Adapting your coaching to recognise your coachee’s life stage

How your coachee shows up for coaching is more impacted by their life stage than you might think.? Here, I share some research into motivations and life stages, so you can reflect on how you might choose to adapt your coaching approach.

Research (note 1) shows that achievement-oriented individuals have a range of needs (aka goals) that motivate them in their working lives.? These are broadly linked to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

• They tend to have lowish needs surrounding personal security, i.e. physical comfort and psychological structure.? This is because these needs are generally being met.
• They typically have higher needs surrounding the social aspects of work – relationships and recognition, which are sometimes unmet.
• They have the highest needs for the self-actualising aspects such as power and autonomy.

These days, physical comfort that is provided by salary and benefits, psychological safety of appropriate boundaries and structures at work, and the social aspects of a healthy workplace experience, are largely expected.? Staff will quickly leave employers if these needs are not being met.? This is why their unmet needs are lowish.? This also explains why HR departments stress the benefits of recognition schemes – these schemes attend to the needs at the next level, i.e. the social aspects of work.

Most commonly, achievement-oriented individuals’ unmet needs surround power and autonomy.? This is the tricky one – how to empower people at work.

As coaches, we assume our clients know what motivates them and can isolate their goals. In reality, they often need our help to unpack them. So, my first coaching tip is to use these six levels:

• Physical Security – “Comfort”
• Psychological Safety – “Structure”
• Social aspect #1 – “Relationships”
• Social aspect #2 – “Recognition”
• Self-actualisation #1 – “Power”
• Self-actualisation #2 – “Autonomy”

What are their unmet needs within the workplace, and what can they do to lean into them and influence change?

The research also shows that these motivations change throughout our working lives.? I believe it is helpful to understand the typical patterns, so we can adapt our coaching accordingly.

Teenagers to mid-twenties

There are more pressing motivators than careers at age 18.? Before our mid-twenties, people are likely to be more motivated by material comfort and forming relationships.

Mid-twenties to mid-career

By now, most people have satisfied their search for relationships, possibly forming a stable lifelong relationship, or at least a series of relationships! The need for recognition, power and autonomy increases.

This trained-in motivational profile will remain fairly constant for most achievement-oriented people for their working life, with two notable disruptions:

• If the dating/mating game has not resulted in a stable life partner, then the need for recognition, power and autonomy is replaced by a heightened need for relationships.
• The birth of a first child all but eliminates the need for recognition, power and autonomy.? In their place, the new parent seeks physical comfort, psychological safety and a nurturing relationship.? Their motivational profile resembles that of a process worker. This is experienced more acutely for men, and only on the birth of a first child (not subsequent children).? It likely lasts for 9-18 months, after which they revert to the trained-in profile of an achievement-oriented individual.? Organisations can misread the signals and write off dedicated managers during this period who appear to have ‘lost their spark’.? The truth is, thy are likely to come back even stronger.? This is definitely a situation to watch out for when coaching – how can the new parent demonstrate their worth at work AND look after their newfound psychological needs from parenthood?

Mid-career (crisis)

At some point between the ages of 35 and 45, the drive for more recognition, power and autonomy becomes challenged when the hitherto high achiever realises they are not going to make it to the top.? They become disillusioned and cynical towards work.? They direct their motivational energy to other interests such as hobbies or new relationships.? Motivationally, the high achiever reverts to their teenage years, focused on comfort and relationships.

Coachees need support to work through this crisis – form their coach (career direction) and sometimes from therapy (midlife crisis).

Late forties to fifties – work/life maturity

For those who do not experience mid-career problems, the achievement-oriented motivational profile continues unabated into their forties.?

As career goals become fulfilled, recognition needs are met, and the individual shifts their energy to other leisure pursuits or volunteering, for example.? Children leave home.? Marriages that have survived are renegotiated.? At work, the mature worker accepts they have come as far as they will.? They begin to focus on their legacy, and so they may choose to mentor others. With less pressure to achieve, some do the best work of their careers – the so-called ‘Golden Years.’

Retirement

The need for recognition, power and autonomy fade and are replaced by even higher needs for comfort, security and relationships.? Relationships are satisfied through friends, family, grandchildren.? Purpose is redefined.? With aforethought, those who have been gradually increasing their leisure activities or charity work will be well-placed to adapt.? Those that have not can feel helpless and lost and may significantly affect their life expectancy.

Implications for your coaching

I do not have the answers.? I present this thinking to stimulate your thinking.? Do you recognise these life stages in your clients?? Should you and do you adapt your coaching to meet them where they are?? And if so, how?

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Note 1. Hunt, J.W., (1992). Managing People at Work: A manager’s guide to behaviour in organizations (3rd Ed.): London, McGraw-Hill.