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As a leader of so many awesome, bright, ambitious, and hardworking young engineers/technical personnel; I have asked my mentors: "What frustrated you most at the beginning of your career?". I have received many different answers to this question, surprisingly most are centered around "I didn't know my impact" to "Stupid Little Management Requests”. Further analysis of the issue usually transforms the latter into the former category because "Every request from my manager was stupid because I didn't realize why they were asking for it".

Often stepping outside the bounds of pure leadership (I am an engineer at heart!); I try to baseline teams’ knowledge by teaching them something technical indiretly related to their normal daily tasks. It's shocking to find out that quite often they ask "How does this have anything to do with what we do?". When you hear this, it's safe to assume they are coming to work every day performing a whole day of “SLMR’s”. Their work life consists of shifting rocks from one pile to another - having little idea of why they're doing it.

If you can break this monotony, and give your team a tangible understanding of what their daily tasks actually mean in the real world, you will achieve a quantum shift in their motivation. They will come to work wanting to make the world a better place, confident in the fact that what they are doing makes both themselves accomplished and their customers more successful. Even the most mundane tasks will be much more bearable!

I'm not saying it's easy to drive this change by any means! You can start by taking the following actions for your people:

Show office based personnel what happens with the work they do, and what happens if it’s not done.
Take them into the field to interact with the end users of the work they deliver, encourage interaction and learning from the end user as the mission here.
Record all wins that you can attribute to the work delivered by your people, share them often, and celebrate them publicly in your organization.
Ask your customers to share in the success and celebration of the success.
If you have built some rapport, informally stop by your people of all levels and talk to them about their tasks. Offer them insights into how you’ve seen their work used and how it contributes to the big picture.

We often talk about wanting to have an impact; serve others by helping them see theirs, further increasing yours!

I must give credit to Brad Moore for the term “SLMR’s”.