CHAPTER 6
Purpose-Driven Analytics: Understanding Motivators

I have been managing employees for over 20 years. The first time was the hardest, as there were lots of unknowns. I moved into the role simply because my boss had decided to resign, and I was “next up.” I hadn’t received any formal training. I was expected to just keep doing what my predecessor was doing.

For managing the actual work, it was easy to pick up where she left off. There was a nice backlog of tasks that needed to be done, so I just assigned out the work using this list. But I had no idea how to plan for the future. I had no strategic plan on how I would manage my employees. I had no idea how difficult it would be to handle different types of situations. I was mostly unprepared.

Thankfully, my prior boss was a good one. I was lucky in seeing a reasonably good model of how to manage people. She had slowly been informally training me to be her successor, even though she may have not even...