Are you operating above or below the line?
Motivations drive our behaviour and our thinking. They impact our relationships and our results. So it makes sense for us to take a step back and ask, what is driving us? How does that impact our behaviour? What results are we getting? What is behind those interactions that stick in our minds, the ones that we replay in our thoughts at night?
One path for raising awareness is to consider where you operate from most of the time on the Scale of Motivations by Zohar and Marshall*. In their work, Zohar and Marshall argued that leaders need rational or liner intelligence (IQ), and emotional or associative intelligence (EQ), but also a critical transformational intelligence (SQ).
It is SQ that allows us to move away from short-term finite games where we play through resources, where the players and rules are known and do not change, and where the game ends with winners and losers. SQ sparks our curiosity about why we do what we do and pushes enquiry towards what ‘better’ looks like. Leaders high in SQ choose to play infinite games, where players may be known but are also unknown, where the rules can and do change. They focus on improvement and appreciate that the game of life is designed to play on without them. Indeed they design work in the the same fashion. Leaders with high SQ “play above the line” on the Scale of Motivations, in the positive motivations.
The Scale of Motivations, Zohar & Marshall, 2004.
As personal effectiveness increases and behaviour has a more positive outcome, we move up the scale, from deficiency needs to higher level needs. One notices on the scale that the positive and the negative legs of this scale mirror each other, and so the mirror of ‘craving’, for example, is ‘power-within’.
Are you playing above or below the line?
*For more information on the Scale of Motivations, read the book Spiritual Capital, by Zohar & Marshall, 2004.
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