, even if it's a rigorous task to determine how to measure the work. Setting goals/deliverables/timetables/QoS is a task for which, I'd think, your input would be instrumental.

If that's the case, so be it. Sometimes no news is good news.

Flip side is managers who strive to find something, anything, always, wrong with your work. They may or may not realize it. If you suspect you're working for one, try leaving a deliberate flaw for him to find, or inject self-depricating humor, every encounter; if this seems to satiate the need to criticize, time to go.

> I'm a security officer in a hospital, and it's truly a thankless job

When my infant son was in the NICU, I wasn't allowed to stay overnight with him. I thanked every single security guard every single time I interacted with them.

The picture at the top made me think "office with natural light." Seriously, I would be willing to shank a mofo for more natural light at work.

Two things I love about my current office is the amount of natural light we get (odd for me since I usually don't like a ton of sunlight, but somehow it works) and the big enclosed interior spaces (it's probably 40-45 feet from floor to ceiling in places): http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/san-bruno/#media=...

If you can't change your office, have you thought about getting a "happy light" ? I have some friends who lived in former East Germany for a few years and their sleep and mood improved a lot when they bought one for ~$30 and spent 30 minutes reading in front of it each day.

Ha! One benefit of getting laid off years ago: I work in my sunny home. My sympathy to cubicle dwellers!

Curious: Does your boss know this?