Activate the Best Self

A zero-budget engagement turnaround at Larkfield Care Services, a UK contact-centre operator. You are the new manager of Team Aurora — 60 frontline advisors with 48/100 engagement, 52% annualised turnover, and a flagship £9m energy client threatening to terminate inside a 90-day cure period. Finance has handed you a hard constraint: no pay rises, no bonus pool, no headcount. Across four rounds you diagnose why intrinsic motivation collapsed (Cable's seeking system), redesign onboarding around best-self activation, choose a strengths-based job-crafting move that loosens control without breaching the client's SLAs, and set a feedback ritual that reinforces rather than starves the seeking system. Every choice moves four KPIs — Engagement, Intrinsic-Motivation Index, CSAT/performance lift, and Voluntary Turnover — and any reach for money or tighter monitoring actively backfires, so only design-and-leadership levers recover the account. Learners discover that engagement is a work-design problem, not a pay problem.