For at least last twenty years, and in most corporations worldwide, there has been a growing concern about the steady decline of personnel motivation, stress in the workplace, and in some cases, outright employee burnout. Almost paradoxically, the key management buzzwords and phrases focused on these corporate issues are centered on how to empower the personnel, how to enable co-responsibility, how to foster pro-activity, how to develop ownership, how to create a learning environment, how to tap on collective intelligence, etc. Note also that all these themes are central in most executive coaching requests.

Considering that this concern has very consistently stayed on the top of most Human Resource department’s wish list for decades, we can assume that the issue is not being solved, and therefore that it has not been approached properly, including in executive coaching programs. Indeed, in spite of millions yearly allocated to diverse personnel empowerment programs, inspirational conventions, incentive schemes, motivational coaching, financial perks and bonuses, training schemes, executive coaching and development programs and a host of other monthly or yearly recognition exercises, significant measurable change is far from perceptible. On the contrary, it seems that in too many companies, personnel is generally subject to more absenteeism and occupational illnesses, under stress and voicing distress, quitting, and generally expressing dissatisfaction with their immediate work environment. In fact executive coaching is often used to treat the symptom rather than to permanently solve the underllying problem.

Conclusion: to deal with this generalized motivational issue, the array of means deployed by Human Resources seems to have been inversely proportionate to achieving perceptible results. It is high time to reconsider corporate perspectives on the empowerment issue and find original executive coaching strategies to really deal with developing personnel motivation.

For one, it seems that if generalized personnel de-motivation can indeed be increasing in modern organizations, this evolution should less be considered a problem in itself and more perceived as a consequence or a symptom resting on other causes. Indeed, if we are not solving the problem, maybe it is not correctly formulated, including in all our executive coaching processes.

Notice that when an executive or leader asks the question “how can we empower personnel”, it is both assumed that the issue is with the personnel and not with the executive. It is also assumed that the original state of those personnel is one of disempowerment. On both counts, how amazingly convenient!

The very way the problem is formulated automatically drives a search for a certain range of solutions to be applied to the employees: more pay, more perks, more recognition, more bonuses, more training, etc. What else motivates personnel? Unfortunately, over time, we have noticed that this approach is not solving the issue. We may even notice that these apparent solutions are often fostering unproductive individualistic and competitive behavior when more is to be gained in collaborative teamwork. So these apparent solutions may actually do no more than add to organizational problems.

But let’s face it, in spite of all the apparent corporate concern and extensive Human resource programs focused on developing employee motivation, ownership and commitment, it seems that over the past decades, the corporate work environment has gradually become much more alienating. So let us now consider that the problem was not defined correctly. What if we are just trying to cure a symptom and not the real illness? To approach the issue with a different perspective in all executive coaching, it may be useful to consider a completely different frame of reference.

For instance, we could indeed assume that most people are naturally motivated to contribute to the achievement of meaningful and stimulating individual and collective goals. We could consider that when given a chance and a supportive environment, any normal worker, employee or executive will spontaneously volunteer positive and constructive energy to achieve corporate objectives. If one adopts this point of view in the course of any executive coaching process, then the leadership question becomes “why are employees and managers becoming unmotivated in the corporate environment, often to the point of quitting in order to become self-employed by taking great personal risks? What indeed makes people loose their motivation for one environment and choose to leave for other horizons?

In this perspective, the real question in executive coaching today may be to simply ask: how is the corporate environment systematically de-motivating, dis-empowering and alienating personnel?

Indeed, it seems that most corporate leaders, executives and management are deploying an array of methods specifically tailored to limit empowerment, stifle initiatives, curb all risk taking, increase predictability and ultimately succeed in rendering their employee’s and middle management’s life utterly boring. Indeed, one doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to perceive that organizations are becoming more and more controlling. Consider:

The growing amount of increasingly detailed standardized operating procedures that are usually rolled out and controlled from distant centralizing headquarters.
The extraordinary array of complex and very detailed reporting systems that occupy many managers almost full time. Many of these control systems routinely by-pass and overlap managers and are redundant, for extra security.
The extensive time spent in meeting presentations to inform and over-inform an increasingly inquisitive micro-managing executive hierarchy,
The widespread deployment of ISO and other so-called quality measurement systems focused more on establishing another set of measurable procedures than on really developing client quality,
The very wide and continuously growing range of financial and executive control systems,
The growing complexity of matrix co-management structures, where everyone reports to at least two or three contradictory if not competing and conflicting hierarchies.

All these control systems and more are implemented in the corporate environment to achieve two very complementary objectives: minute executive control over any possibility of initiative, and extremely precise predictability of results. This is the central issue that needs to be approached and solved in the course of most executive coaching processes.

Delegation means “untie”. De-Legature. Legature is kin to ligament. This is what most managers and organizations do not undertand about the whole concept of delegation.

Organizations and executives need to face the fact that unmotivated and disempowered personnel are not the result of a world-wide and general social evolution that would have today’s employees require more perks to function normally. The lack of interest for work in the corporate environment results from growing a form of neo Taylorism that has been very gradually developed by over-centralizing headquarters, with HR often coming in first place, and over-controlling executive processes and paradigms. This has acelerated over the past thirty to fifty years.

As a result, outstanding increases in the volume of sales or of financial results are not first in the hierarchy of executive concerns or priorities. Executive managers mostly want to know what each and every person is doing and want to control exactly when and where they are doing it in a very predictable way. This has become much more important than to have the same people creatively achieve really outstanding results in a less controlled and more unpredictable way.

In effect, most executives priority is to justify its managerial presence by proving that it can very correctly and minutely predict and control. Executives must be able to answer any question concerning their organization, at a pin’s drop. This is what their shareholders expect. If an organization’s personnel ever aims for outstanding goals in a fashion that escapes executive control, then the latter will often react in fear and move to establish tighter controls. Consequently today, it is much more important to merely make a safe and sure budget than to unexpectedly deliver multiplied results.

As a consequence, when the large majority of an organization’s personnel seems to display lack of motivation and empowerment, the real issue is that their corporate culture is primarily focused on pleasing security-oriented shareholders who prefer stable and predictable progressions over unexpected opportunist peaks and slowdowns. Shareholders want their corporations to compensate for their fear of change by providing apparent stability. Consequently, employees have to suffer a fundamentally insecure management culture focused on implementing a very wide range of coercive control systems essentially designed to limit unpredictability for executives.

In such a context, middle management and personnel adapt, comply, and limit themselves, slow their potential growth and minimize all risk taking. Why indeed spend time and energy fighting more and more pervasive internal limits imposed by the corporate system if the priority is not to develop. Organizations are today running in the fashion of excessively reigned race horses. In this context, it may also seem useless for executives to attempt to motivate, empower and grow personnel. One does not grow in coercive environments. At best, one will better survive by displaying apparently compliant and pleasing behavior. Just deliver the very safe expected results.

In this context, there are two possible executive coaching strategies that could bring much more coherency.

The first strategy is to cancel all useless expenses on training, coaching, empowering and other means that are fundamentally incoherent with the underlying corporate priority on total control and legation rather than delegation.
The second strategy would consist in using executive coaching to develop a more goal-oriented management culture that would not privilege a top-down centralized micro-controlling environment. This executive coaching strategy would indeed consist in accompanying leaders to create a learning environment for their personnel to grow, unfold and achieve their potential for outstanding results.

Organizational personnel would then be simplie untied. They would not need to be empowered nor motivated. They would just be allowed to express and unfold their existing natural motivation to grow and develop in a positive environment. In this systemic executive coaching context, the personnel would be less stressed and distressed, and executive coaching and training alike would have their rightful place.