Understand motives,
improve team and climate.
Motives are not good or bad. They explain why the same task energises one person and drains another. This training starts in that judgement-free space — and then goes one step further: what happens when a strong motive runs unfiltered into a team, and how to adjust behaviour without denying the motive.
Five characters everybody knows. Set their motives.
Fictional characters are useful because their motives are written large. Move each slider between low, neutral and high, then compare with our estimate. In the seminar we do the same exercise with situations from your own week.
Sherlock Holmes
Consulting detective. Brilliant, unbearable, and entirely uninterested in what the room thinks of him.
The quiz has no score that means anything. Its point is the argument that follows it: two people can read the same character completely differently, and the same is true of colleagues.
Every motive runs on a spectrum. Both ends are a strong need.
In the profile, high and low are not more and less. A high structure motive is a need for order; a low structure motive is an equally strong need for flexibility. Nobody sits at zero, and neither end is a deficit.
That part stays judgement-free. What we add in the seminar is effect: when a motive goes straight into behaviour with no filter, it lands hardest on the people wired the other way. The goal is never to suppress it — denying a motive costs energy every day and does not hold. The goal is a filter: keep feeding the motive, change how it arrives.
Three of the sixteen motives as an example. In the seminar we work through the ones that actually sit in your team.
Starts without a plan, keeps things open, decides on the way and finds a fixed process constraining.
Triggers: High-structure colleagues read it as unreliable and start building safety nets — double documentation, extra check-ins.
Rewrites the shared document, wants process before content, cannot start while things are still vague.
Triggers: Low-structure colleagues feel controlled and slowed down, and quietly start working around the process.
Wants the executive summary and the next step, skips the background, prefers doing to analysing.
Triggers: High-curiosity colleagues read it as superficial and stop sharing the reasoning — which is exactly what would have convinced them.
Opens the next question just as the decision was about to be made, reads everything, wants to go one level deeper.
Triggers: The team experiences it as reopening closed topics and loses confidence that anything stays decided.
Skips the informal round, keeps meetings short, works with the door closed.
Triggers: Others read distance as rejection or arrogance — probably the most common misreading in any team.
Wants to talk everything through, drops by, turns a written question into a call.
Triggers: Low-contact colleagues experience it as interruption and protect themselves by becoming unavailable.
Small adventures, solved first alone and then together.
The second half of the training is practical, and it runs in one order for a reason. Everyone takes the challenge alone first. Then the same challenge again as a team, with the strengths in the room made explicit. The difference in the result is the argument — nobody has to be talked into it.
Everyone gets the same challenge and works on it on their own. Most people get further than they expected, and then hit a wall that is specific to them.
The same challenge again as a team, with what each person brings named beforehand. What changes is not only the result but how fast the group gets there.
We look at the team's own behaviour: who took the lead, who held back, where time was lost, and which motive was visible in that.
What comes out of it is an honest answer to a question most teams never ask: where are we genuinely better together — and what does that require from each of us?
Homogeneous teams feel efficient. That is the problem.
When a team shares a motive profile, agreement comes fast and friction is low. It also means whole categories of risk, customer and idea are never raised, because nobody in the room is wired to notice them. We map the team profile and name what is missing — not to hire different people, but to know which question has to be asked deliberately.
Individual profile, team session, or both.
Motivation Decoded works with a validated motive profile per person. Whether that stays individual coaching or becomes a team programme depends on what you want to change.
Put your programme together.
We start with your strategic goals, the people involved and the patterns you want to change — then shape the right combination of modules.