You can't motivate anyone

Before we look at how to coach people, you need to understand a bit about motivation. Or more importantly, what causes people to be de-motivated.

You cannot motivate anyone, and as a leader you can create an atmosphere and environment in which people will become motivated, and in which you act to remove the de-motivating factors.

There are two factors in motivation, or lack of it.

Aspirations and Problems.

Aspirations.

If you understand your team’s Aspirations, you stand a chance of structuring a future with them that takes them where they want to go and which will be of value to you. You will be able to work with them to identify any skill areas for improvement or acquisition to get there. You will work together to create a Personal and Professional Development plan to get them there. The individual will see clearly their place in the organisation and their future.

Problems.

Problems come in two flavours. Environmental problems and task problems. Environmental problems are the things around the organization and it’s systems, methods etc. that make getting the job done well and delivery of best service difficult. These things you can fix once you  know they exist. 

Task problems are those that relate to why the individual is not doing the best possible job. A skill is weak or missing. Again, once identified and agreed, you can fix it. Of course there are both individual skills and team skills. Developing team skill needs to be the subject of another article.

Imagine an individual who has all the skills to excel at her/his job and deliver results, no organizational hassles or obstructions to get in the way, an agreed longer term objective for their career; and an agreed roadmap for getting there...WITH YOU!!

Motivated? I think so.

This is how you start to identify Interference and unleash people's Potential.

All interference I have ever encountered came from falls within the parameters of aspirations, skill or environmental problems.

Look out for an article about "The Performance Equation" to understand how that works.