In the first year of being a manager, I spent a lot of time answering the question — what was each person in the team seeking from their work and how could I orchestrate it? There’s a lot of great research in this area [¹, ²], but these five team needs kept coming up in some flavor or form during my search:

• Autonomy
• Purpose
• Mastery
• Connection
• Recognition

I wanted to write this article to discuss these along with my own reflections on what could be done to foster them and some anti-patterns I noticed managers might slide into.

1. Autonomy

This isn’t about letting people run wild and directionless. It’s about giving them control over how they do their work and drive towards the goals of the team. It should be a conscious act on the part of a manager. Something you strive for everyday. When your team members feel trusted to make decisions, it hits the trifecta: they come up with new solutions, they are productive, and they are motivated and happier.

How to foster it:

• Set clear high-level goals and expectations but allow flexibility in execution. Instead of micromanaging, ask: “What’s your approach?” and give high-level feedback.
• Find the right opportunities where they can exercise their autonomy. Discuss with them on how you’re planning to find these projects and keep them in the loop.
• Provide resources and remove obstacles, but don’t hover.
• Develop a tolerance for failure. When people experiment with novel ideas, some of them are bound to fail. Innovation cannot happen without experimentation. Extract the most from the failures, but give creative space for such high-impact work. Instead of dictating how things get done, setting guardrails is a good way to balance autonomy and accountability.

Anti-patterns to avoid:

• Offering “fake autonomy.” For example, asking for input on decisions you’ve already made or giving autonomy on uninteresting or non-impactful projects.
• Overloading the team with decisions without proper guidance or context. Being thrown into the deep end is not fun for everyone. Assess the temperament of each person to see what makes sense.

2. Purpose

The best and most enjoyable work I did was when I was working towards a mission rather than the day-to-day grind to earn money or status. People have a deep need to see how their work fits into the bigger picture. A core responsibility of a leader is to inspire a mission their teams can drive forward.

How to foster it:

• Share the “why” behind every task. For example: “This design doc will guide next quarter’s strategy.”
• Highlight impact, especially through storytelling, before and after it has happened. Celebrate how their contributions benefit customers, colleagues, or the company’s mission.
• Align team and company mission with individual values. If someone is interested in ML platform development, help them develop a personal mission to improve the orchestration engine and save their teammates hours of time. If someone believes in ML research being the difference between a good and great product, figure out a way to have them contribute novel ideas to high-impact products which can affect customers. Note how all this involves a lot of time spent with each team member which goes beyond simply talking about the team mission.

Anti-patterns to avoid:

• Overhyping mundane tasks. “Doing this documentation will change the world” feels insincere. Please don’t do that.
• Only hyping the most grandest of missions and leaving everything else dry. Motivating missions come in different forms and exist at different levels of abstractions.
• Assuming people inherently understand their impact without explicit communication. I made this mistake at the start of my management life. Things get lost across various hierarchies and lateral teams. Also, not everyone has a need or inclination to see the bird’s eye view.

3. Mastery

Humans are wired to grow. When team members feel they’re learning and advancing, they’re more engaged and productive. Lack of the right kind of learning opportunity is a big reason why people leave.

How to foster it:

• Offer stretch assignments that challenge skills without overwhelming. Discuss candidly with the team beforehand.
• Invest in training—but tailor it. Generic workshops don’t cut it in my experience. Dedicated workshops on specific topics like large-scale ML design, book or paper reading sessions, sharing experiences on large refactors and code smells are more helpful.
• Frame learning as something we do everyday. I have a separate section in my quarterly check-ins for “Things I want to learn this quarter”, which we often bring up in our weekly 1-on-1 meetings. Blending it into the day-to-day is ideal.
• Regularly discuss career aspirations and map paths to achieve them. One of the most satisfying things I’ve done in the last couple of years has been both getting help and helping the team see beyond levels, and focus on reusable knowledge and high-impact behaviors & skills as a way to grow.

Anti-patterns to avoid:

• Not taking the time to build trust with your team. This can backfire tremendously when discussing areas of growth. When trying to master a skill, everyone needs a guide with whom they can share their aspirations and limitations. Mastery requires iterations and feedback, and that cannot happen if people are guarded.
• Providing one-size-fits-all development plans. Growth is personal, not plug-and-play.
• Rewarding short-term busyness over long-term results. Learning thrives on focus, not overload. If you consistently push for rapid learning, it often devolves into unstructured busyness without any long-term results which stick.
• Not keeping a tab on the broader industry and what growth means outside your team or organization. If your team isn’t growing like other teams or the outside industry, they will leave.
• Optimizing only for scope size when trying to find projects for your team, instead of finding projects which can support growth goals for each of your teammates.

4. Connection

Work is better when we feel we belong. Positive relationships foster collaboration, trust, and a sense of community. We’re social creatures who do our best when we feel we’re working together.

How to foster it:

• Start with your own connection to your team. Invest time in it, going beyond work-related agendas. You don’t have to be a buddy for all your teammates to show that you are as human as them and enjoy a sense of personal connection, camaraderie, and care about working well together.
• Create rituals: team lunches, shared celebrations, or casual check-ins. If you’re in a remote setup, find time to come together beyond work meetings to get to know each other. I’ve found longer-term events like hackathons to be a great way to connect to others. There’s a concept of third spaces, which are neither strictly work nor purely social which can be useful to cultivate organically (eg. hobby-related slack channels).
• Encourage collaboration and help your team build wider networks. A big part of a manager’s role is connecting teams.
• Address conflicts quickly and fairly to maintain trust. Setting the right culture around conflicts is very important as teams become larger or more cross-functional.
• There’s no one-size-fits-all for building true professional connections with your teammates. Be open to trying new things and iterating. Ask for feedback.

Anti-patterns to avoid:

• Forced fun. Mandatory happy hours can feel like an obligation rather than a joy. Having a variety of these activities and making them optional is the way to go.
• Thinking planned activities or meetings will be enough to foster team connection rather than organic interactions. Most quality connections I made with other people in my company were when we were knee-deep working on something critical or challenging.
• Blocking lines of communication between your and any other team. I have seen managers moderate cross-team communication, mostly due to political reasons. This is a big red flag.
• Pitting team members against each other to incite competition. Even though this is obvious, I’ve heard of this too many times to not mention. Doing this just prevents your teammates from treating each other as allies who can propel each other.

5. Recognition

People want to feel valued. Recognition fuels motivation and reinforces positive behavior. More than that, it’s an earnest way for you to acknowledge the hard work of your team.

How to foster it:

• Be specific: “Great job” is nice, but “your analysis helped the client see what they needed” is more impactful.
• Be sincere: It’s easy to spot if you’re praising someone with a script or agenda.
• Mix it up. Public shoutouts, private notes, or even small tokens of appreciation go a long way.
• Recognize effort, not just results. Celebrating progress encourages perseverance. It also gives intermediate feedback that the direction of effort is correct.
• People feel recognized in different ways. Like love languages, there are different ways to show your team how valuable they are. Big scale public praises, regular shoutouts, being given critical or more impactful projects, financial bonuses, all can be different ways of showing recognition. Communicate with the team to find out what their language is.

Anti-patterns to avoid:

• Overdoing it. Constant praise can dilute its impact.
• Focusing only on the loud achievers. Quiet contributors need recognition too. A lot of work is invisible and happens in the background. Intentionally dig for it and bring it up.
• Delaying recognition to the end of the project. It diminishes the impact and not celebrating ongoing wins slows down momentum.

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At the heart of it all lies one essential ingredient: a manager’s genuine intent to serve their team as a true servant leader. Without this authenticity, even the most well-meaning efforts will feel hollow and superficial.

References