> When they tell their base managers to crack the whip and force them to give the whole “you are not working hard enough, tighten up. Shorter lunches, clock in 5 minutes early, etc” speech to the base employees, they will absolutely feel resentment and do LESS work, not more.

The most influential question from team lead trainings over the years has been: Do you trust your employee to want to complete the task and purpose they have, or do you need to control them? There are a few names for this, Theory X and Theory Y mainly.

And don't be snide and just say that the current economy forces you to work due to wages. A lot of people I know would just create their own creative work if they had all the money in the world. So yeah, I think if you frame a persons job and purpose in the company right, you can trust them to work. This may not work in all industries, but in tech it seems to hold.

An example where this is in my experience a good guidance: Someone starts slipping their metrics, whatever those are. Comes in late, is hard to reach remotely. Naturally they should get slapped with the book right? Nah. If you assume they want to work well, the first question should be: Why, what is going on?

In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.

Like one guy on the team recently had some trouble during the last legs of building a house and needed more flexible time. We could've been strict and told him to punch it and take their entire annual vacation to manage that, even if he just needs to be able to jump away for an hour or two here and there. Instead we made sure to schedule simple work for him and have him work with a higher focus on educating his sidekicks, tracked the total time away and then booked it as 3-4 days at the end. Now it's a fun story in the teams lore they are fond of having navigated that, instead of one guy sulking about having lost all of his vacation in that nonsense.

> In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.

Note that there already has to be a pretty high level of trust between that employee and their manager for this to work; if I don't feel like I can trust my manager, I will absolutely keep my lips zipped about anything not directly work related.

This is a great post on this topic: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/02/23/OhForemanWh.... I'm not sure I'd agree with the full argument as such about commit rights (vs. e.g. pull request review), but it does illustrate parent's point