You want your people to change. So what?

Back in my corporate days, before people routinely carried around digital devices to meetings, I carried a beautiful black Oroton folio.

Tucked into one of the little compartments, next to my business cards, was a small laminated piece of paper I coveted for its potential impact on my people leadership.

It listed five ways people are motivated.

I can’t remember them all, but let’s say they were things like money, status, power and influence. The idea: that if you could understand what motivated the person in front of you, you could speak to them in language that connected to that motivation, and therefore, motivate them. The card had words you should use to connect with each of the motivation types.

I thought this was brilliant … but I couldn’t master the use of it.

Despite my obvious failure, I still maintained the ambition that this capability would surely arise in me at some point. I carried it religoiusly with enthusiasm and my own motivation — I wanted to be a great leader and I wanted to motivate my people. The thinking made complete sense, and yet my ability to neatly categorise each person into a motivational type, re-code my language accordingly, and then use that language whilst attempting to lead people through whatever was arising in the at-times chaotic world of fast-moving consumer goods was, frankly, impossible.

But I kept carrying the card, in hope. I felt it was important but it was not sufficiently simple for me to actually execute. It sounded great in a leadership training program, which is surely where I sourced it from, but like so many logical-sounding approaches, almost impossible to implement in the real world.

In the last few years, I’ve finally worked out when and how to use this insight into people, and it’s one particular moment: the moment you ask them to change.

This is the moment the insight on that little card has real value.

Let me paint the picture and you’ll recall it because we’ve all been here: we share information with someone about what they are doing. Tell them what we’ve seen and how it could be better, why perhaps it’s not landing, what needs to shift. Usually accurate, certainly well-intentioned.

But information on its own is just information.

It does not become motivating because it is true.

It becomes motivating when the person understands why it matters to them.

That is the deceptively simple missing step. So simple you might overlook it, and yet it is what gets someone to take notice; to get curious because now, you’re actually speaking to them.

Most leaders are very clear on why the change matters to the business. They can explain the commercial impact, the team impact, the productivity issue, the risk, the cost, the inefficiency, the strategic importance etc etc.

Useful. Relevant. But easily dismissed.

People do not change simply because the business has a need.

They change when something becomes personally meaningful enough to move them.

This is relevance. Not manipulation.

And relevance is what turns information into motivation.

If you tell a senior leader they need to share more of their thinking in executive meetings, the message may be accurate. They may agree. But if they do not understand why that matters to the future they want for themselves, the information may land, sting slightly, then drift away.

If, however, they understand that the promotion they so desperately want requires people to experience their thinking and articulation in the room, not afterwards in private conversations, the same information has a different weight.

It is now connected, to them.

This is the point that little laminated card was trying to make, in a far more complicated way than I could use.

You don’t need to become fluent in eight different motivational languages. Few people can decode every phrase someone uses and neatly categorise each person at each moment in time (because motivation is contextual, not universal).

You need to know what matters to them now, and then connect the change you are asking for to that.

This is where many leaders misdiagnose the problem. They think the person is not motivated. Not ambitious enough. Not self-aware enough. Not taking the message seriously.

Sometimes that may be true.

Or maybe the message simply has no personal relevance.

A correct observation, but nice-to-know without somewhere meaningful to land.

Management connects change to the task.

Leadership connects change to the person.

That is the difference.

So before your next developmental conversation, ask yourself something simple:

Why does this matter to them?

Not just why does it matter to you, or the business, or the project, or their leadership. Why does it matter to the person in front of you, in the context of their ambition, their future, their confidence, their identity, their choices?

Because when someone can see the connection between what you are asking them to change and something they genuinely care about, the conversation shifts.

The information has meaning.

The change has a reason.

The person has a stake in it.

That is motivation.

Not a laminated card in a folio.

A conversation clear enough to connect the dots.