When you hear what they have in mind to tackle your 'under-functioning motivation', you may just wish you were back in the bad ole days of school reports when fail grades meant a few slaps would be promptly delivered to the open palm of your hand.

The workplace equivalent to the slap is now well gone. That 'slap' approach attacks the issue from the punishment end of the reward-punishment continuum. It may have appeared to have the effect of harnessing motivation for a few months so that, in the short term, performance improved. In the longer term, however, nothing really changed except that better ways to avoid detection were developed.

The basic tenet of every psychology text book is that we humans avoid punishment and seek out reward and pleasure; we are as adept at following these fundamentals as we are at eating, sleeping and the other survival basics we indulge in along the way. . .

So while punishment systems can be used and be partly effective for underperformance, they should not be used in isolation for long-term improvement, but in conjunction with approaches from the other end . . . rewards, improvements or the promise of them Irish businesses are awake to this and part of an ever-growing toolkit for changing behaviour comes in the guise of business coaching. This mysterious, seemingly miraculous healer of all motivational ills is being called upon for everything from conflict resolution, career change, redundancy, mergers and absence management Bringing coach into the office can be awkward, though. Being told to engage in a series of one-toone sessions with someone you've never met before who speaks a strange mix of guru-speak meets Mother Superior mantra, may mean things get even worse. 'Coach avoiding' can mean absences increase . . .

and sometimes understandably, if going to 'coach' is perceived as akin to sitting in dunce's corner.

Or, those sent to the coach may see it as a way of hiding from the prying eyes of authority, as they head for the comfy back seat and stretch out, eyeing each other knowingly. They're all thinking the same thing:

Let's hope the journey is long and smooth and the coach is all accommodating.

Crack open the drinks cabinet and pass round the party hats.

Those who use coaching as a means of skiving should, if the coach is proficient, soon be caught and marched up to the front seat, shown the gear stick and warned that, any day now, he or she'll be in there, and the cliff edge is just around the corner. The thing about proper effective coaching is that the one-toone nature of the contact means there's nowhere to hide and no scope for the daydreaming at the back of the dosser's class with which we sometimes associate corrective action.

Still, mere mention of the word coach and a little bit of suspicions arises. Images that pop to mind are of a very long journey in stuffy, cramped conditions with the constant companion of a sweet-sucking chatterbox and a foreboding of travel sickness at every turn.

Apart from the sweet, this can be the experience for many of those who have been sent the way of the business coach.

Few consultants and business systems analysts will deny that there is an increasing number of enquiries from HR and 'Training and Development' departments about coaching rates, types, outcomes and models.

Like anything new and American in origin, coaching can be corrupted over here. There's huge scope for tricky ethics, in part because so many charlatans have invoked the power of their own personalities to heal individual and organisational ills. If you depend on the personality of the coach alone to battle complex issues at work, you deserve the catastrophic results you're likely to get.

That's not to say coaching is all value-less. It's just that, as a new phenomenon built on human interaction and psychological constructs, one as yet not regulated or legislated for here, its value is not immediately apparent and so comparing varieties and models within coaching is difficult. Renowned professionals like Peter Drucker are squarely behind the coaching method of behaviour change, and there's little about organisational life he is not on top of.

Capturing the value of a good coach requires an understanding of what the coaching process contains.

Too often those booking coaching don't know enough and go on intuition and a gut feeling, and hope the treatment clears up the messy malaise. This won't work, just like clients attending coaching in this context won't; it's merely a method of making things appear to be working and is a waste of time and money.

"The aim of coaching is to facilitate the performance, learning and development of the client. This requires :

a results driven agenda, a sustained effort, commitment on behalf of the client, and a formally agreed focus which is determined in advance by both parties.

The emphasis in our 'Inside Out' Business and Personal Coaching programme, according to director Jerry Kelly, MA MITD, who offers coaching as well as other related training options, is on why we feel and act the way we do, on taking individual responsibility and developing a clear understanding of how our thinking is affecting our wellbeing and performance.

"Personal change does not happen overnight. It requires dedication to the task, skilled guidance and daily practice."

There are a number of assumptions underlying the coaching context. The first is that there are hidden skills within the individual.

The second is that they will be willing to unleash them with the coach when they were intent on hiding them from the colleagues, and the third is that, when the coach is gone, the newly discovered skills or behaviours will not extinguish rapidly, thereby giving rise to the requirement for more coaching every year.

Question: Off the sports "eld, what's the point of coaching?

Answer: The coach's role in an internal career development coaching programme is to identify and clarify career goals, options and strategies.Some of the benefits of an internal career development coaching programme include:

1. offering employees support and guidance, especially during times of change and flux (for example, when a company is restructuring);

2. retaining staff by making them aware of the opportunities open to them within the organisation;

3. offering development options (especially in organisations that tend towards flat hierarchies);

4. preventing newly appointed executives from derailing.

Some of the benefits of business coaching as a stand-alone activity:

1. maintaining your career if you are in danger of acute under performing;

2. assessing your current career standing . . . how do you 'fit' you job? ;

3. evaluating your career opportunities/options . . . a systematic run-through of options for your skills and personality;

4. coping with the three 'R's': restructuring, redundancy, and retirement.

Answer provided by Carmel O'Neill, organisation psychologist and business coach, Division of Work and Organisational Psychology (DWOP) of the Psychological Society of Ireland, the professional body for psychology in Ireland.

http: //www. psihq. ie/MEMBERS _DWOP. asp Patricia Murray is an organisation and work psychologist. If you have an issue you'd like her to tackle, email business@tribune. ie with 'Career Couch' in the subject line.