Brunello Gianella · Motivational Intelligence
Motivational Intelligence makes visible what holds between motive, role, and system. And what drains people of substance every day.
A leadership offsite. The new strategy is agreed on, nobody objects. Six months later, half of the work hasn’t even started.
The room was well facilitated. The motives were not.
The usual answer
more communication, more engagement, more alignment.
The more precise question
Which motives does the role call for, and which ones does the person filling it bring?
If you only look at behavior, you mistake the surface for its possible source. Motivational Intelligence is the ability to read the motives beneath behavior: your own and those of others. Not as one drive you just have to fire up hard enough, but as 16 life motives, each with its own individual intensity.
It is grounded in the motivation research of Prof. Steven Reiss and the Reiss Motivation Profile®.
Individual
The profile describes how strong or weak each of the 16 life motives is in a person, compared to the norm. Not a type. An individual profile.
Equal in value
A strong need for Curiosity is no better than a weak one. What matters is the fit with the specific role.
Relatively stable
Life motives describe inner goals and values that carry a person through the years.
Typologies make people easy to handle. The Reiss Motivation Profile® makes individuality something we can talk about.
I call it ESSENTIA. Not the image others have of us. Not the role we play. But the source of our goals and values: what doesn’t need to be negotiated in order to be valuable.
This place doesn’t have to be created. It is already there. The profile provides coordinates. The person provides meaning. WIRK.RAUM provides context.
For the person, impact begins as intention. For the room, it begins as action.
Nobody sees my intention. The room experiences what I say, decide, and do. And what I leave undone. What lies in between is no side issue. What lies in between is leadership.
B = f(P, E)
Behavior is a function of person and environment, after Kurt Lewin. That is why WIRK.RAUM is not a place a leader controls. It is a relationship that everyone involved keeps shaping.
Unfiltered is not automatically genuine. At first, it is merely untranslated. The two poles of a life motive stand for opposite, psychologically equal goals and values. Steven Reiss called the tendency to consider one’s own values the better ones Self-Hugging. It turns difference into judgment, and misunderstood intent into conflict.
Reading people is not value-free. It reads values. But it has to be free of judgment.
Behavior provides observations, not yet an explanation. Interpret too quickly, and a possible mismatch turns into a personal deficit.
Leadership
“I value validation and encouragement from others.”
Team
“I value organization, predictability, and neatness.”
“I value flexibility and spontaneity.”
Strategy
“I value peacemaking, cooperation, and harmony.”
Each of these interpretations remains a hypothesis until the profile and the conversation support or reject it.
Motivational Intelligence begins where quick judgments about people end.
The Reiss Motivation Profile® shows the individual intensity of the 16 life motives compared to the norm. No typology, no pigeonholes: coordinates.
The reading separates observable behavior from its possible motivational source. What looks the same doesn’t have to come from the same motive.
The number doesn’t explain the person. Only biography, situation, and dialogue reveal what meaning an intensity has taken on in a real life.
The reading connects motive, role, and WIRK.RAUM. It shows where energy flows, where adapting takes its toll, and where difference turns into friction.
The number prevents guessing. The reading prevents judgment. The dialogue prevents presumption.
What this is not
We don’t start by asking: What’s wrong with this person? We ask: What haven’t we understood yet?
A reading doesn’t tell you who you are. It shows you where you look at the world from. And why others can see the same world completely differently.
Once you can read people, you no longer need to invent them.
06 / Motivational Intelligence Advocate · Mentor
I’m Brunello Gianella. For more than forty years, I worked on change engagements with CEOs, owners, and leadership teams, most recently under the name CEO-CODE®. Then I stepped out of the consultant role. Today I’m a mentor, not a coach.
I learned the Reiss Motivation Profile® from Prof. Steven Reiss in Columbus, Ohio, directly from the founder of the method. I have worked with it for more than twenty years. Motivational Intelligence is what grew out of both: a more precise reading of motives, roles, and systems.
I live and work in the canton of Schwyz, Switzerland. My book (in German): Wenn Turnschuhe nichts bringen.
Experience from engagements with
“His professionalism, creativity and unbridled joy of discovery make every project unique.”
“Deep thought-leadership and the ability to communicate complex concepts very clearly.”
They get better because others are allowed to disagree.
I write on LinkedIn every day: about motivation, leadership, work, and the systems that are quick to declare people the problem. And I respond. For me, content is not a broadcast channel. It is the beginning of a conversation.
I no longer sell programs or send invoices.
What I have, I pass on: experience, tacit knowledge, insights from forty years with people in positions of responsibility. Provided the person, the relationship, the topic, and the challenge hold. Whether they do is my call.
One-on-one
A leadership decision, a role, a friction that won’t resolve. We read which motives are at work in it: yours and those of the others.
Over time
For people who work on one question over a longer stretch: roles, staffing, culture. No curriculum. Conversations when they’re needed.
It always starts the same way: with an espresso.
09 / Virtual Espresso
Not a sales call. You bring an observation from your everyday life. I read with you what might lie beneath it.