Better communication starts with sharing
The first time I asked my new teammate for her Attuned report, she was reluctant to share.
Her Financial Needs score was high, and she thought this was something to be embarrassed about. I reassured her that there was nothing wrong with that, and that no one Motivator was better or worse than any other. And yet, it got me thinking about her concerns and how best to approach them.
When people first take the Attuned Motivation Assessment and see words like “Financial Needs” and “Status”, it’s understandable that they might jump to conclusions as to what those terms mean. Similarly, some might see that they have low scores for certain Motivators and think that this is a reason to worry. For example, one engineer I spoke with who had just started his own business was concerned about his low score in Autonomy. But obviously this didn’t mean he couldn’t get work done by himself—just that it wasn’t a strong motivating factor for him.
What does your Intrinsic Motivator Report tell you?
The result of a 55-question survey that takes around 15 minutes to complete, Attuned’s Intrinsic Motivator Report isn’t a personality test or a scorecard of your ethics or abilities.
Rather, it’s a visualization of the values that are most important to you and the things that make work meaningful to you.
Thus, being motivated by Financial Needs doesn’t indicate that you’re greedy, or that you only care about money. It just means that financial security is important to you, and that you view financial indicators, such as meeting revenue goals, as a useful way to measure success.
Likewise, having low Autonomy doesn’t mean you need to be told what to do, or that you can’t set your own targets—it just means you don’t mind whether or not you have a lot of freedom and flexibility in your workplace.
Sharing is caring
As well as highlighting your own Motivators to increase self-awareness, one of the great things about using Attuned is that it gives you the opportunity to see what really makes your colleagues tick too.
Have you ever left a conversation with a coworker feeling like you didn’t get through to them? Or maybe that they didn’t understand where you were coming from?
Often, this is because you each have different dominant Motivators, and have therefore brought different needs to the table. By sharing each other’s Intrinsic Motivator Reports, it’s easy to see the areas in which you are most different, and by understanding these motivational gaps (as well as similarities), you can develop a common language that works equally for both sides.
Here are two examples of how this played out for me recently:
Making Training Wheels Turn
When I was first asked to train my new teammate, I was excited to get started. But during the first few meetings, I got the feeling that my way of explaining things wasn’t having the desired effect, and she seemed overwhelmed by the flood of information.
So, rather than plough on regardless, I decided to ask her to show me her Intrinsic Motivator Report. In addition to Financial Needs, Feedback and Progress were two of her top Motivators—I could work with that!
From there, I tailored my training in two ways:
I scheduled time after each of our training sessions to give her feedback on her performance.
I talked her through some ways that could help her track her improvement in certain areas.
As a result of these tweaks, she became visibly more engaged and started leaving our meetings with a palpable sense of excitement about the work she was going to do.
Incidentally, Progress is one of my lowest Motivators—something I was ironically a little embarrassed about when I first took the Motivation Assessment. It’s not something I think about normally, but if I know it’s important to one of my team members, I make sure to keep it top of mind.
Finding Common Ground
I had a lot in common with my team lead when I first joined Wahl+Case. We liked the same kinds of movies and video games, and the same kinds of food. Out of the office, we got along great!
But in work there was a bit of a disconnect. For some reason I wasn’t picking up the things she was teaching me as quickly as I’d hoped, and we could both tell there was something off, although I elected to just get my head down and try to do better.
Things only changed when we both sat down and shared our Motivator Reports. As we discovered, two of my top Motivators, Feedback and Security, were two of her lowest.
Suddenly everything made so much more sense! I realized that her quick and to the point way of training was a reflection of what she valued, not a reflection of how she felt about me.
In turn, she realized that I needed more feedback, and so offered me more chances to ask questions, which made me feel more confident in what I had learned.
The result: clearer communication and a much smoother and more productive working relationship.
Conclusion
Whatever your Intrinsic Motivator Report looks like—whether your results tend toward extreme highs and extreme lows, or fall somewhere in the middle—it’s important to remember that there is no such thing as a “good” report or a “bad” report. It’s just a reflection of your values and preferences, and a visualization of the things that are most and least likely to motivate you at work.
And the same applies to other people’s reports: whether they are very similar or completely different to yours, the main thing that they offer is invaluable insights into the best ways to communicate with and understand one another.
That’s why, whenever I meet a new teammate now, one of the first things I do is to suggest we swap Motivator Reports.
Download The State of Motivation Report 2025. It’s free!
