My work currently involves designing and executing ‘Reward and Recognition’ programs for the 1000-strong sales force (and key partners) of an Insurance major.  As you may gather, the nature of the portfolio is such that it imbibes skills from various categories, including Sales, Marketing Communications and Human Resources.

In my quest to find out what’s being discussed on this subject, across the globe, I chanced upon an excellent article published by the Harvard Business School:

People are primarily motivated by one of eight career anchors:

1. Technical/functional competence – a desire to excel in a chosen line of work
2. General managerial competence – wants to learn how to do many functions, supervise increasingly larger groups of employees
3. Autonomy/independence – most satisfied operating according to their own rules and procedures; they don’t want to be told what to do
4. Security/stability – those who value above all a predictable environment, one in which tasks and policies are clearly codified and defined
5. Entrepreneurial creativity – those who want to create something of their own and run it, in fact, obsessed with the need to create
6. Sense of service – need to focus work around a specific set of values; the chance to focus on a particular cause
7. Pure challenge – seeking ever-tougher challenges to conquer
8. Lifestyle – their most pressing concern is for their jobs to give them the freedom to balance other concerns with their work

You may not agree with all of these, but you have to admit it makes sense.

If more HR professionals and senior managers saw people in this light, it would surely reduce the number of times bright folks leave organizations simply because of a mismatch between their own agenda and
that of the firm.