Day 90 — Management series 3/7: “Coaching & Motivating”
How do we help team members to tap into their potential talent, and explore their career path with possible growth? There are many coaching and motivating techniques that smart leaders can adopt to help our team to thrive. In today’s article, I’m sharing my knowledge and experience in the following structure:
- Why are Coaching & Motivating Important
- Motivating: Based on Motivation
- Before Coaching: Competencies
- Coaching with Situational Leadership
The Value of Coaching & Motivating
Why do we need coaching and motivating? Couldn’t we just let the team self-organize with full autonomy? I think famous NBA coach Phil Jackson, who led Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers with total 11 championships, summed it up very well:
“My philosophy is that you don’t motivate players with speeches; you have motivated players that you draft. That’s where they come in, and those are the guys that are competitive. You can not teach competitiveness.” — Phil Jackson
In a dream team like Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers had, what Phil had to do was to create an environment for the competitive team members to let go their ego (which is very hard), and play along well as a team, and pursue the common goal: winning. That sounds pretty great to me. However, not every one gets to draft a dream team like Phil Jackson. Sometimes, we’ve seen some team members are just not as motivated, or some are not highly competent for the given task.
What should we do in these situations? We need methods and tools to help team members put their energy in the right way. Therefore, with different types of talent and different level of competencies, we need coaching and motivating techniques in order to create a sustainable success model. Some common benefit of coaching and motivating are:
- Optimize individual & team performance
- Enhance individual’s long-term growth
- Achieve team’s goal more efficiently
- Foster team culture of supporting each other
- Lower attrition rate by retaining talents
There are a lot more side benefit of coaching & motivating team members, but before we expanding to all those potential value, let’s come back to the reality; how do we effectively coach and motivate team members? Let’s start with motivating skills.
Motivating: Based on Motivation
I’ve been talking to leaders/managers in different age s& ethnicity groups in order to understand the most effective way to create strong leadership with different types of talent. From all the interviews I’ve done, the keyword here is “Motivation”.
People come from different background, different cultures, different upbringings, which formulate their own distinct value systems. Because of that, everyone has their unique set of motivations; some are driven by family value, some with ego, some has strong from financial concerns, some just want a stable job, not much of career movement.
Determine motivation level
Although they have their own reasoning behind, we can still gauge their motivation level in terms of job performance with a common standard. The book Move Your Bus by Ron Clarks sheds some lights around motivation level by using a “bus and passengers” analogy:
- The driver: usually the team lead, managers, or someone who practices lateral leadership. These are the people who’s formally/informally sitting in the driver seat to steer the bus, and helps everyone on the bus move forward.
- The runner: also as known as top performers, who work hard and smart to both produce great results and provide constant support, so that the bus can move fast.
- The joggers: usually considered as mid-level performers, who can produce consistent results; with certain trigger, occasionally switch to high gear.
- The walkers: the mid-low level performers, they are slow but steady, because they prefer stable way instead of changes, sometimes they drag the bus and slowdown the pace.
- The riders: need constant monitoring and pushing to make progress, tend to “work smart” and hide behind the crowd.
Choose the right way to motivate
Once we determine individual’s motivation level, we can customize our approach to fit in their styles to get better results. Here’s a simple breakdown:
- Motivate the driver: If they volunteer to be the driver, the motivation is usually not too big of a concern. However, if they are assigned to be the driver, then we’ll need to know: 1) how passionate they are about the assigned tasks; 2) if their competency level match the required skill set. If both answers is on the lower side of the scale, then we need to provide a “close monitor and support” types of work relationship, in order to keep their momentum; more importantly, motivate them with what’s benefit they can find within the project, so that they can be self-motivated.
- Motivate the runners: Runners run fast because they’re looking for something; whether it’s tangible reward like promotion and raise, or something more aligned to their intrinsic value: self-actualization, belonging, redemption, ego, etc. The best way to motivate runners is to find out what makes runner run, keep fueling them with what they need, and help them reach their goals.
- Motivate the joggers: Joggers don’t make trouble, and they are great supporters. When they are next to runners, sometimes they run to support the team. Or, if they’re determined to achieve a certain specific goal, they can accelerate, too. In order to motivate the joggers, provide a clear vision and the value proposition, and reward them when the put extra effort to speed up.
- Motivate the walkers: Walkers are very clear about what they want: not moving fast. They use different tactics to slow down the general pace in order to hide the fact that they are being slow. If not managing walkers carefully, others might feel unjust and frustrated (especially runners), then they also slow down their pace. Therefore, provide clear performance-driven reward system, so that walkers know that their tactics won’t work, and the only way to be rewarded well is to step up.
- Forget about the riders: Riders don’t link the team’s success to their own success; some of them don’t even care about their own career success. As a driver, if there’s no easy way to get rid of the riders, you might as well focus on the runners and the joggers, and get HR’s help to handle riders.
Before Coaching: Competencies
Even though different jobs require different types of competency, there are some general guidelines that can be measured across most of the jobs. In the book of Lead Inside the Box, authors Victor Prince and Mike Figliuolo described an important concept of “Management Capital”. What it means is how much time & effort a manager possesses in order to manage their team. In an ideal situation, employees consume minimum Management Capital (time & effort from the manager) and produce great results. However, we all know that this ideal situation almost never exists.
The authors also break down the management work and competencies into 4 categories: Directing, Doing, Delivering, and Developing. The idea behind it is that a great employee could have high competencies on all 4 categories, so that they don’t consume much of management capital, and can get promotion much quicker. Let’s take a look at these 4 categories:
1. Directing:
A competent employee in “Directing” should have the abilities of:
- Planning the required tasks based on the project goal;
- Prioritizing the task and create a timeline;
- Coordinating the people and logistics in order to get things done.
2. Doing
A competent employee in “Doing” should have the abilities of:
- Deciding on their own without the needs of approval on everything;
- Motivating themselves without constant needs of external motivation;
- Clearing roadblocks without unnecessary escalation.
3. Delivering
A competent employee in “Delivering” should have the abilities of:
- Monitoring the progress and timeline;
- Correcting the course of direction;
- Repairing mistakes and relationships.
4. Developing:
A competent employee in “Developing” should have the abilities of:
- Training themselves in order to fill the gap of required skills;
- Coaching themselves with the helps they can get;
- Promoting themselves by planning the path for promotion and execute the plan.
Based on the described 12 types of competencies, managers can plan their coaching work more precisely to where employee needs development.
Now that we know how to gauge competencies, next, we’re going to introduce Situational Leadership, a competency-driven types of coaching technique and framework.
Situational Leadership
Design directior Lawrence Lipkin once said, “once size never really fits all”. Depending on the level of competency that a team member possess against the given task, a smart coach will choose different coaching techniques to reach the maximum effect. Situational Leadership is a framework to help coaches determine appropriate coaching approach. Let’s take a quick look:
Level of Competency
First, we need to determine the competency level of the given task or skill. Competency is very contextual, a person can draw well doesn’t mean they are good at creating innovative product ideas, and vice versa. That being said, we’ll need to understand the person’s competency level of a specific skill set that we’re providing coaching. We can break it down into 4 levels:
- D1 — Enthusiastic Beginner: One who hasn’t mastered the skill, but full of confidence;
- D2 — Disillusioned Learner: One who hasn’t mastered the skill, and showed frustrations;
- D3 — Capable but Cautious Performer: One who has a good grasp of the skill, but not yet confident;
- D4 — Self-Reliant Achiever: One who master the skills and confident
Map to Situational Leadership Approach
Now that we have figured out the person’s competency level (D1-D4), we can now map it to the types of coaching we can provide.
- D1 — Enthusiastic Beginner: Provide plan and detail instructions to ensure things are going on the right track;
- D2 — Disillusioned Learner: Provide both instructions and emotional support so that the performance won’t be affected by negative morale;
- D3 — Capable but Cautious Performer: Provide emotional support and encouragement to reassure the progress on skill development;
- D4 — Self-Reliant Achiever: Provide bigger space, bigger plate for the top performers to fully benefit from their talent, and reward them properly.
This framework is extremely helpful in my experience. When working with junior team member, they often don’t know what question to ask, hence a clear plan and guideline will help them get into the rhythm of learning by doing. On the other hand, if we provide too much guidance for highly-skilled worker, it might come off as micro-management and create distrust and unnecessary conflict. Situational Leadership help us carefully craft our coaching strategy and appropriate engagement to help team members grow and thrive.
Conclusion
- If done right, coaching and motivating team members have great return over investment (ROI);
- Depending on self-motivation level, leaders need to choose their motivating techniques carefully to match the individual’s needs.
- Use situational leadership skill to select appropriate way to coach team members on different competency levels.
What’s your way of coaching and motivating your team? I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
