Last months article discussed
different ways to manage your coaching time. The most time-efficient way may be
what I called ‘Coaching by Walking Around’ which means using opportunities that
come up in your everyday interactions with staff to develop them and advance
their careers. In this article, we’ll take a very practical look at five
different coaching opportunities that you can listen for and act on during your
day to day management activities. With each opportunity you’ll need to
recognize it, verbalize your support and mobilize the employee to take positive
actions.

Here are the five coaching moments to watch for
followed by examples:

1. When your employee
demonstrates a new skill or interest, seek ways to expand on it.

For example, let’s say Bob’s accounting assistant
June adds graphic elements to spreadsheets and shows a good eye for colour and
clarity. Bob notices the extra effort and added value. He praises her efforts,
comments on the positive impact of what she does and asks about her interest in
visual presentation. He asks her to think of ways she can use this talent more
within the organization.

2.
When your staff member seeks feedback, provide real,
specific feedback aimed at development.

Mary’s
marketing assistant George asks her what she thought of the latest designs that
he produced. Rather than just saying something positive, Mary thinks for a
minute and relates some specific aspects of the designs she liked and a meaningful
suggestion for improvement. Mary leaves it to George to decide if and how he
might act on her suggestion for his next design project.

3. When your employee enquires about
changes in the organization, confirm his or her emerging interest and
show them how to find out more.

Salesman
Robert asks his functional boss Lee what’s happening with plans for the
proposed division of the marketing and sales departments. Although it is a
complicated topic that is far from resolved, Lee spends a few minutes to
discuss it. Lee outlines the timetable for the decision and asks if Robert is
seeing an opportunity for himself with the change. Since Robert seems to be
interested in making something of the opportunity, Lee suggests he speak to the
Marketing Director to learn more about the plans.

4. When your employee is not doing well
at some aspect of the job, seek to discover root causes and support
them in finding solutions.

Following a
change in organizational structure, Lucy has to coordinate the workload of
several colleagues. Her boss Fai has noticed some tension among the colleagues
that Lucy works with and she realizes that Lucy is more grumpy than usual.
Rather than letting the potential problem escalate, she takes a few minutes to
ask Lucy what she finds difficult about her new role. Fai and Lucy then
brainstorm to think of how Lucy can handle the situation differently.

5. When your staff member is venting
frustration as a result of boredom or inefficiency, acknowledge their
feelings and encourage them to take action in any way they can.

Stanley
notices that his marketing manager Josephine is being unusually cynical during
the weekly meeting. Rather than letting it pass, he takes a few minutes in
private to ask what is bothering her and she admits that she’s frustrated with
the lack of support she gets from her counterparts in the region. Stanley acknowledges her
feelings and listens as she describes what causes her problems. He asks her a
few questions to help her clarify what she can do to reduce her frustration.

To be effective at coaching on the run, you first
of all need awareness. That means you are listening and watching for
opportunities for staff development. And you know how to support and mobilize
people to take advantage of the opportunities. A few well-spent minutes can
greatly advance your efforts to build strong coaching relationships with
people. Your time will pay off in increased staff motivation, engagement and
retention.

What would be the impact on your staff if you
took more chances to coach?

What stops you from coaching
your staff on the run?

This article was inspired by an
article by Beverly L. Kaye of www.careersystemsintl.com.

–Or, How to Manage Your Coaching Time–

Yes, it’s a myth. Coaching doesn’t
actually take more time from a manager’s life. In fact, effective coaching
creates new time by leveraging on the energy and abilities of team members.
However, we need to invest some time to save time in the long run. In this
article, we’ll review some of the different ways to manage your coaching time
to get the benefits most effectively.

One of the most
convenient excuses for starting anything new is that we don’t have time. And so
it is when I’m teaching people the skills to coach in the workplace, people
often comment that they don’t have time. What they really mean, of course, is
two things:

1) They are unsure how much time it will really
take.

2) They know they will have to change the way they
manage their time in order to spend more time upfront with their people before
they can save time through coaching.

In this article, I’m
not going to go into how to change your time management effectiveness, except
to say that the only way to improve your time management is to consciously
change your priorities. One of the key transitions to effective management is
to spend more time managing people rather than doing the work yourself. So of
course it makes sense that you would need to spend more time listening and
talking to your staff. By using coaching skills, you can ensure that you use
the time you spend with your people to the greatest effect.

Given that you will have to spend more time with your people, how will
you spend your coaching time? Let’s look at three simple options.

Option 1: Coaching by Walking Around

One of the big advantages of being a Manager Coach rather than an
external coach is that in many cases you have frequent daily interactions with
your coachees. You have opportunities to watch them in action, experience their
strengths and weaknesses first hand and give feedback and coaching. Just in
time coaching can be very motivating and effective as you can be available to
encourage and empower your coachees throughout the day capitalizing on the
moments of opportunity that occur.

This is a very time
efficient method as the coaching will happen in a few minutes here and there,
adding up to very little additional time.

However, for this
kind of coaching to be effective, you must be very aware in all your
interactions. You have to be ready to coach, even while you are focusing on
your other roles.

To be an effective ‘just in time’ coach,
it’s ideal if you have evolved to the extent that you can be yourself as a
coach. That means judging and criticizing are just not you, and at the same
time you hold high standards that you are able to share in an empowering way.
You may find you have some staff members who you can coach this way, and others
you cannot.

If your coachee feels overly nervous when
you’re around, rather than empowered, then it’s a sign that you have not yet
built sufficient trust with this coachee. Perhaps you are showing subtle
judgment or criticism such that they are not at their best in your presence.

On the other hand, if you don’t have the skills to call attention to
improvement opportunities on the fly, then many coaching moments could be
wasted.

I know a coach in Ottawa, Canada
who coaches politicians and senior civil servants ‘by walking around’. She
moves through the legislative buildings watching her coachees speaking and
networking and gives them immediate, private feedback on their performance and
the political dynamics that she sees. She’s a very strong person and yet not
judgmental. She sees evidence and speaks what she sees without calling it
‘right or wrong’. It just ‘is’ and every action has an impact. What a great
attitude for an empowering and ever-present coach.

Option 2: Coaching in Management Meetings

When managers begin coaching, they often simply change the way they
run their regular one-on-one meetings to include more listening, more open
questions and more support focused on the coachee’s needs. This is an easy way
to start to change your ways and it causes little disruption to the usual way
of doing things. The meetings may last longer than in the past, but they are
also likely to be much more productive. In fact, you may even find the meetings
are quicker or less frequent than before as you are likely to cover the needed
communications more effectively.

The main risk of using
this method is that you can confuse your coachees about what role you are
playing. As a more traditional manager, you may spend most of your management
time giving instructions and criticisms. As a Manager Coach you are likely to
spend more time asking questions and listening to their ideas. If they don’t
realize why you are suddenly asking for their opinions, they may wonder if you
are trying to test them or even lure them into a trap so you can fire them!
They will not be able to collaborate with you if they don’t know what you
expect of them.

The easy solution, of course, is simply to
explain to your coachees what role you are playing at different times in the
meeting and the reasons for your different roles. This will also help you
remain clear about your intentions and actions if you change roles mid-meeting.

As your coaching relationships improve and as you more
fully delegate responsibility to your staff, you may find that this type of
coaching naturally evolves into Option 3, as explained below.

Option 3: Scheduled Coaching Meetings

This type of coaching models the interactions between an external
coach and a coachee and it is quite different from normal management meetings.
The meetings are usually planned ahead and the coachee has the responsibility
to set the agenda. These meetings are the coachee’s chance to use the coach’s
time (in this case the manager’s time) however they choose.

One main advantage of this system is that it allows the coach and
coachee to keep their roles very clear within the meeting. This clarity
facilitates more effective coaching because the manager is less likely to slip
into a directive or hierarchical role.

Another huge benefit
is that the coachee retains full responsibility for how they want to use the
time. This system instills tremendous trust and responsibility in the coachee.
It can also be a highly efficient way for a manager to ensure staff members are
getting the kind of support they most need.

The success of
this type of coaching depends on the manager’s ability to fully trust the staff
member with the responsibility for both job performance and career development.
It does not mean it is only useful for very experienced and effective staff.
Someone can be fully responsible for their performance without necessarily
being fully competent, I believe. Almost everyone is motivated to do a good
job, given the chance.

Many managers use these kinds of
meetings for occasional performance and development reviews. For example,
annual appraisal meetings often use a structured format to encourage the
employee’s responsibility and input, and to facilitate collaboration.

I’ve worked with some very popular, effective and busy managers who
use scheduled coaching meetings almost exclusively to manage their staff. It
takes discipline to manage the time, and trust to coach the people.

Recently I asked several of my clients to choose role-models for
themselves as effective managers, and all of them selected bosses would had
treated them as coaching clients. These bosses had time for them, either in a
very structured way, or more spontaneously. These bosses were willing to listen
to their concerns and offer both questions and suggestions. These bosses let
them take full responsibility for the decisions they made within the scope of
their jobs while also informing them of the big picture in which they played a
part.

Coaching Fact: Coaching Takes Time AND Saves
Time

Whether you do your coaching in small doses
or in dedicated meetings, I think there’s no doubt that coaching saves time in
the long run, especially if you care about your whole team’s quality,
productivity and effectiveness. How will you spend your coaching time?

Role transitions are critical
times for employees and for organizations. Regardless of the situation into
which new staff members arrive, they are faced with the additional challenges
and time pressures of quickly learning how to do their new jobs. Collecting and
absorbing information about a new job takes time. And the forming of new
relationships is often challenging and critical to success. An effective Coach
Manager can speed and ease this process. 

The
First 90 Days, by Michael Watkins, is an excellent book
specifically about the increasingly frequent challenge of job changes and how
to navigate them to ensure success. Although the book is written for anyone taking
up a new leadership role, the advice in the book is also relevant for the
supervisors of any new employees, particularly those new staff who have a
leadership role. This article explains some of the key strategies in this book
as they relate to the Coach Manager's role. 

Take the Time You
Need 

Be sure to set aside some time to
spend with your new people. Times of transition are often action-packed as many
organizations find themselves short-staffed such that everyone is over-worked
by the time the new staff member arrives. So it is tempting to let them work in
a flurry with the rest of you, rather than stopping to tell them what is going
on. 

By nature we humans like to be in action even
if it is the wrong action. We say to ourselves “Don't just sit
there, do something!” The more stress we are under, the more
likely we are to do that. So instead you can remind yourself to
“Don't just do something, sit
there!“ 

It's much more
efficient to spend some one-on-one focused time with your new staff early on
rather than have to fix misunderstandings, poor habits or mishandled
relationships later on. 

Focus on Creating Strong Relationships 

Inducting your new staff is much more than just telling them what to
do. It is the beginning of a trusting, collaborative relationship where you
will be guiding and supporting this person to reach organizational goals in
alignment with his or her personal strengths and aspirations. Consider it the
beginning of the best manager-employee relationship you have ever
had. 

You can build all aspects of this
relationship through the following five conversations. 

Tell Them What They Need to Know 

Your new employees need a lot of specific information in order to
understand how to do their jobs well. What follows is a checklist of the types
of conversations that are needed in the first few days and weeks. Initially you
will be the one talking most in these conversations as you have a lot to tell
them. But make sure you also listen to their responses and check their
understanding. 

1. Diagnose the
   situation 

   In addition to providing all the
   background information about the new employee's job, give him or her an
   analysis of the type of situation he or she is facing. The current situation
   may fall into one of 4 categories as follows: 

   Start-up
   -Systems and structures must be created from scratch. 

   Turnaround -Rapid and decisive action is required
   to pull out of a critical situation 

   Realignment
   - An established system needs to be adjusted through building on strengths and
   tearing down what is no longer working. 

   Sustaining
   Success -A well-established system must be maintained while finding
   ways to take the business to the next level. 

2. Clarify your
   expectations

Be as
specific as you can in relating your expectations to your new team member. Your
expectations will include the outcomes that you want to see as well as any
expectations you have about the way the work is to be done. While being clear
about your process expectations, you can also be open to negotiate in order to
allow your new employee to be successful in using his or her own strengths and
style. 

Take the opportunity to elicit the new
employee's expectations to ensure you are in alignment. 

3. Discuss
   your working style 

Your style includes things like the format, frequency and level of
detail of your communications, your working hours, your moods, your hot buttons
and your preferences for their communications with you. Elicit their
preferences as well so you know what to expect from them and how to get the
best from them. 

Understand
Their Needs and Negotiate Support 

As the
new team member gets familiar with you and the work requirements, you can both
benefit from some deeper conversations to understand his or her unfolding plans
and future needs. 

4. Agree
   on what resources and support will be provided 

• Discuss your new employee's budgets, manpower and level of
  authority, and be ready to negotiate. 
• You may
  choose to offer your support for brainstorming and sharing experience while
  leaving the new leader with the final decisions on issues within his or her
  control. Be open to understanding what kind of support would most help this
  person. This is how a true coach works. 
• Finally,
  you may be asked to provide protection, advocacy or other kinds of political
  support for ideas and decisions. 

By agreeing on all these issues, you form a strong alliance with your new
staff. 

5. Plan
   for personal development 

In the long run, your new staff members will not
remain motivated unless you understand and provide for their development needs.
Discuss these plans early in your relationships to leverage on their strengths,
weaknesses and ambitions. 

 Conclusion 

If you take the time to properly induct your new staff members, you can
quickly build trusting and collaborative relationships which are the catalysts
for success in business. Focus on building the relationship through five
conversations covering both immediate and longer term needs.

Last month’s article focused on
how to discover what motivates your staff. In this article we’ll look at what
you can do to increase their motivation, starting with the most popular
motivator, achievement. Almost all of your team members are motivated by
achievement to a certain extent. Are you capitalizing on that? Let’s find
out. 

Harness the Achievement
Motivators 

When you ask anyone what
motivates them at work, most often they will first talk about the satisfaction
they feel when they have achieved something. I’ve witnessed people putting
great effort into a project without much concrete gain apart from the feeling
of satisfaction from achieving something significant and challenging. It’s a
strong motivating force and something relatively easy to harness in the
workplace, if you know how. 

To harness this type
of motivation, you need to make sure of two things: 

1) Your employees know the results of their
work. 

2) Your employees believe they have control
over the results. 

Seeing,
Hearing and Feeling Results 

Think about
it. Imagine you are preparing a PowerPoint presentation for your boss to
deliver, and you will not be present for the delivery nor get any feedback on
how well it is received. How will you know if you have been
successful? 

If you don’t know what aspects of your
efforts were appreciated and what parts could be improved, why would you make
an effort to do it well? Any extra effort you make may well be wasted and you
wouldn’t even know it. 

True to form, your boss
comes back from the presentation and tells you it was ‘fine’. You feel like
your job is not very exciting and there’s nothing to motivate you to do any
better than you normally do. 

In contrast, think
about what would happen if you were in the audience when your boss delivered
the presentation. 

You would be able to watch her
as the presentation slides guided her and supported her. You’d notice the
reactions of the people in the audience. Maybe they get puzzled by a slide and
need to ask for confirmation. You hear their murmurs of confusion. You hear
their ‘hmms’ as they understand. You feel the confidence of your boss and the
feeling of assurance she gives the audience. In other words, you get to sense
and experience the results of your actions. Yes, it’s motivating because it is
concrete feedback on your results. 

Apart from
actually witnessing the impact of work first-hand, it is also very motivating
to receive specific feedback. In this case, your boss could have taken the time
to note what she particularly liked about the presentation slides, and also
what she would prefer to change, or which aspects didn’t have the desired
effect. With this kind of constructive feedback, you would feel motivated to
improve your results next time. 

Both positive and
corrective feedback are important and motivating. But in general positive
feedback is more important and more powerful. I’ll go more into this topic in a
future article. 

Controlling Results and
Expressing Yourself 

Likewise imagine
what happens to your motivation when you are working on an interesting and
important project but your boss keeps insisting on making the most important
decisions himself. You feel you are just doing busy-work and not really
contributing to the results. You feel uninspired, even used. You might react by
doing the minimum so at least you can get off work early and do something you
really like. 

I’ve had numerous coaching clients
complain about being treated this way by their supervisors. Most likely the
boss is not aware of the damage being done to the motivation and morale of the
team. 

In contrast, have you ever worked for
someone who trusted you with a project that was a real challenge for you? Maybe
it was a previous boss, a teacher or a leader in a voluntary
organization? 

If you remember a time like that,
you may recall an adrenaline rush of excitement as you thought ahead to how you
would do the job. You probably felt honoured that you were trusted and you
really wanted to live up to that trust. You decided to yourself to do the best
you could both to test yourself and also to prove yourself to that important
person who trusted you. 

Missed
Opportunities 

When people don’t have the
opportunity to sense and control their results, they quickly lose motivation.
It’s human nature. And you know, your employees are human too. 

Many managers make these same mistakes with the best of intentions.
Here are some of the thinking patterns that lead to these missed motivational
opportunities. 

1) “I am more
qualified to do this work and I can do a better job than my
staff.” 

All managers must
strike a balance between getting the work done and developing other people to
get the work done. Very often doing the work yourself is playing it safe. I
would challenge you to delegate and develop more. You, your company and your
team will benefit in the long run. 

2)
“My people are too junior and inexperienced to achieve very
much.” 

With junior people it
is even more important that you develop them, both to get them up to speed and
to train them to expect to learn and grow. You can start with small tasks to
gradually build their confidence and experience. You will need to experiment with
what size of task motivates them and what is too overwhelming. Everyone has a
different capacity for challenge and learning. 

3)
“I need to receive credit for my team’s work in order to ensure my power and
position in the organization, or for my personal gratification and continued
motivation.” 

This issue is a
challenge for many managers. We can blame the organizational culture for
requiring power politics, however, I believe this problem comes more from the
personal realm. Is it really true that your company won’t value you unless you
take all the credit? Or is it more a question of your own level of confidence
and belief in yourself? 

The most motivating
managers that I’ve met are all very self-confident people. They don’t need to
prove themselves much. They have a pattern of thinking that allows them to feel
secure in the most power-hungry workplace. They often use a sense of integrity,
of ‘doing the right thing’, to keep themselves focused on developing their
people and their organizations. 

To use the
achievement motivators effectively may require a shift in your thinking that
marks a milestone in your development as a successful manager. It is a key area
of personal growth for all managers and often a focus for much of the
leadership development coaching I do. 

But… 

When I bring up this type of motivation to my clients or students, I
often hear the complaint that their people are not motivated to do a good job
in their work because … their employees want to avoid being given more
work. 

Yes. Of course. Wouldn’t you do that? If you
give your employees MORE work when they do a good job, you are punishing them
for their efforts. You are probably giving them more stress, less free time and
more of the same kind of work that is becoming boring and tedious to
them. 

To motivate them to work harder and do a
better job you need give them BETTER work. Better work is work that challenges
them, for which they get a new and better kind of recognition or credit. Work
they are responsible and accountable for and that you count on them to do well.
I mean also work over which they can express their talents and preferences,
where they can make their mark and feel a real contribution. 

It is also, by the way, work that contributes more value to your
organization. It challenges them to give their best and to tap into their
higher-level talents. Wouldn’t you want them to do that? 

Once again you may need to let go of some of the control you have as
their boss. You may need to figure out how to upgrade some of the busy-work into
higher accountability work. 

You may also need to
figure out how to communicate the benefits of this kind of work to your staff.
If they are accustomed to being given only more work and not better work, it
may take some honest talk to relate how you intend to change things. 

Are you thinking now about how you could do this? If yes, I would love
to hear your ideas of what you will do and also the particular obstacles and
challenges you face. 

Actions to Take 

In
summary, here is a list of questions to answer and actions to take that will
help you harness the achievement motivators of your staff. 

1) Consider how each of your staff receives feedback on his or her
responsibilities. How can you increase the amount and quality of both positive
and corrective feedback? 

2) If you could give each
of your staff members a motivating challenge, what would it be? 

3) What stops you from delegating higher-level responsibilities to
your staff? What change in your thinking or actions would be needed to increase
your level of delegation?

This quote by Dwight Eisenhower
makes leadership sound so simple. But both parts of his famous sentence are
actually quite difficult to do well. This article focuses on the second part.
How do we get others to do what we want them to do? 

Put simply, we have three choices. We can force them. We can reward
them. Or we can align our goals with theirs so that they work willingly and for
their own intrinsic benefit. 

The first option has
been abolished. It's called slavery. Some managers still try to use force to
get what they want but it is a very inefficient method as a lot of energy is
diverted into resistance. 

The second option is our
way of life. We reward employees with pay and benefits and we expect them to
provide their labour in return. This method works well to a certain extent. But
when you want to get the very most from your employees, when you want to engage
their minds and their hearts in their work, then you must harness their intrinsic
motivations. No matter how much you pay people, they will only engage
themselves fully when they are delighted by their work and excited about their
results. 

Therefore you can only maximize your
effectiveness when you use the third option: discover what they want to do and
align that with the company's goals. 

4
Categories of Intrinsic Motivators 

As described
in last months article, the first step in motivating your people is to discover
their intrinsic motivations –and not just one. The more you know about what
motivates your employees, the more flexibility you will have in creating ways
to harness that motivation. 

Last month we looked
at some methods for eliciting your staff's motivations. This month let's look
at some classifications of motivations to will help you identify more. Most
people will have at least one type of motivation in each of the following
categories. 

Achievement 

The majority of people are motivated by results. In general people are
quite aware of this kind of motivation. People readily admit that they feel
motivated when they've achieved their aims after a challenging assignment or
when they see satisfaction in the eyes of their customers. 

To harness this type of motivation, you need to make sure your
employees see the results they are creating and feel the control they have over
them. You can probably capitalize on these motivations much more than you
currently do. More on exactly how to do this in a future article. 

What kinds of results motivate you? And what kinds of results are most
exciting to your staff? 

Actions 

People are motivated by doing certain things that they enjoy, apart
from the results. For example someone may enjoy persuading people just for the
sake of it, regardless of any result, such as a sale, that may come about from
the action. Some people enjoy precision work; some people love making broad
brush strokes; some find pleasure in small talk; while others are thrilled by
deep conversations. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different possible
activities that people enjoy and many of them are work related. You'll find it
very useful to discover action motivations because the people who enjoy these
actions will persist in doing them regardless of any specific
results. 

For example, I have a friend who is a
natural connection-maker. Everywhere she goes she gets to know people quickly,
often starting friendly conversations with complete strangers. She is naturally
open and welcoming. We call her the 'social coordinator'. 

In some jobs, her tendency to be outgoing could be a disadvantage, a
distraction for others in her office environment, or a 'time waster'. But in
any job where making warm connections with strangers is a desirable quality for
the company's goals, she is a natural. And as long as she has the chance to do
that, she will have fun, feel successful and add tremendous value to the
company just by being herself. 

What do you love to
do, just for the sake of it? What do your staff members do when they have
complete choice? How can you align your staff's natural tendencies with their
role at work? 

Personal Needs 

All of us have personal needs that motivate us, whether or not we
admit it. In fact our personal needs are often the strongest motivators that
cause us to get up in the morning and go to work, and that motivate us to
express ourselves in specific ways. I'm talking about the need for safety,
security, belonging, self-esteem, recognition and many more very important
personal needs. 

Personal needs are different from
the other motivators. When our needs are met we don't feel excited and
inspired, we just feel satisfied. But when are needs are NOT met, we often show
ourselves at our worst. 

Satisfying the needs of
your employees, whether by your own actions or through supporting them to make
changes, is a key step in motivating them. Needs are the foundation which
allows someone to be motivated by achievement, actions or
contributions. 

What do you need at this point in
your life? What do your staff members need? 

Contributions 

Many people are highly motivated to make meaningful contributions to
the world. They may want to save the earth, help people or express other
artistic, intellectual or social values. 

You may
have heard the story of the janitor at NASA who, when asked what he did for a
living, replied that he was sending a man to the moon. Instead of defining the
meaning of his work as simply cleaning, he was motivated by the contribution he
was making to something much bigger, more inspiring and important. 

You can align much more of your staff's energy and commitment by
clarifying the link between your company's business and the greater good that
it achieves. The big thing that your company does, such as generating wealth
and providing valuable products and services, can in itself by very motivating,
as long as it is clear and evident. 

What
contribution do you want to make to the world? And what about your staff? 

Conclusion 

As you
deepen the conversations you are having with your team members about their
motivations, there are many wonderful things to discover about what makes them
tick and what makes them happy. By looking in the four categories, Achievement,
Actions, Personal Needs and Contributions, you'll uncover a variety of ways to
motivate each person, including yourself. These motivations are the raw
material of personal energy that makes every person and every organization
successful. I personally find it very inspiring to learn such things about
people, and I hope you do too. 

Whether you find
this easy, difficult, inspiring or frustrating, I'd love to hear about it so I
can continue to address your concerns through these articles. Please send me an
email and I promise to respond to see how I can support you. coach-manager@progressu.com.hk

Motivation is a crucial element for a productive and effective workforce. A lack of motivation is a common complaint among managers and also a good indicator that there is a need for coaching. In this article, I'll focus on the basic theories about motivation, and the first step in motivating: discovering the inner motivations of your people. In a future article, I'll discuss how to use coaching practices to harness the power of those inner motivations to the company's benefit. 

Many managers find that motivating their people is one of the biggest challenges they face. It is a complex task because it is completely different for each individual that you want to motivate. Most managers find some people very easy to understand and motivate, while others are unreachable or beyond their comprehension. Coaching practices can be extremely helpful in providing the skills to understand the personal motivations of individuals, even difficult ones, and to use this information to align their motivations with organizational goals. But before we get to the coaching skills, here's a brief review of the basic theories behind motivating people. 

Motivation – How Does it Work? 

Referring to the Harvard Business Review paperback on Motivating People¹, we can see that while new management fads for how to motivate people have come and gone over the past few decades, human nature has not changed in the meantime and the proven strategies that were articulated in the 1950s are just as relevant today. It is heartening to read these strategies that align perfectly with the coach approach to managing people. Below are some very brief summaries of the key points made by a few authors. You can reflect on the questions to consider how these points affect you and your team. 

Fredrick Herzberg: 

Real motivation happens when someone is willing to do something without external prompting. For example, if you need to keep kicking your dog to get him to move, you are the one who is motivated, not the dog. Are your people truly motivated or are they just earning a pay check? 

External factors such as money, benefits and working hours prevent dissatisfaction. Only internal factors create internal motivation. What internal factors motivate you? What motivates your people? 

Nigel Nicholson: 

You cannot motivate anyone. People can only motivate themselves. Everyone has motivational energy but it is often blocked in the workplace. Removing those blockages requires employee participation. How do you work with your people to help them become motivated? What are you doing that blocks your staff's internal motivation? 

Harry Levinson: 

To be effective in the longer run, employees' objectives must be designed to meet both individual and organizational purposes. In other words, forcing people to work solely towards organizational goals without consideration for personal goals will lead to loss of morale. Conversely, when individuals' goals are designed to align both organizational and personal purposes, employees are much more engaged and require less external motivation to get the job done. How well do your staff's personal goals align with the organization's goals? 

Discover the Inner Motivation 

According to these authors, the first step in helping someone become motivated is to discover what internal factors motivate them. You need to find the source of the inner motivational energy. This is where coaching skills become vital. Here are a few different strategies you can use to discover what motivates people. 

1. Use a personality assessment system that identifies preferences, traits or strengths. A person's natural tendencies indicate what motivates them. I recommend Harrison Assessments² as they survey a very wide range of traits based on a person's preferences. Using the data from the assessment, have a discussion with the person assessed to understand more completely how they feel about their strengths, how they use them and why they enjoy these strengths. Remember that although the assessment is likely to be accurate, they are the true experts on their own motivations. 
2. Ask them to tell you about a time when they were really happy at work. Draw them out to uncover what exactly was motivating them at the time. Listen closely to what was important to them. Accept what they say and withhold your judgment. Notice their body language to understand what thrills them. 
3. Observe how they behave when they have complete choice. What do they do in their spare time? What kind of tasks do they volunteer for? 

An Example 

A client of mine was promoted to a management position in a new department and was concerned about enlisting the support of the existing staff during a period of uncertainty and change in the organization. He used some simple Harrison Assessment reports to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of his four direct reports. With the insight of the assessments, he was able to have productive conversations with each of his staff members to discuss in detail how they wanted to work and how they could best support the organization. Since the Harrison Questionnaire is based on a person's preferences, the strengths and weaknesses indicated in the reports point to what the person is motivated or not motivated to do or be. 

The report revealed very different traits between the employees and so my client was able to tailor his conversations with the staff to leverage on their strengths and discuss how to accommodate or change their weaknesses. Apart from the insights of the assessments, his willingness to be open and respectful (that is, to be a coach) with his employees contributed greatly to his success. 

My client was very pleased with the outcome of the exercise. He said, “I cannot believe the effect this exercise had on the key managers. One spin off that I was not expecting was that I unstuck them from the business and that they are all excited about change. This makes my job of guiding improvement much easier now.” 

Conclusion 

Managers can increase their staff members' motivation by: 

1. Helping them discover and articulate the internal motivations they feel and 
2. Collaborating with them to find ways to align their personal motivations with the organizational goals. 

This process requires that the manager listen well and observe carefully while maintaining an attitude of acceptance and openness that encourages staff members to reveal their inner motivations. There are many different assessments, exercises and lines of questioning that the manager can use, but the key to success is the non-judgmental and positive attitude that allows people to feel comfortable and proud about who they are and what they want. 

January 2006

1–Harvard Business Review on Motivating People, 2003, A Harvard Business Review Paperback, Harvard Business Review Publishing Corp. ISBN 1-59139-132-6 

2– For more information about Harrison Assessments, please see www.spaxman.com.hk/personality.html