You won't believe why Allison wanted to leave her job (and how it can help you retain key people)

Allison was a paralegal at a law firm in a small town. She had worked in the industry for 26 years and at the same company for 17. Allison had never had a bad performance review. 

Allison came to me right after I set up Ignite Global in 2009 and was working as a professional Career Coach. For the previous year she had been suffering from migraine headaches and she was missing work due to stress leave.

Like many people, Allison had become so unbelievably frustrated with her current situation that she had decided to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and to retrain into a completely different field. She wanted me to help her discover what she should do and to help her prepare for this transition.

But the whole situation made no sense. How does one go from loving her job - and doing it well - for 26 years (and working for someone she liked and respected for 17 of those 26 years) to becoming so stressed that she was missing work due to her migraines in less than one year. 

I won’t go into the details here, but in helping Allison I created my “Fall in Love with Your Job Again” exercise that I now teach in the Career Development Conversation of our Mind Reading for Managers Course.

That exercise helped me discover that Allison was frustrated by two things: both of which came as a result of her company moving offices a year earlier - at exactly the same time that she had developed her migraines.

First, it seemed that her new desk was under a very harsh light and it was this light causing havoc with her optic nerve that was giving her the migraines. She moved desks and - believe it or not - never had a migraine headache again.

The second thing that caused Allison to seek me out was that had lost confidence in her ability to do her job. Again, this is a woman who had never had a bad performance review. 

Allison, it turns out was very motivated by external praise and recognition.

In the old office environment she sat right next to her manager. Because they were in close proximity she naturally got a lot of his time and attention. He was a very positive person and gave praise freely. But in the new office he was on a completely different floor and she barely saw him. 

Allison realized that she missed the pats on the back and that not having them made her question her abilities. To fix this issue, she simply scheduled a 15 minute, weekly meeting with her manager. Problem solved.

Allison was at one end of the Motivators Continuum. People fall somewhere on the continuum between being highly motivated by external praise and recognition (like Allison) and being highly motivated by internal challenge.

If motivated by internal challenge they:

• Need to make sure their goals are their own and are big enough to be inspiring
• Respond well to competition (particularly with themselves, but also with others)
• May shy away from attention

If motivated by external praise / recognition they:

• Tend not to like competition (unless they are assured they can win and their success will be noticed)
• Need a lot of positive reinforcement (you can inspire them to greater performance by catching them ‘doing things right’)
• Need a lot of time and attention (which can be managed by regular short, sharp bursts)

Understanding where your staff fall on this continuum and then tailoring your approach to both motivation and recognition can create huge shifts in behavior and performance.

Where do your team members fall?

Schedule a 30 minute call with me 

 The Motivators Continuum is one of two frameworks we teach in the Underlying Motivators conversation to help inspire your staff to “go the extra mile” and be recognized and rewarded appropriately when they do.

Underlying Motivators is the fourth of the 5 FOCUSed Conversations that we teach in our Mind Reading for Managers program.

Schedule a 30 minute call with me to discuss whether the 5 FOCUSed Conversations for Greater Employee Engagement and Productivity could help you:

• Save time and money by decreasing your employee turnover / churn
• Increase employee engagement, motivation, performance and productivity
• Ditch your annual performance review​s / appraisals while INCREASING employee motivation and productivity & DECREASING your own workload & stress
• Avoid those ‘sweaty palms’ conversations when you have to confront your employee on poor performance or behavior
• Better manage both your ‘day job’ and your team 

Delivery methods for the program:

• In house - for groups of up to 15
• First ever public, online course launching in January 2017 (with Early Bird Rates available) - for individuals or small groups of managers from 1 organization
• Train the Trainer and license the content for delivery by internal trainers - for large organizations

Client Testimonials:

 “Mind Reading for Managers is a refreshing and effective approach to people management. The 5 FOCUSed Conversations have guided our line managers to apply more structure and direction to their conversations but without overtaking their own personal management style. The framework is flexible and we have applied it to our Induction program plus our regular one-on-one huddles with our employees.”

- Madel Giles, HR Advisor, Razorfish Australia 

"We've successfully used the Mind Reading for Managers / 5 FOCUSed Conversations program to completely replace our annual performance appraisals. No one liked our old system and it was very time consuming for both managers and staff.

Not only did this program achieve our goal of eliminating performance appraisals, we immediately noticed a reduction in re-work after implementing this program, which has a direct impact to our bottom line. Even our most skeptical of managers has come to embrace the monthly conversations."

- Robert Shelton CPA, CTA, Managing Director, DFK Everalls