23 Managers Started. 5 Finished. Here’s What We Learned From the Motivation Pilot
What happens when managers actually have time to understand their people — and what happens when they don't.
A few months ago, I wrote about a hypothesis we were testing within our organization: that managers who understand the individual work motivations of their direct reports would show measurably higher leadership effectiveness scores after 90 days than at the start.
The pilot is over, and the results are in. The honest version of this story has two parts — what happened to the managers who didn’t finish, and what happened to the ones who did. Both parts matter.
*Spoiler Alert
In case you’re scanning to see the main points, here they are:
23 managers enrolled in the pilot; only 5 completed all 90 days
Workload, not skepticism, was the consistent reason managers dropped out
Among the 5 who finished, the pilot average Motivational Leadership Score rose from 4.22 to 4.47
The manager with the lowest baseline score showed the largest gain — nearly 17%
One manager’s MLS declined even as his team’s general engagement rose, showing the two metrics measure genuinely different things
The core lesson: the framework works, but it demands real time and sustained attention — not a one-time training
The Numbers You Need First
Twenty-three managers enrolled in the Motivated Manager Initiative. Five completed it through to Day 90.
That’s important to know.
Before I get to what the data showed for those five managers, I want to sit with that attrition number honestly, because it’s one of the most important findings of the entire pilot — even though it’s not the one I expected to be writing about and one I wanted to ignore.
Why Managers Dropped Out
When we talked to the managers who didn’t finish, the reasons were consistent and, frankly, understandable. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe in the framework. It wasn’t pushback or skepticism. It was the workload.
Running a department, hitting numbers, managing a team day to day — that work doesn’t pause to make room for something new, even something genuinely valuable. Several managers told us, in different words, the same thing: they felt they couldn’t give individual motivation conversations the attention they deserved. Rather than do it halfway, they stepped back.
I respect that. A rushed motivation conversation, treated as a box to check, would have done more harm than good. The managers who dropped out were making a reasonable call given everything else on their plate.
But it also tells us something important about what this work actually requires. Understanding what drives each person on your team is not a training module you complete once. It’s an ongoing practice that takes real time, real attention, and a manager who has the bandwidth to sustain it. That’s a genuine cost. Any honest account of this framework has to say so.
What Happened to the Managers Who Stayed
Here’s where the story turns. The five managers who completed the full 90 days didn’t just participate — they engaged deeply, and the results show it.
The pilot average Motivational Leadership Score across this group moved from 4.22 to 4.47 — a meaningful gain. But the average hides the more interesting story underneath it.
One manager entered the pilot with the lowest baseline score among the 23 managers. And what’s interesting is that his team was already engaged — strong Gallup numbers, solid performance — but they didn’t feel he understood what motivated them individually. He was, by every measure, the person with the most room to grow and the most at stake.
By Day 90, his score had risen more than any other manager with a meaningful sample size — a gain of nearly 17%. His employees’ sense that he leads them in a way that motivates them specifically — not generically — nearly doubled in strength.
What’s notable is that his general Gallup engagement score barely moved over the same window. That’s not a contradiction. It’s confirmation that something real changed in a specific, individual way — something the broader engagement survey was never designed to capture. His team didn’t suddenly become a different team. He became a manager who understood them differently.
A Story With Real Texture, Not Just a Clean Win
Not every result was a straightforward gain. One manager’s motivational leadership score actually declined over the 90 days, even as his team’s general engagement rose meaningfully over the same period. His own weekly reflections throughout the pilot showed someone genuinely wrestling with the framework — coaching a team member through a difficult attendance situation, building processes collaboratively with someone in a new role, trying to find the right moment to have hard conversations about money with someone going through a hard season.
I don’t think this manager failed the framework. I think his team went through something difficult during these exact 90 days, and that difficulty showed up specifically in how individually understood his people felt — even while their overall sense of the workplace improved on other dimensions. That’s a real and useful distinction, and it’s exactly the kind of finding that wouldn’t surface if we’d only looked at the average.
The Lesson
If I had to compress everything from this pilot into one sentence, it would be this: this works, but it takes time and effort, and not everyone has the bandwidth to give it right now.
That’s not a disappointing conclusion. It’s an honest one. The managers who stayed in and did the work saw real movement — in some cases, substantial movement, in the exact direction the hypothesis predicted. The managers who stepped back did so for legitimate reasons, and their absence from the final numbers is itself a finding worth taking seriously.
Any organization considering this kind of work needs to build in the time and support for managers to actually do it — not just the training, but the ongoing space in their week to have these conversations without feeling like they’re falling behind everywhere else. Motivation, it turns out, asks something of the person trying to understand it, not just the person being understood.
In an upcoming post I’ll be sharing a practical tool managers can use to identify the specific work motivations of every person on their team. Stay tuned.