The cheapest item on the motivation list

Your outcome depends on how well you communicate your mission.

What makes talented people want to work somewhere: they enjoy the work itself, they think the pay is fair, they believe the work matters. The last one is the most urgent for companies and teams to get right.

Whether the work is enjoyable depends mostly on what the company does, and that's slow to change, but believing the work matters costs real leadership attention.

Your high performing employees, and the people who could become that want to see the results of their work matter.

If you let a capable person see how their work creates value, they will surprise you. Bog them down with useless busy work, decisions that get revised every week, bad tools and you get nothing.

With AI, more of the execution happens without people touching it. That removes some of the pleasure of the job for people who found joy in problem solving at the code level. And if they don't trust the mission, they will be low performers now more than ever.

It's time to be problem solvers and solution engineers, not code monkeys.