I'm not in a manager position, but from a managee's position, I'd say the best approach is to make whatever process for advancing (in salary, title, responsibil

I'm not in a manager position, but from a managee's position, I'd say the best approach is to make whatever process for advancing (in salary, title, responsibility) as clear as possible. You can't convince people who are comfortable where they are to climb, and every company needs those people (e.g. the guy who maintains the crazy Makefiles that no one else likes to deal with, but who doesn't care to revamp the build system even though its sorely needed). However, if you lay out the path for advancement, then everyone can either choose to go down it, or not. If folks decide to not go down it, or get jealous seeing other people advance down it, you can tell them that if they do the same stuff, they'll advance too. Be careful how you adapt this to each individual as well. There are a lot of words spilled here about how developers with families are penalized because they can't "crush it" late into the early morning on weekends. The hard part will be managing to make things fair across developers of all backgrounds, as you need to make sure you entice valuable employees of all types to stick around.