Coaching and MotivationJanuary 2016

material minds

What is expected of them How they’re doing How they can improve

In order to execute strategy effectively, you need to connect that strategy with the daily action of all employees. In order to connect strategy to action employees need

to know three key things:

The rest of this slide deck shows how coaching and motivation enable an employee to know the third thing they need to know; how they can improve.

Connecting Strategy With Action

Understanding what drives results in a business is key to successfully executing on strategy.

These business drivers comprise your business model and should be a focus for analysis and improvement.

While performance management reports on results, coaching is designed to bring improvement on results through understanding business drivers.

Through metrics, one can track and measure business drivers and understand the linkage between activities and results.

Once you have analyzed the linkages, you can take action to determine how to improve results.

Breaking down variables enables an employee to see fine differences that move results.

Business Drivers

Materiality

Something is material if it matters to the end results. The business drivers that matter, the ones which can bring the biggest improvement in results are the material ones.

One key to success in strategy execution is to focus on things that matter, not on things that don’t have an appreciable affect on results.

The purpose of coaching employees is to help them improve business results by better understanding:

• The linkage between activities and results.

• How to change that linkage.• How to increase the

engagement in activities.• All to improve results. 

The Purpose of Coaching

The Job of the Coach

The coach’s job is not to give answers but to ask questions, thus enabling the employee to learn on his or her own how to drive better results.

   

 

Who do you coach?

You act as a coach for all of your direct reports, conceivably their direct reports and anyone whose work you influence.

When do you coach

Every conversation is an opportunity to coach someone. It is something that is not formal but can be combined with performance management discussions to enable someone to figure out how to improve.

Ask them for feedback and whether they agree that there is something that could be improved

Ask them for solutions for improving the process that leads to suboptimal results.

Explore alternatives that could change the process to lead to better conclusions.

Delegate to them the choice of alternative that could lead to improved results.

Coaching starts by understanding what is going right and what could be improved.

The Coaching Process

Always Be Coaching

Coaching is used to enable employees to know how they can improve.

Without coaching, you’ll never be able to improve your team’s personal effectiveness.

And since as a manager, your job is to get things done through other people, you’ll never improve your own results unless you’re coaching others.

Difficult Conversations

If coaching is leading to difficult conversations where the employee isn’t agreeing that something needs to be improved or the manner through which it could be best

improved then there are three steps to realign the conversation.

Understand their motivation. If motivations are not aligned then there can never be a meeting of the minds on how to improve.

Have empathy. Change is difficult for many people and having empathy for their situation may enable you to break through with them in another way.

Finally, have patience. Sometimes the process of change and improvement takes a little while.

If coaching isn’t working it is ultimately your fault:

• You didn’t hire the right person.• Job design was inadequate.• There wasn’t enough training• There was ineffective supervision

If Coaching isn’t Working

Step 2 - What does Success look Like?Motivation

If coaching is the management process, then motivation is the leadership function that is most closely aligned with coaching. By motivating someone you are inculcating in them a

desire to improve.

Modern management theory holds that motivation induces a high level of employee responsibility and participation in decisions in the work

environment, something that is enhanced through metrics.

Self Determination Theory

Daniel Pink has proposed that employees need three things in order to be motivated to improve.

They need autonomy over some if not all four aspects of their work:• When they do it.• How they do it.• Whom they do it with.• What they do.

They want to achieve mastery by developing themselves and their careers further and tasks that fall short of expectations will result in boredom.

Finally, they need purpose; to be connected with a higher goal than profit maximization and they have to understand the company’s purpose.

Metrics form the basis for effective:

Coaching

By making objectives, results, and potential areas for improvement very clear and unambiguous, coaching is facilitated.

Motivation

Employees needs for autonomy, mastery and purpose and through this, self-motivation are enhanced with effective metrics.

Putting it All Together

material minds

Helping companies execute strategy better by connecting strategy with the daily action of all employees.

Charles Plant

416 458 4850cplant (at)materialminds.com

ConsultingCoachingWorkshopsSpeakingTeaching

This is a five part series on Strategy Execution and is comprised of:

1. Strategy Execution2. Using Metrics to Define Success3. Job Design and Delegation4. Performance Management and Communication5. Coaching and Motivation