How to help your team when day-to-day motivation is flagging…

Over the past few weeks I’ve found people are more willing to admit they’re struggling with motivation.  I am.  I’ve found this lockdown the hardest so far in terms of finding the motivation to get the most out of every day.

Now this is a very complex area but there will be times when you will need to discuss how issues around motivation impact performance so here’s one idea that might be useful if you need to have a motivation conversation with one of your team…

How you feel is impacted by how you think and what you do and although effective coaching focuses on using questions to influence behaviours, I think a useful approach with motivation is to focus more on sharing perspectives to influence thinking.

How?

• Empathise – start by helping them see they are not alone and this is also an issue for you and others in the team
• Share – then think about how you think about motivation and share your (or others) perspective!  This could be how you shaped your thinking around what is achievable when working from home, what you have read that helped you understand why you will have days when you are less productive or the impact of seeing what you have to do each day as needing either high focus, medium focus or low focus and basing what you do on what is achievable when the ebb and flow of your motivation is factored in
• Re-frame – switch back into coaching mode to ask how they could try to re-frame how they think about motivation to see if that makes a difference

When I recognised I was struggling for motivation, being asked what I could do differently didn’t help (and actually pissed me off a bit!). What did help was a bit of empathy and to recognise that challenges around motivation could be addressed by reflecting and adapting the way I thought. Maybe you have colleagues who feel the same?

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