By: Martin Cloutier
Whether you’re part of the HR team or hold an external support role as a coach, mentor, or consultant, your fundamental responsibility is to help people advance while ensuring sustainable performance for the organization.
However, what distinguishes helpful from transformative support isn’t just the quality of your advice, but also your ability to understand what truly motivates someone, what holds them back, and what prompts them to commit.
Beyond competencies: discovering what drives engagement
Competencies are key to any role. But a person’s values, motivation, and life priorities are what truly demonstrate why they commit, persevere, and excel or, conversely, get discouraged.
Aligning your actions with your life priorities isn’t just about well-being—it’s directly connected to mental health, performance, and retention.
Life priorities: a powerful indicator of performance and leadership style
Life priorities differ from person to person, influencing our career decisions, relationship to work, and leadership style. For example, some people will naturally gravitate toward the following:
- Wellness and balance: health, the environment, leisure, and the outdoors
- Relationships and social impact: closeness, collaboration, and community
- Learning and culture: curiosity, development, and knowledge
- Career progression: ambition, results, and responsibilities
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Search for meaning: contribution, alignment, and mission
These priorities are often elusive at first glance. However, they clearly emerge in the way a person approaches goals, change, stress, or expectations.
For coaching and human resources experts, this is a reliable way to identify the most effective ways to drive engagement, adjust objectives, guide decision-making, and promote consistent progress.
Aligning personal values and business objectives: a win-win approach
When business objectives don’t align with personal values, the organization may experience a drop in energy, resistance to change, gradual disengagement, or a brain drain.
Conversely, when these objectives are aligned with a person’s internal drivers, a virtuous circle is created—there is greater clarity, autonomy, and accountability, not to mention more consistent performance over time.
It’s not about adapting the company to each individual, but rather, creating a space where the person can thrive and the organization can achieve its goals.
A favourable time, but a topic that comes up year round
The holiday season and the start of the year are a good time to reevaluate your priorities. Many people feel the need to make changes, find meaning in their lives, treat themselves with greater respect, or clarify the next steps on their development path.
However, these reflections aren’t limited solely to January. Self-reflection, transitions, motivation issues, or mid-career crises can occur at any time. That’s why it’s important to have a solid tool box on hand to provide the right support at the right time.
The right questions to bring out non-negotiables
Here are some simple but powerful questions to help you better understand what drives the person you’re guiding:
What would you like to accomplish in 2026? Why are these goals important to you?
What would your dream job look like? What inspires you about this vision?
What is most crucial for you in your day-to-day work?
What challenges truly excite you?
Have you ever felt that your role didn’t align with your true self? If so, what was missing?
What do you appreciate most about your manager?
If you could write your own job description, what would be your must-haves?
The goal isn’t just for the person to answer, but to help them identify what’s essential, non-negotiable, and must be considered to build a consistent career path.
Your role: foster self-awareness to drive progress more effectively
It isn’t unusual for people to not know themselves as well as they think. This isn’t because they lack intelligence or maturity, but rather because they’ve never been encouraged to practise this type of introspection.
In taking a coaching, mentoring, or HR partnership approach, your role is to create the conditions that allow this clarity to emerge through your listening skills, questions, ability to rephrase, and support framework.
Focus on the right tools to maximize impact
Depending on the person and the context, a well-led discussion may be enough. However, for some profiles, psychometric tools can accelerate self-awareness and make the discussion more concrete, particularly for those who aren’t used to reflecting on what truly drives them.
Here are some of the tools offered in the Pixonality range of solutions that can support these interventions:
- MVPI Report (Hogan)
- SuccessFinder Profile Insights (SuccessFinder)
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Career Report (Hogan)
Conclusion: getting to know the person better means strengthening alignment and performance
In both HR and coaching, gaining a better understanding of the person in front of you is a clear strategic driver.
Ultimately, alignment between personal and organizational goals is one of the best indicators of progress, engagement, stability, and sustainable performance.
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