Webinar Wrap-Up: Coaching with Context and Motivation
Coaching is most effective when it reflects the reality leaders are operating within. In MRG’s recent webinar, Coaching With Context and Motivation, we examined how motivation, environment, and situational pressures shape leadership behavior—and why overlooking these factors can limit the impact of even the most well-intentioned coaching efforts. Understanding context is not an added layer to coaching; it is central to helping leaders grow.
To explore these ideas further, our Head of Research & Education, Maria Brown, addressed a series of questions from participants, offering practical insight into how coaches can apply a more contextual and motivation-informed approach in their work.
Do you have your research study published or available to LEA certified practitioners.
Our research presentations and reports are available in the MRG Knowledge Base, which can be accessed by all MRG-certified practitioners. One advantage of gaining access to the Knowledge Base is that you get to see research and insights from all our assessments, not just the one(s) in which you are certified.
Some of our research is also available on our website in the Resource Hub.
Can people change their scores? Can you influence motivation through coaching?
This is an important place to be really clear. The goal of the IDI is not to change someone’s scores. It’s to help them understand them.
Motivational patterns tend to be relatively stable over time as they’ve been shaped through experience. It is true that scores can change over time as people experience new events, outcomes, and simply go through the stages of life. In other words, scores are likely to change when the experiences associated with them become more or less intrinsically satisfying. However, the purpose of coaching with the IDI is not to increase or decrease a score or turn someone into a different version of themselves. It is to help them see themselves more clearly.
At the same time, coaching can absolutely influence how someone works with their motivation. What tends to change is not the underlying driver but the awareness and the choices that come from it. Those choices can potentially lead to score changes, but that is not the intended goal.
When someone understands what gives them energy and what drains them, they can:
- Make more intentional decisions
- Anticipate where something will be effortful
- Put strategies in place to support themselves
- And approach situations differently
So rather than trying to change motivation, coaching helps people use it more effectively.
You can think of it as a shift from “How do I become someone else?” to “Given how I’m wired, how do I navigate this in a way that actually works for me?”
How is this different from personality assessments?
Personality assessments tend to describe consistent patterns in how you think, feel, and behave and they often assume those patterns are relatively fixed or enduring over time.
The IDI is getting at something different. It is focused on motivation: what you’re naturally drawn toward based on your life experiences, and what kinds of experiences create a sense of energy or satisfaction for you. It also allows you to see what is more emotionally draining and more likely to repel you. Rather than describing who you are, it helps you understand your preferences shaped by experience and how those preferences influence the choices you make.
Personality can absolutely influence motivation. But motivation reflects how those tendencies have been shaped and reinforced through experience. That is part of what makes it so actionable.
The IDI gives you a picture in time of what currently drives you, what you’re pulled toward, what may take more effort, and where there may be alignment or tension. That creates a different kind of conversation. Instead of labeling someone, it gives you a way to explore:
- What’s sustaining them
- What’s draining them
- And how they can navigate that more intentionally
So, it’s less about defining who someone is—and more about understanding what’s driving them right now, and how to work with that.
If someone scores high or low in an area, does that mean they’re more or less effective? Is low energy a weakness? Can motivations get people in trouble?
This is where it’s really important not to fall into a “good vs. bad” mindset. The scores are not measures of effectiveness. High is not better. Low is not worse. In fact, we’ve conducted research with leaders who have completed both the IDI (measures motivation) and the LEA (measures leadership behaviors and leadership effectiveness), and we don’t see a consistent relationship between IDI profiles and leadership effectiveness. You can have highly effective leaders with very different motivational patterns. There isn’t a single “right” profile for success.
Part of the reason for that is that motivation doesn’t map directly to behavior. The IDI measures what gives someone energy and what they’re naturally drawn toward. But behavior, which others actually see and experience, has a more direct connection to effectiveness. And motivation does not determine behavior.
While motivation influences behavior, it doesn’t determine it. Two people with similar motivations can behave very differently depending on their context, role, organization, awareness, etc. What the IDI shows us is where someone naturally gets energy and where they don’t.
It is important to note that a lower score isn’t a weakness. It simply means that a particular type of experience is less likely to naturally energize you. You can still be very capable in that area, but it may require more intentional effort, and it may not be something you gravitate toward.
In some cases, lower energy can actually be an advantage. For example, someone lower on Enduring (less naturally drawn to persistence and sticking with something over time) may be quicker to shift approaches when something isn’t working. That can lead to more flexibility and, in some cases, moving more quickly to a better solution. At the same time, that tendency could show up as giving up too quickly even when a solution was going to work with a little more time.
On the other end, someone higher on Enduring is more likely to stay the course and follow through, which can be a real strength. But they may also stick with an approach longer than they should.
The same motivation can be both an asset and a liability, depending on the context. That’s really the key point: motivations can absolutely get people into trouble, not because they’re wrong, but because they’re powerful. We tend to rely on what gives us energy and shy away from what drains our energy, sometimes without realizing it.
The value isn’t in labeling scores. It’s in increasing self-awareness around:
- Where someone is naturally pulled
- Where something may take more effort
- And how to use that awareness to be more intentional
That’s what ultimately drives effectiveness. It’s not the scores themselves, but how well someone understands and works with them. We are not prisoners of our motivational preferences. In fact, we often operate in opposition to our motivational preferences: we hold our tongues when we have the impulse to say something inappropriate, we get out of bed in the morning when we’re exhausted, we step back and listen when our instinct is to act, we make decisions in the moment when we’d prefer to take more time to think, and so on.
Watch the Webinar Recording
If you missed this coaching motivation webinar, you can access it anytime here.
You can also follow Maria Brown here on LinkedIn. And be sure to keep an eye on our Upcoming Events for more webinars like these as well as our full schedule of upcoming Certifications.
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