Understanding what drives you — and why it matters for performance, wellbeing, and sustainable work.
Most workplace performance conversations focus on skills, behaviours, and goals. What they rarely address is the question underneath all of those: what actually motivates this person?
Not what should motivate them. Not what motivates people in their role or industry generally. What motivates this person, right now — and whether their current work environment is meeting those motivators or systematically starving them.
When motivation is unmet over time, the cost is real and measurable. Disengagement. Reduced output. Increasing strain. The quiet, persistent sense of going through the motions — which is one of the clearest early signals of functional suffering.
Motivational Maps makes the invisible visible.
Motivation is the psychological and biological driving force that compels us to act, direct our behaviour, and achieve goals.
Derived from the Latin word movere (meaning "to move"), it explains why people initiate, continue, or terminate specific actions.
Motivation generally breaks down into two main types:
Intrinsic Motivation: Driven by internal rewards, personal satisfaction, or enjoyment (e.g., pursuing a hobby because it makes you happy).
Extrinsic Motivation: Driven by external forces or outcomes, such as money, grades, or avoiding punishment (e.g., working a job to pay bills).
COMMON QUESTIONS
For yourself, your team, or your organisation — these are the questions that come up most often before booking an assessment.
ABOUT THE CONCEPT
Motivational Maps measures what drives a person, not what they are good at or how they prefer to behave. It identifies your top motivators from a set of nine — ranked in order of strength — and your current motivation score, which shows how well those motivators are currently being met.
The distinction matters. Skills and behaviours can be trained. Motivation is different — it is the underlying energy that determines whether someone brings their full self to their work, or quietly disengages while still appearing to function.
Personality tools like Myers-Briggs or DISC describe how someone tends to think, communicate, or behave. They are relatively stable over time and answer the question "what is this person like?"
Motivational Maps answers a different question: "what drives this person, right now, and is it being met?" Motivation is more dynamic than personality — it responds to context, role, and life circumstances. That makes it a more immediately actionable tool for understanding engagement, energy, and risk of disengagement, rather than a static description of character.
Yes. While most people have a relatively stable core of one or two motivators across their life, the full ranked order can shift — particularly after significant life events, role changes, or periods of sustained unmet need.
This is part of why Motivational Maps is valuable as a periodic check-in rather than a one-off assessment. A motivational profile taken during a period of high strain may look meaningfully different to one taken once that strain has been addressed.
ABOUT THE ASSESSMENT
The self-perception inventory takes around 15 minutes to complete online. The report that follows shows your nine motivators in ranked order, your overall motivation score as a percentage, and where that score sits across the Action, Risk, Boost, and Optimal zones — alongside specific, practical suggestions for increasing motivation where it is being depleted.
The debrief is a facilitated conversation with Tammie to interpret what the report is actually showing — not just reading the results back, but translating them into what they mean in the context of your specific role, team, or life situation.
For individuals, this often means naming something that has been felt but not yet had language. For leaders and teams, it usually means identifying practical, specific actions — what would genuinely shift someone's motivation, rather than generic engagement advice that doesn't account for what actually drives that particular person.
Individual reports are confidential to the individual. For team and organisational reporting, results are aggregated into a collective picture — showing the overall motivational landscape of a team or organisation — rather than individual results being shared with leadership without consent.
This mirrors the same principle used in the JSECC: people need to trust that being honest in an assessment will not be used against them, or the data stops being honest.
FIT AND APPLICATION
It can absolutely stand alone, particularly for individuals or for a single team wanting to understand its motivational landscape. For organisations building a fuller psychosocial risk picture, Motivational Maps works well alongside the JSECC and PR6 — the JSECC shows where hazards exist, the PR6 shows resilience capacity, and Motivational Maps shows what is driving or depleting people day to day. Together they give a more complete picture than any one tool alone.
Most engagement surveys measure outcomes — how satisfied, engaged, or likely-to-stay someone reports being. They are useful, but they rarely explain why those numbers are what they are at an individual level.
Motivational Maps measures the underlying driver, not just the symptom. Two people can report similar engagement scores for entirely different reasons — one because their need for recognition is unmet, another because their need for autonomy is unmet. Without knowing which, any response you design is a guess. Motivational Maps replaces that guess with a specific, individual or team-level picture leaders can actually act on.
Both, genuinely. Many individuals use Motivational Maps outside any workplace context entirely — alongside coaching, during a career transition, or simply to understand a persistent sense that something in their life isn't fitting, without yet having language for what.
Tammie's own top motivators — Searcher, Expert, and Spirit — were unmet for years before she had any language for why. That is often exactly the gap this assessment closes.
Loss of motivation is one of the earliest and most reliable signals of functional suffering — and one of the easiest to miss, because it rarely looks like anything dramatic. It looks like someone still doing the work, still meeting deadlines, just with a little less of themselves in it than before.
Because functional suffering is invisible to most standard workplace metrics, motivation data gives leaders something concrete and non-clinical to work with — a starting point for a conversation that might otherwise never happen until something more serious surfaces.
Functional Suffering in the Workplace — read the full article
Motivational Maps is an ISO accredited self-perception inventory that identifies an individual's key motivators — what drives them, how motivated they currently are, and what practical steps would increase their motivation.
It is based on more than a decade of research into human behaviour, organisational psychology, and motivation theory, drawing on the work of Abraham Maslow, Edgar Schein, and Charles Handy to identify nine distinct motivators, clustered across three domains.
Relationship
Driven by connection, belonging, and the quality of relationships at work.
Achievement
Driven by results, progress, recognition, and the pursuit of excellence.
Growth
Driven by meaning, autonomy, creativity, and personal development.
Each person carries all nine motivators in some measure — but in a unique ranked order. The Motivational Maps assessment identifies which three to four sit at the top for an individual, and how strongly they are currently being satisfied.
RELATIONSHIP
ACHIEVEMENT
GROWTH
A NOTE FROM TAMMIE
She came to this work the hard way. Her top motivators are Searcher, Expert, and Spirit — meaning, mastery, and autonomy. For years, none of them were being met in the life she was performing. She didn't have language for why she felt like she was slowly disappearing inside a role that looked, from the outside, completely fine.
That experience — motivators consistently unmet, mental health quietly declining underneath a functioning exterior — is part of why Tammie does this work now. Motivational Maps doesn't just identify what drives a person intellectually. It names something people often already feel but haven't had the language to explain.
Motivation is the motive - the internal reason - we have which prompts us to act in certain ways and directions
Loss of motivation is one of the earliest and most reliable signals that someone is carrying more than is visible. It rarely announces itself — a person doesn't usually say "my core motivators are unmet." What shows up instead is a quiet flattening: less initiative, less energy in conversations, a sense of going through the motions in work that used to feel meaningful.
Because functional suffering is, by definition, invisible to standard performance metrics, motivation data gives leaders something concrete to work with — a non-clinical, practical language for a conversation that might otherwise never happen.
Functional Suffering in the Workplace — read the full article
We have inherited a model of mental health that is largely binary. You are either coping, or you are not. You are either fine, or you are in crisis. The space in the middle — the long, quiet, high-cost corridor between the two — has been largely invisible in both clinical and cultural conversation.
This invisibility has a cost. It means that people who are struggling at the identity level, but performing well at the behavioural level, fall through the cracks of both professional support and social care. They don't need the crisis line. They're too exhausted to seek therapy. They look too competent to be offered help. And so they keep going.
INDIVIDUALS
Anyone wanting clarity on what genuinely drives them — particularly useful alongside coaching or career decisions.
TEAMS
Leaders wanting to understand what is energising or depleting their team, beyond what engagement surveys capture.
ORGANISATIONS
A motivational landscape view alongside JSECC and PR6 data — completing the picture of where psychosocial risk is building.
For yourself, your team, or your organisation — every engagement starts with a conversation about what you actually need.