Coaching: What we need is…?

By launching a challenge on the social networks, precisely with this question, we have had the most diverse answers.

• Good Sense
• Work
• Union
• Rain

Anyway… and so many other answers that wouldn’t fit here.

All this made us think…

But what’s missing after all?

A leader, a father, a businessman, a director, a child…?

Will we ever come to any conclusions?

Let’s take the word “Motivation” or, as we like to call it, “Motive for Action.”

Will it work for everyone?

A few days ago we were giving another course on “The Art of Leadership and Coaching.” The class was fantastic, the best we’ve had so far, and on the last day, while we were entering the introduction module to coaching, a lot of questions came up.

But one that aroused a lot of interest in me was the question of motivation.

We were asked, and rightly so, given that most of us are directors and commercial managers, the mix with company managers and general managers, “Can I use coaching to motivate my staff?

A pertinent question, however, somewhat treacherous.

One of the assumptions of coaching is that we have within us the resources we need. Whether to motivate ourselves, to evolve, or to live, inside we find most of the things we need.

It’s a bit of a complex operating basis for most people, because we always have the idea that we’re going to be the ones to solve, correct, amend, or whatever we want to call it, the other person’s problem.

It’s scary for a leader to use that assumption.

If a leader wants to use the coaching tools to help his people, a question arises:

“Why do you want to help them?”

• “So that they can be successful”
• “To evolve”
• “So you can earn more”

Often the answer to this question is:

And if we keep asking the same question, we will probably go to other farms.

But we get to a point where the answers start to stop being about each other and start being about us.

Ultimately, a leader wants a motivated employee because he’s useful to his team, to his results, to his company.

So if that’s the case, why use so many excuses?

This is where the complication of using coaching comes into play when it comes to motivating people in the team.

If that’s what it’s for, then you might as well use mentoring or even traditional leadership, or any other model.

If a leader wants to use coaching tools to help his team, first of all he has to be prepared to play with the main assumptions of coaching.

In other words, it is about the other and not something we need.

If you are willing to comply with this little rule, then the coaching tools are a very valuable tool to help the person to find their own way.

This week take a moment to think:

“Am I assuming what my team, company, family, etc. need?”

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Also published on Medium.