Improving Motivation and Job Satisfaction – the importance of the Graves Drives

One valuable use of MindSonar is to identify a person’s motivators.  For example, this is important when designing recruitment and retention strategies for an organisation and for individual teams, and when coaching individuals who want to achieve a long-term goal which will take time and dedication.

In using MindSonar for these purposes it’s important to look at the Graves Drives within each profile.  These will tell you a lot about the values that matter most to the individual – the things that they need to get from the given context in order to feel fulfilled and motivated.  By looking at the Graves Drives of the individuals concerned, it usually becomes apparent that, even in the same context, different people have quite different values.

For example, in people considering changing jobs in a particular sector, I have seen some who prioritise the Graves Drives Powerand Competition, and others for whom Learning and Order are the priorities. Similar differences can exist even between members of the same team.

By knowing this and by being aware of the impact of not enabling individuals to obtain them (namely, dissatisfaction and demotivation) managers and coaches can develop a more tailored approach to motivation.  This could be by using different language when describing the opportunities available – emphasising those aspects which match what is important to the individual, or (for larger organisations) it could be about providing a more varied range of any optional benefits available to staff.

Without the information that is provided by the Graves Drives as identified by the MindSonar profile it is all too easy to fall back on the assumption that all people are motivated by the same things. Such an approach can lead to poor recruitment and retention results for companies, or to coaching clients becoming disenchanted with their progress towards major goals.

Of course, the whole profile should be taken into account as thinking styles are also an important consideration, but without an understanding of the individual’s values, much could be missed.

If you’ve done a MindSonar profile, have another look at your Graves drives and think about how they are influencing you in that context – could you improve your own motivation by taking them more into account?  If you haven’t done a profile yet, then why not contact a certified MindSonar Professional to arrange one – it could make all the difference to your success!

The At My Best profile – a real game-changer

During my training to be a MindSonar Professional. I did an “At My Best” profile. In this exercise, I completed a MindSonar profile after focussing on a context in which I was feeling motivated, inspired and able to develop and take forward ideas and solutions which enabled me to succeed in what it was that I wanted to achieve. That is, I profiled the thinking patterns, Graves Drives and criteria that I employ when I’m working at my best.

I found it a really enlightening and useful exercise, as it enabled me to identify the metaprograms which were key to taking forward projects that I had put on the back burner for a while.

Some of the shifts I needed to make to move into my At My Best profile from my stuck position were ones I was aware of – such as moving into a more Proactive thinking pattern, rather than a Reactive one. Others had been less noticeable to me. For example, when working at my best I employ a stronger Internal Locus of Control than I did with respect to those projects which were on the back burner. This surprised me as I usually have a strong Internal Locus of Control overall and hadn’t realised how much some projects were being held back because of a concern about what others might think.

At my best I was also much more focused on Towards motivation than Away From, and this shift could also help me identify my desired outcomes and what I really wanted to achieve.

The insights from the exercise went beyond simply identifying the shifts in meta programmes which would help me increase the amount of time I spent in my At My Best profile. Looking at the Graves drives and Criteria also helped me to realise that some of my stalled projects didn’t really meet my needs in terms of my values and priorities. This was a particularly enlightening section of the Mindsonar profile for me. Once I saw that some of my projects were just not aligned to what was really important to me, it was easier to either modify them and even to let some go.

Since doing the At My Best profile, I’ve made some real shifts in what I’m aiming for, and some real changes in the way I identify and approach my plans for the future.

When working with clients who feel stuck or stalled in some way (which is pretty much all of them), I think it’s really useful get the client to do a At My Best profile. The changes it can bring to how they experience working on their plans and dreams can be game-changing.

Have you done an At My Best profile yet? If you have, then please share your experiences and insights from it below. If you haven’t and would like to, then contact your nearest Mindsonar Professional to arrange one – it could make all the difference to your success!

How do Criteria, Values, Meta Programs and Graves Drives Fit together?

Standards
Let’s start with criterion. This is actually the broadest concept of the four.  Criteria are standards by which we evaluate things. When you meet someone new, you may be using ‘happy’ as a criterion for evaluating the other person. Do they look happy? Great! Do they look unhappy? Not so good.

Values
Values
are criteria too, but they are very important criteria. ‘Honesty’ might be a value when you meet someone new. Sometimes these very important criteria are called ‘core values‘. If someone you meet doesn’t seem very happy, you may find that not so good, but even though happy is a criterion for you, you might not worry about it too much. But if they strike you as dishonest, you might think twice about meeting them again. There is a sliding scale between ‘Criterion’ on the one end and ‘Value’ on the other end. As a criterion becomes more and more important, at some point we call it a value. So when we ask ‘What do you find most important in this situation?’ we are asking you to give a value.

Meta Programs
Meta Programs are ways in which you handle your values. For instance: are you presupposing people will be honest (meta program: matching) or are you presupposing they will be dishonest (meta program: mismatching)?

Graves Drives
Graves Drives are a typology of criteria. In MindSonar we ask you to indicate, for each of your criteria, which Graves drives they are related to most. For example: is honesty about power for you (red drive)? Or is it about community (green drive)? If somebody else had ‘Openness’ as a value, would that be similar to honesty or not? We can’t know  from looking at the words ‘honesty’ and ‘openness’. But if we know that two people both categorise their (differently labeled) values in the same Graves Drive, we know that their values are similar.

Categorizing Criteria
The American psychologist Clare W. Graves theorized that there are eight value systems, which evolved over the course of human history. He assumed that each value system flows from the previous one as a response to:
a. Ever more complex life circumstances
b. Problems with the previous set of values.

MindSonar measures the extent to which your criteria are associated with seven of the eight Graves Drives. We call this ‘Graves categorisation’: putting your criteria (which you already described) into one or more Graves categories. This makes it possible to compare criteria between you and other people or between yourself in different situations.

Graves
Clare W. Graves was a professor of Psychology in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century at Union College in New York, the same university where Abraham Maslow taught at the time.

Maslow was developing his motivation theory (Maslow’s pyramid of needs), which shows the development of individual needs. The highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy, ‘self-actualization’, fit right in with the prevailing views of the seventies.

Graves thought this model did not offer a broad enough base for understanding man as a bio-psycho-social-cultural being. He assumed that human behaviour was not determined by individual needs alone, but by a combination of social, biological and psychological factors. Graves theorized that there are eight value systems which evolved over the course of the past 100,000 years of human history. Graves called these value systems ‘Levels of existence’.