Whether an assignment comes back with effort attached depends on how well the work fits the person doing it, and how you frame it when you hand it over. You control how an assignment is delivered and how it is received, and neither requires new headcount, a bigger budget, or a reorganization.
Most managers are already good at picking who gets a given assignment. You look at the work, you look at your team, and you pick the person with the right skills and enough room on their plate. Capability is a genuine constraint, and ignoring it produces missed deadlines and rework.
But McKinsey’s research puts top performers in highly critical roles at 800% more productive than average performers in the same role, and that’s a gap far too wide to explain through capability alone. This explains why what energizes Joe to go all in might drain Sarah and lead to procrastination — and if you don’t know the difference and apply a one-size-fits-all approach to how you lead them and assign projects, Joe will succeed while Sarah will struggle.
Bain and Company, working with the Economist Intelligence Unit, measured the productivity gap from the other direction. On their index, where a satisfied employee produces at 100, an engaged employee produces at 144, and an inspired employee produces at 225. One inspired person generates roughly what two and a quarter satisfied people do.
Bain also found that only one in eight employees is inspired at work, which tells you how much of this capacity is sitting unclaimed inside teams that are already fully staffed.
Delegating by skill alone leaves out what drives the person doing the work
Ask any manager what their people are good at, and you’ll get a fast, confident answer.
Ask what drives them, specifically enough to shape an assignment around it, and the answers get vague. That gap is expensive, because the difference between an assignment somebody merely executes and one they take ownership of comes down to whether the work energizes or drains them.
Workload data suggests most teams have plenty of room to reshuffle who does what so managers can get the best from every team member.
Eagle Hill Consulting, in a survey conducted by Ipsos among 1,375 U.S. employees in January 2025, found that 68% of employees say much of their time goes to low-value, inefficient work, and 78% regularly trade ideas with colleagues about how to work more efficiently.
Your team has already likely diagnosed a fair amount of this on their own. Gallup’s meta-analysis of more than 10,000 work units and over 300,000 employees across 51 companies found that units scoring above the median on the item, “I have the opportunity to do what I do best,” carry a 38% higher probability of success on productivity measures and a 44% higher probability on customer loyalty.
Motivation Code measures the driver powering those productivity and engagement figures.
Motivation is what drives a person toward work they find satisfying, and every person has all 32 identified Motivations within them ranked in a specific order. Motivations ranked highest produce energy when work draws on them, while Motivations ranked lowest produce an energy drain when work demands them.
To move fast, do more, and exceed expectations for the assignments given, employees need to find their groove — that sweet spot of flow where they immerse themselves in their work, do their best with the least effort, and achieve their full potential. And that only happens when the work in front of them taps into their strongest Motivations and prompts them to engage, persist when things get tough, and achieve their goal. At Motivation Code, we call that Motivational Flow. It’s how someone is wired to contribute the most value to a team.
Identify the kind of work that energizes each person on your team
All 32 MCode Motivations map to 8 Motivational Dimensions, and Dimension-level information is usually enough to inform how you assign work. Every MCode Dimension is fueled and depleted by different types of work, and knowing how members of your team are wired for work turns assignment decisions from guesswork into something closer to routing.
- Achievers are driven by personal excellence and distinction, so high-visibility projects, stretch assignments, and competitive situations energize them. Routine maintenance, shared credit, and work with no room to excel drain them.
- Drivers are driven by momentum and completion, so clear deadlines, defined problems, and high-stakes challenges suit them. Open-ended initiatives with distant outcomes and meeting-heavy calendars wear them down.
- Influencers are driven by visible effect on people, so mentoring, presenting, persuading, and bringing an idea into practice all fit. Isolated tasks and ideas that stay theoretical do not.
- Learners are driven by depth and mastery, so research, complex analysis, and teaching what they’ve figured out all suit them. Surface-level repetition and rushed timelines don’t give the wiring anything to work with.
- Optimizers are driven by closing the gap between how something works and how it should work, so process design, fixing what’s broken, and owning a standard fit them. Ambient chaos and environments that settle for good enough grind on them.
- Orchestrators are driven by bringing pieces into working order, so planning complex initiatives, strategic oversight, and building structure suit them. A bulleted task list is their worst assignment, because it treats an owner like labor.
- Relators are driven by connection and reciprocal belonging, so collaborative projects, mentoring, and consensus-building fit. Competitive individual assignments and work that isolates them do not.
- Visionaries are driven by seeing what could be and shaping it, so creative problems, future-facing work, and building something new energize them. Rigid execution against someone else’s template drains them.
Comparing the 8 Dimensions against your current project queue will usually surface at least one assignment sitting with the wrong person, along with one person who would take something off your desk and enjoy it.
How to word an assignment so the person receiving it takes ownership
Matching work to the person it suits only gets you halfway, because most projects go to whoever has the skills and capacity. Someone has to write the quarterly report, handle the client escalation, and run the migration, and the best-suited person is often already booked.
The notion of motivated assignments is all about shaping projects to align with an individual’s Motivational Flow, and using motivational language to assign those projects.
It’s leaders pitching to an employee’s sweet spot and setting them up to be extraordinary by framing an assignment so it lights them up.
This means that the way you’d shape an assignment for one member of your team will be different from how you’d shape it for another member. This is all about personalizing the way you communicate, not changing the deadline, the budget, or the scope.
The goal is to shift what the person receiving the assignment hears and interprets — and there are eight different ways to do it:
- For an Achiever, name the bar and what clearing it looks like. Specific metrics and outcomes carry weight, while generic praise and language that treats them as one of the group fall flat.
- For a Driver, put the finish line in the first sentence, then show the milestones between here and there. Give them meaningful ownership of the approach and don’t soften the difficulty, because a softened assignment signals a lack of confidence in them.
- For an Influencer, name the specific humans on the receiving end rather than the abstraction, and schedule the debrief where they hear what changed. Their work finishes when they see the effect it had, which usually comes well after the deliverable ships.
- For a Learner, explain why the work matters before you explain what to do, leave room for them to determine how, and make sure their thinking is visible in the final deliverable. Adding “then bring the team up to speed on Thursday” converts solo research into something they’ll go deeper on.
- For an Optimizer, define expectations explicitly and name the actual gap you want closed. Give them authority over the standard rather than asking them to inspect against someone else’s.
- For an Orchestrator, hand over a domain instead of a to-do list. Give them the system, process, or initiative and the authority to organize it.
- For a Relator, connect the assignment to the team it serves and the specific people who benefit. Individual tasks framed around who they support get more from a Relator than the same task framed around personal output.
- For a Visionary, give them a domain to shape, a horizon far enough out to be worth aiming at, and a named audience who will receive what they produce.
Get it wrong, and your team members will be…
- Unengaged and drained by their work.
- Unmotivated, distracted, and moving slow.
- Struggling to care and procrastinating.
- Dreading work and the day ahead.
- Under-performing and cracking under pressure.
- Put at a disadvantage and set up to fail.
- Feeling insecure, incapable, and stressed.
Get it right, and your team members will be…
- Engaged and energized by their work.
- Motivated, in the flow, and moving fast.
- All-in, excited, and building momentum.
- Looking forward to work and the day ahead.
- Over-delivering and thriving under pressure
- Given an advantage and set up to succeed.
- Feeling secure, capable, and confident.
Motivation Code helps leaders understand how people think about work. The motivational intelligence the MCode assessment provides reveals the why behind decisions and actions, gives context to communication styles, and explains what they need to contribute maximum value. With this understanding, leaders can use motivational language to craft assignments their people can’t wait to sink their teeth into.
How to distribute draining work without burning one person out
Some of the work on your team won’t energize anyone, no matter who you hand it to. Someone still has to produce the compliance documentation, reconcile the expenses, and file the report that nobody is likely to actually read.
Three approaches to unwanted work beat assigning it and hoping for the best:
- Rotate it so no single person absorbs it permanently.
- Split it so nobody spends a full week focused on it.
- Time-box it with a defined end so it doesn’t turn into an ambient obligation.
Whichever you pick, explain the work honestly when you hand it over. Dressing up draining work as a growth opportunity fools nobody, and you’ll want the trust it costs you for something more important later.
Signs an assignment matched the person
Confirming whether an assignment suited the person you gave it to doesn’t require a survey, because the behavior that follows a good match is observable and tends to appear fairly quickly.
- Someone working on an assignment that draws on their strongest Motivations extends the scope on their own, asks better questions earlier, surfaces problems before those problems reach you, and returns with more than the brief requested.
- A mismatch produces something different and easy to miss, which is exactly what you asked for, delivered on time, with nothing beyond it. That output is perfectly acceptable, and it’s also the clearest signal you’ll get, because conscientious people respond to draining work by complying with it precisely.
The best thing you can do is tell the person exactly what you observed about how they handled the work.
McKinsey’s 2025 HR Monitor found that 26% of employees received no feedback at all over the past year, so specific acknowledgment of what someone did with an assignment is rarer than it should be and matters more than most managers expect. PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, covering 49,843 workers across 48 economies, found that only 57% of workers say their manager supports them in building new skills. Making the connection between an assignment and someone’s development explicit is worth the sentence it takes.
Motivational intelligence simplifies the process of assigning work
Assigning and framing work to fit each individual depends on knowing what drives each person on your team, and observation alone won’t get you there. Watching someone work tells you what they’re good at and how they behave under pressure, while the Motivation underneath that behavior stays invisible.
That’s a problem because the same visible habit can come from entirely different motivational drivers, so a manager working from observation ends up confident about conclusions they have no way to check.
Our motivation assessment surfaces each person’s Motivations directly. It takes about 30 minutes, and the methodology rests on more than 65 years of motivation science and research, and more than 1.8 million analyzed achievement stories.
Then, an MCode Team Alignment Workshop turns those individual results into motivational language your whole team can work from.
Here’s how it works virtually for distributed and hybrid teams, or onsite for in-office and enterprise teams:
- Everyone completes the MCode assessment.
- A Certified MCode Executive Coach hosts a private Impact Session with the team leader to fully understand their results before the sessions begin.
- The Coach then facilitates interactive workshop sessions with companion workbooks. All sessions are built around your team’s specific MCode assessment results.
- The team builds its Team Motivation Map as it goes, with two of the six workshop sessions covering designing work that energizes your team and optimizing roles for team success.
- The experience wraps with a private debrief between the Coach and the team leader.
With MCode results in hand, leaders can personalize the way they assign projects to individuals and teams, so they can gain quick buy-in, get their best work, and drive outstanding outcomes. Teams and individuals benefit, too. They discover how each team member is wired for work, which helps them understand themselves and each other and work better together.
Learn more about our Team Alignment Workshop experience or reach out to book your workshop and give every manager the motivational intelligence they need to personalize the way they lead and make assignments, and every team member the understanding they need to be a high-value team member.
