Why Knowing What Your Team Wants Is Just as Important as What They Can Do

Leadership Focus: Skills Tell Only Half the Story

MSP leaders spend plenty of time looking at what their teams can do—tickets resolved, SLAs met, utilization, certifications earned. Those metrics matter, but they’re only half the story.

To really drive performance and retention, you have to look beyond ability. You need to understand what your team wants.

That means learning about each person’s goals - what motivates them, where they’d like to grow, and how they want to experience that growth. Because not everyone defines “career advancement” as moving up the org chart. Some want to deepen their craft. Others want new experiences or broader exposure across clients and technologies.

When you understand both sides of the equation - skills and aspirations - you unlock engagement, loyalty, and momentum.

Metrics Are Only Part of the Story

Most MSPs pride themselves on being data-driven. They track tickets, billable hours, response times, revenue per engineer, and utilization rates. But none of those numbers tell you what energizes your people or why they stay.

Service Leadership’s 2024 report showed that top-quartile MSPs retain technical talent 23 percent longer than peers, primarily because of engagement and growth opportunity. The takeaway? Visibility can’t stop at the operational dashboard.

When leaders understand their teams’ goals and motivations, they make better staffing decisions, reduce burnout, and improve margins. Knowing who wants what helps you design work that matters—to both the business and the individual.

Not Everyone Wants “Up”—But Everyone Wants to Learn

There’s a misconception that high performers are always chasing promotions. In reality, many of the best engineers, analysts, and coordinators simply crave continuous learning.

In technical roles, that might mean exposure to new stacks, certifications, or client environments. For non-technical staff, it could mean leading a process improvement initiative, managing client communication, or spearheading a cross-department project.

These employees aren’t disengaged—they’re ambitious in a different way. They’re driven by growth through experience, not necessarily hierarchy.

Top performers thrive when they’re learning something new in a structured way. Without that, even your best people risk stagnation—or start looking elsewhere for stimulation.

The Hidden Costs of Misalignment

When leadership doesn’t see or support what employees want, the results show up fast:

• Burnout and disengagement: People feel boxed in or undervalued.

• Quiet quitting: They still show up, but only do the minimum—because their work feels like a dead end.

• Turnover: When learning and mobility vanish, people leave to find them elsewhere.

• Missed opportunity: Projects slow down or lack innovation because talent isn’t being fully leveraged.

In a business built on people—where client satisfaction depends on the expertise and energy of your team—these aren’t soft issues. They’re operational risks.

The Challenge: Doing All This With Limited Resources

Every MSP leader knows time and resources are stretched thin. HR teams are small, and managers juggle client demands with team oversight. So how do you build visibility into people’s goals without adding more meetings and spreadsheets?

You make it continuous, and you let employees drive it.

That’s where Teamwrkr’s approach makes a difference.

Instead of relying on traditional, once-a-year reviews that feel like paperwork, the StatSheet concept captures real-time growth data from the people who know the work best—the technical professionals themselves.

Here’s how it changes the equation:

• Employee-owned growth tracking: Employees record their aspirations, new skills, and desired experiences directly.

• Peer and manager verification: They can request reviews from peers, managers, or even clients—creating a 360° validation loop.

• Continuous, crowd-sourced insight: Instead of leadership chasing feedback manually, the process becomes ongoing and distributed—structured but lightweight.

• Roster integration: Leaders get a clear, current picture of their workforce—skills, interests, and motivation—all in one place.

It’s visibility that scales with your business—saving time while deepening connection.

Real-World Perspective: What Leaders in Our Community Are Seeing

In the Teamwrkr Community, one MSP leader recently shared how he began holding structured career conversations after reading a discussion thread on retention.

What he found was eye-opening: several team members weren’t looking for promotions or new titles—they simply wanted different kinds of projects, mentoring opportunities, or exposure to new tools outside their day-to-day work.

By making space for those conversations, she saw engagement rise almost immediately. A few people who had been quiet or disengaged started contributing more in meetings and volunteering for internal initiatives.

His reflection captured it perfectly:

“When you stop assuming everyone wants to move up and start asking what they actually want to experience, you realize how much untapped energy is sitting right in front of you.”

That’s the kind of leadership shift happening across our community—simple, human adjustments that lead to stronger teams and better results.

Pro Tips: Turning Insight Into Action

• Start every career conversation with curiosity. Ask: “What’s something you’d love to learn or experience this quarter?”

• Normalize lateral movement. Reward learning and experimentation, not just promotions.

• Recognize growth publicly. Highlight when someone takes on a new challenge, not just when they hit KPIs.

• Use peer feedback intentionally. Let Wrkrs request reviews—it builds credibility without overloading management.

• Keep data fresh. Encourage StatSheet updates quarterly so your Roster reflects reality.

• Track retention as a performance metric. Service Leadership data proves it: firms that focus on retention outperform peers on profit and customer satisfaction.

• Celebrate structured learning. Offer short-term rotations or micro-projects as part of the culture, not one-off favors.

Summing It Up

In managed services, people are still the strategy. Knowing what your team can do keeps the business running—but knowing what they want to do keeps it thriving.

Skills tell you capability. Aspirations tell you potential.

When you give your team a structured way to express, validate, and evolve those aspirations—through tools like StatSheet and Roster—you create a culture where growth fuels performance. And that’s the foundation of every resilient MSP.

Related Reading

Want to learn more? Check out Want to Keep Great People? Give Them a Smarter Team Model and How to Build a Trusted Roster That Scales Smartly to gain more insights!