Some facets of motivation are easy to spot – when an otherwise reliable employee starts showing up late, calling in sick, or missing deadlines, the alert manager will know something’s up.
In our workbook this month on ‘Making the most of your 1-2-1s’ we are focussing on how to get the most out of that crucial
relationship. Take the following test for each of your direct reports to get a benchmark of where they currently sit on the scale – and the ways you can get them firing on all cylinders once more.
1. Thinking about the organisational goals you’ve set your employee, which of these statements best applies?
- He/she has a clear plan of action for how they’ll achieve their goal, and adapts it as time passes to ensure it’s still relevant.
- He/she is more or less on track to achieve their goals, but I’d like to see a little more thought and planning.
- I get the sense he/she doesn’t pay huge amounts of attention to goals until the period leading up to the performance review.
- He/she has shared with me their career plan and details of the kinds of opportunities they would like to be considered for.
- He/she is highly likely to have personal goals and ambitions but we haven’t really discussed these in a formal way.
- I get the sense he/she doesn’t currently have a clear sense of what they’d like to achieve.
- He/she is likely to have a good sense of what went wrong and why, and what he or she would do differently next time around.
- He/she is likely to take constructive feedback on the chin with an ‘onwards and upwards’ mentality.
- He/she sometimes takes knockbacks too personally and can suffer a confidence crisis if things don’t go according to plan.
- He/she is normally completely comfortable with change and often the first to raise a hand to volunteer.
- He/she might be hesitant at first, but usually gives new challenges their best shot.
- He/she may require a lot of handholding or may easily become stressed in an alien situation.
- He/she would probably weigh up the opportunity and make a calculated decision as to its worthiness.
- He/she should would proceed with caution and want to be as sure as possible of a successful outcome before venturing further.
- He/she would probably stick with the tried and tested method of working unless there was an absolute guarantee of success.
- He/she asks a lot of questions around the feedback and generally seems to welcome the opportunity to learn something new about themselves.
- He/she usually accepts the feedback, though it’s not always clear to see how they’ve put it into action.
- He/she doesn’t respond well, feeling unfairly criticised and not entirely open to learning a lesson.
- He/she networks far and wide and appears to have a trusted circle to turn to for help in all sorts of circumstances.
- His/her network is likely to be largely made up of internal delegates with whom he/she has good working relationships.
- I’m not sure if he/she has a robust professional network just yet, or how open he/she is to building this up.
- He/she would have already identified the opportunity and put forward a compelling case for why it should be awarded them.
- He/she would welcome the opportunity but might need a little encouragement.
- He/she might need some convincing that this opportunity would be good for them, and may try to back out if things don’t go well.
- Draw up a plan, call on the advice of others and stay as positive as possible.
- Get a little worried but generally keep a “can do” attitude.
- Suffer from some anxiety and feel a little out of his/her depth.
- Work closely with the difficult colleague in order to establish common ground or find a better way of dealing with the situation.
- Try to make the best of limited interactions.
- Keep interactions to an absolute minimum and focus instead of building closer alliances with those he/she already gets on well with.