Understand Others Motives - A Short Story

Welcome to Leaders Lift - a podcast for aspiring and existing leaders!

I'm your host, Greg Cunningham and I look forward to being a part of your leadership journey.

Thank you for tuning into this Leaders Lift Shorts Episode

In today's Short, I want to share a quick story from early in my career that entrenched in my brain how important it was to understand the motivations of those that I was leading.

In the first call center I worked in, one of my teams had a young lady that just seemed to always be on top of everything. She was always in the top few in our quarterly rankings (yes this was a long time ago), was the first to volunteer to learn new skills and was always in search of OT.

Now normally when I see someone like this, my first thought was that she needs to be trained to move up the management chain but in one of my skip levels, I realized that maybe that would come in the future but now was not the time.

I don't remember exactly how I asked the question, but we got around to talking about why she wanted to be such a top performer. To put this in context, our top performers got first choice of vacation, first shot at OT and were asked first to train into new skills which generally meant some type of a pay increase. So here was her answer.

I have a really expensive car that I love (she drove a BMW) and I love to travel. So I need to make as much money as I can but balance that with my time off so I can travel the world.

First, this was a very honest answer and it took be back just a bit. Second, it was like a light bulb went on in my head and all of a sudden, her actions and behaviors totally made sense. I didn't even talk to her about management because she was extremely happy with what she was doing and while management would have maybe made her more money, it would not have been nearly as flexible.

So basically we finished our conversation and she went back to doing her thing. Anytime her manager or I had concerns about something, we tied it back to those motives.

When I left the organization, she was still at the top, was one of our first work from home employees even though it was the graveyard shift and was still driving that car. She had also been more places on vacation than I will probably ever get in my lifetime.

This just shows that taking the time to get to know what really drives a person can help make or break their success and yours. If we had pushed her into management, we would have lost an amazing call center rep and she would not have been nearly as happy. My guess is we would have lost her.

Lesson: start by taking a look at your key performers and take the time to understand their motives. Write them down. Talk to them about those motives. And then build an action plan that takes advantage of that. I think you will see them step up even more as both of you focus on their real goals.

That's it for today. Go out and lift someone!

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