Why "good manager instincts" misfire, and how the software fixes it
I have been managing people for twenty years. I had a direct report, call her Gabriella, who started every project with "we need to align on this." I read it as caution. I read it wrong.
My motivators are Autonomy, Competition, Altruism. Hers are Feedback and Status. What I heard as hedging was actually a safety behavior, checking whether she was about to do something wrong, before it was too late to correct.
There is a name in instrument flying for the illusion where the cockpit reads true while the aircraft is in fact pointed at the ground: the somatogravic illusion. The dials are honest. The body feels level. The horizon turns out to have been somewhere else the whole time. A motivational profile gap produces something close to the same effect on the way one person reads another. A note from instrument flying
TalkCoach reframed the request. The fix was to ask her for concrete proposals she owned, framed so a wrong decision was something we would fix together with her authorship intact. I used the script almost verbatim in our next 1-on-1. Her change was immediate.
A misread direct report does not announce that they have checked out. They stay, and their best work walks out the door. 1-on-1 coaching software that cannot see motivators cannot see the misread.
Adapted from the original Attuned essay. Read the full version with author notes →
