The document outlines the importance of coaching and motivation in connecting strategy with daily employee actions to improve business results. It emphasizes that employees need to understand the link between their activities and results and highlights the role of coaching in fostering this awareness while addressing challenges in employee alignment and motivation. Additionally, it introduces concepts from modern management theory, such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose, as essential for enhancing employee motivation and performance.

1. Coaching and Motivation
January 2016
material minds

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. Putting it All Together

15. material minds
Helping companies execute
strategy better by connecting
strategy with the daily action
of all employees.
Charles Plant
416 458 4850
cplant (at)
materialminds.com
Consulting
Coaching
Workshops
Speaking
Teaching
This is a five part series on Strategy Execution and is comprised of:
1. Strategy Execution
2. Using Metrics to Define Success
3. Job Design and Delegation
4. Performance Management and Communication
5. Coaching and Motivation