Maybe you feel that learning about coaching and therefore improving your management skills will make you more secure in your current job or improve your CV and thus your employment prospects. Perhaps you hope that your new coaching skills will improve your relationships in the team or it may be that you'd value the kudos that would come from being a coaching manager. It might be that for you, coaching is just a better way to interact with people and you want to see them thrive and you want to give something back.

Maybe you were just bored and started surfing the web or maybe you were told to read it.

I'd guess that in the end it's probably some blend or combination of the above that has you reading these words. People's rationale for doing things - their motivation - is seldom simple and neither are the variety of models and theories that have been developed to help us understand the nature of motivation in a work setting. They range from the over simplistic - people move towards pleasure or away from pain, to the extremely complex - here is Porter and Lawler's expectancy model for example:

E (Effort) = (E'P) x ? [(P'O) x V]

No, I don't get it either!

Ultimately an appreciation of motivation is developed by appreciating what people want from a situation and how they go about fulfilling such aims. As a manager of people - particularly one interested in using coaching to improve performance, an understanding of motivation will contribute much to your efforts and help build the required flexibility into your approach.

My aim in this series of articles is to provide a basis for understanding motivation in general terms firstly and then specifically as it relates to coaching a little later. I will not subscribe to any one particular theory but set out the most enduring and important models which seem to give us the most information about the nature of motivation at work. We'll see how approaches to motivation have matured from the rather ham-fisted 'carrot and stick' (yes, yes, I know it still goes on) to the modern day focus on self motivation which has its roots in the school of humanistic psychology. You may have certain skepticism towards applying psychology at work and you're probably right to be cautious, but we'll see how the ideas from the theorists and gurus can be applied in a practical way.

We'll work on the assumption that every employee you coach is unique and that no one theory fits all circumstances. We'll also assume that behaviors influenced by motivation are choices and that our people are not just rats trapped in a maze chasing peanuts.

Next our thunking needs to turn towards two of the more common problem areas: coaching 'difficult' people and coaching 'reluctant' coachees. Two instances in which an appreciation of what makes people tick (or dare I say tick better, longer, faster, more cheaply) can provide a real breakthrough.