Now, Anyone Who
Completes Our Motivational Profiling Survey Can
Identify Within Minutes...
Why YOU Do
What YOU Do,
Why You Can't
Change No Matter How Bad You Want To, and
Why YOU Can't
Change the Motivation of Others.
Purchase the Reiss Profile of 16 Motivators
Motivational
Profiling:
...what is it and how can I use it?
As a result of research done by a variety of
motivational programs over the years, we are now bringing into the
mainstream of life and work, management and leadership selection,
and development
a
succession a set of tools that can improve efficiency, effectiveness
and sustainability.
In Dynamic Engagement, we operate under the
assumptions that identifying specific dynamics in people can improve
how we perform and develop over time.
The first construct of dynamic engagement is
motivational dynamics.
NEW THEORY OF MOTIVATION LISTS 16 BASIC DESIRES THAT
GUIDE US
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Professor Steven Reiss says there's
nothing wrong with workaholics, non-curious
schoolchildren and timid people.
While much of society may believe these people have
problems that need to be fixed, Reiss said his research
suggests they are probably happy just the way they are.
They just have personalities that don't fit in with much
of society.
Reiss, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at
Ohio State University, has spent ten years developing
and testing a new theory of human motivation. The result
of his research is published in the new book Who Am
I? The 16 Basic Desires That Motivate Our Action and
Define Our Personalities (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000).
After conducting studies involving more than 6,000
people, Reiss has found that 16 basic desires guide
nearly all meaningful behavior. The desires are power,
independence, curiosity, acceptance, order, saving,
honor, idealism, social contact, family, status,
vengeance, romance, eating, physical exercise, and
tranquility.
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Purchase the Reiss Profile of 16 Motivators
Motivational Profiling in Management &
Leadership
Is the act of assessing people on a list of 16 basic desires to
understand their unique strivings and motivation. Once those
motivations are profiled as a unique picture of how people strive,
we can engage job, life, relationship and leadership design to align
the requirements of those demands with the intrinsic motivation in
the profile.
In management and leadership, we know we can’t always align
things perfectly, but with knowledge of intrinsically motivating
desires, we can begin to engage employees, customers, buyers,
suppliers and even competitors in a much more efficient manner.
Each person who completes the Reiss Profile has
a unique portfolio of intrinsic motivation and is at least entitled
in my opinion to be treated in a fashion that is in alignment with
that motivational profile whenever possible. This action produces
alignment between what a person wants to do and what a person is
asked, or required to do, resulting in the efficient application of
resources.
The key is to recognize whenever possible, when we as managers or
leaders can create management and leadership designs that promote
alignment between individual and organizational goals.
Let’s take an example:
Using the Reiss Profile of Motivational Sensitivity
described above, the following profile is confirmed (through
interaction and debrief to test the results of the profile):
Note: com = competitiveness
and is substituted for the label: vengeance
When a profile is created, we are careful to
note those desires or strivings that are in excess of +.8 and less
than -.8 before attributing intrinsic motivation. Those desires
which fall within the midzone as it may be, are not used as
predictors and therefore are usually being met by the current
environmental conditions. Those desires falling far from the midzone
are those that have leverage and contain opportunity for alignment
with specific motivational design.
Each striving operates as a continuum with two
polarities, one seen as high and one seen as low. Be sure that you
don’t conceptualize high and low as good and bad, as each has it’s
benefits and drawbacks!
A brief review of this profile might reveal the
following motivational issues:
Low Tranquility: this person likes
excitement, is willing to take risks and may throw caution to
the wind.
High Eating: the person may think a lot
about food, food environments, events based around food, such as
cooking contests, etc.
High Romance: ultimately this striving is
about the desire for sex, but other more subtle factors are
involved, such as romantism, chemistry between people and
fondness for romantic environments. [This desire is left out of
the business profile.]
Low Family: the motivation to be
self-serving rather than nurturing of family
Low Social Contact: to prefer engagement in
solitude with things, tasks and ideas versus contact with people
Low Idealism: prefers utility of
reciprocation versus altruism, likely to prefer to be on the
winning side versus the underdog.
Low Honor: expediency reins, the ability to
seek to round corners, to seek quick resolutions and the
tendency to be impatient are key attributes of this striving.
Low Order: routine is to be avoided, is not
neat or organized, prefers the novel, versus the known.
Low Acceptance: self-confidence, the
ability to persist in the face of resistance or rejection,
doesn’t need the approval of others.
High Curiosity: more abstract than
concrete, prefers learning and analysis, may try to figure
things out to the exclusion of actually learning to master
skills
High Independence: self-reliant, practical
in spiritual terms, not touchy-feely, doesn’t ask for help
usually, won’t seek to work with others naturally.
High Power: desire for influence, control,
dominance, achievement and leadership
I chose this particular profile because it had
a lot of desires crossing the midzone. Not only does this indicate
the person may be interesting, but also of high energy, ambition and
novel.
Now, we identify as leaders, recruiters or
managers a design that has a specific set of demand requirements,
such as the position of a Virtual CEO. Certainly a novel position,
but let’s analyze it using motivational profiling from information
about the position from those who have a vested interest in the
position, such as stakeholders, clients and leadership.
According to that analysis, the following
motivational profile emerges:
You’ll notice when we plot the two of these
profiles using a comparative line graph, how different the
motivational profile of the subject outlined above is from the
motivational profile of the position.
This is an actual case and you can see that the
motivational profile of the subject has little in common with the
position requirements as they are profiled by stakeholders. What’s
more, is that a lot of the motivational striving are opposite one
another.
We’re not saying that because someone doesn’t
have a motivational profile exactly designed for a particular
position or job design that they will fail. However, with this much
adaptation required, it may not be a good fit.
If managers and leaders are forced into using
this subject, a lot of design work can be done to offset some of the
motivational profiling differences, such as a executive
administrator, a public relations person and even a structure put in
place to take advantage of this subject’s strengths, while buffering
them before they get to the stakeholders.
Situations like this occur daily in management
and leadership. Motivational profiling gives us additional tools
with which to select, develop and retain talent more efficiently.
Additional tools that have been developed using motivational
profiling provide coaches, trainers, and consultants with more
effective means of creating alignment.
For more information, contact us for a
speaking, seminars and profiling. Online profiling is inexpensive
and can be done quickly and easily over the Internet anywhere in the
world.
Before you make your next big hiring decision,
or incentive program, wouldn’t it be nice to know what people really
wanted at a deep level?
Purchase the Reiss Profile of 16 Motivators
Motivational Profiling In Relationships
In relationship counseling, coaching and
consulting, the Reiss Profile becomes an essential
part of the relationship conversation.
As noted above in using the motivational
profiling system with management and
leadership...the results don't make or break the
relationship.
However, learning how to discuss intrinsic
motivation with your partner, spouse or significant
other can improve the relationships dramatically
when we not realize we're different, but why we're
different and how that changes the way we approach
the relationship.
Here's an example:
Let's take the subject profile from our
management and leadership example from above:
Now, let's compare that subject in a
relationship with the following subject profile:
Let's
identify some predictors in the new profile:
High
Tranquility: this person is more than likely going
to be anxious about risk, uncertainty and ambiguity.
Excitement is going to cause them concern and at
times anxiety. Disruptions in routines, plans or
expectations may cause them to pull back from risk.
They are likely to be cautious and prefer to create
high levels of certainty or trust before acting or
making decisions.
Low
Honor: as indicated previously, the person may
prefer expediency over continuing to be patient.
They are in most cases not loyal for loyalties sake,
but because it serves their self-interest.
High
Independence: noted previously as self-reliance, the
need for personal freedom and in some cases,
unconventional ways of doing things.
In
this profile, the subject is much more adaptable
because they have fewer intrinsic motivators that
are far from the norm. Most of the desires are being
served by the current conditions.
Remember, those intrinsic motivators that are
farther from the midline are those that become
important to use for predicting a person's
motivation.
When
we combine the attributes of subject A and subject
B, we see that only in tranquility are their
significant differences. Low Honor and High
Independence in Subject B actually coincide with Low
Honor and High Independence in Subject A. While
these may produce relationship issues, as both are
expedient and perhaps unconventional in their thirst
for freedom, each person may respect that attribute
in each other.
What's
also interesting is the need for personal freedom is
something, when served, that both parties can enjoy,
for while one is free to pursue their own interests,
it provides freedom to the other to pursue their
independent interests. If one of the subjects was
say, low independent, or what is referred to in the
model as interdependence, then the interdependent
person would be motivated to remain interdependent
on the independently motivated person. This in many
ways would aggravate the need for independence.
The
holds true for low honor. Both subjects have low
honor as a predictive intrinsic motivator. Each will
tend to be expedient and perhaps motivated to cut
corners...break rules. In some ways, this may be
advantageous to the relationship, although perhaps
together, we might get Bonnie and Clyde, one never
knows.
In all
reality, if one of the subjects was high honor,
there might be additional discord produced because
of the need by one subject to continuously operate
within the rule-set, while the other was
consistently pushing the boundaries, especially
subject A who already shows a high intrinsic
motivation for low order and low tranquility.
This
brings us to the juxtaposition of tranquility, low
in Subject A and high in Subject B. This presents a
dichotomy in many ways as the need for tranquility
from Subject B, may dampen the excitement of Subject
A. It may seem to A, that B worries unnecessarily,
is preoccupied with resolving uncertainty and is not
willing to engage in enough risk without
pre-thought, or planning.
On the
other hand, the high tranquility of B can actually
buffer the risk-taking of A, introduce some neurosis
into the relationship that may be required for A to
be more closure oriented (ordered), to be more
planful, systematic and forthright in
decision-making, rather than flying by the seat of
the pants, which in all likelihood, the profile of
Subject A indicates is likely. Depending on the
power relationship, B could actually stabilize A in
many ways and improve the results that the
relationship may produce over time in
decision-making, planning and preparation.
To the
extent that A is not driven away by B, in deference
to B's need for high tranquility...and B is not
driven to anxiety by A's bandwidth and seat of the
pants behavior, the relationship could be highly
synergistic.
To me,
using motivational profiling in relationships is a
very efficient and effective way to create success
and sustainability over time. My preference would be
for people to consider the short and long term
implications of their motivational profile before
they established commitments, as research has shown
that when you get to about 3 major predictive
differences on the profile between people in any
kind of relationships, they are not going to be
motivated to reach their long term end goals in the
same manner. It would take a significant level of
communication, understanding and effort to design a
relationship paradigm where people would be able to
satisfy their end goals when their end goals are so
different.
You
can purchase the Reiss Profile online through our
partnership with IDS Publishing. We have coaches,
consultants, trainers and speakers available for
hire should your exploration require additional
information about the system and how it can be used.
Purchase the Reiss Profile of 16 Motivators
If there is any way I can
be of service, please feel free to
contact
me with your questions and comments.
The Reiss Profile has made
a difference in my life and continues to make
differences in people's lives around the world.
If you REALLY want to know
what has you...take the reiss profile!
Sincerely,
Mike R. Jay,
Developmentalist
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