If you’re not using assessment coaching in your coaching practice, you’re setting yourself up for failure. By the time most coaches truly understand their clients, they have already made at least a dozen mistakes that could have been avoided by using assessment coach tools. Even if you aren’t losing clients because you inadvertently piss them off, you probably aren’t helping them get the results that will step out of important meetings to take your call.

The Biggest Assessment Coaching Mistake

The biggest assessment coaching mistake is also the most common. It’s not treating high “D’s” and low “D’s” the differently. A “D” on the DISC assessment refers to dominance.

Characteristics of a high “D” is that they like to drive the bus, they don’t like to be told what to do, and are easily angered. The worst thing a coach can do with clients that have a high D is either be bossy and tell them what to do or to take things personally when they confront you. Instead of telling them to clear their schedules to make time for whatever needs to happen, challenge them. Instead ask, “What can you do to make time for that?” or “What can you do to make sure it happens?” or even, “I bet you can’t get it done by Tuesday.”

Are You Brave Enough To Stand In The Line Of Fire?

High D’s are notorious for blowing up. They have an angry edge that can wilt even the most secure coach; without even being aware that they are raising their voice. If you get defensive with these clients, they will lose all respect for you and they won’t even return your calls. If you go head to head with them, you may win the battle but you will inevitable lose the war.

Using assessment coaching tools can help you influence these clients by understanding what matters to them most, and getting them to focus on what they want. These clients are all about achieving goals and winning big, but their Achilles heel is the Shiny Object Syndrome; where they tend to bounce from one thing to another. If you able to support them without pissing them off they are fun to work with and you can help make a huge difference in their lives.

Are there assessment coaching techniques for the low “D”? Yes, but that will have to remain a story for another day.

Colette Seymann
JTS Advisors Designated Accountability Coach

Technorati Tags: Assessment Coaching, Executive Coaching

Face it, without assessment coaching, it is a kind of guessing game. Even the best coaches are often engaged in a process of hide and seek with their clients. Whether they are conscious of it or not, clients often hide their true feelings, or the events that form the basis of their behavior. And as a result, coaches are left to “fill in the blanks”.

I know It Is Your Dirty Little Secret

Yes! It is your dirty little secret. You wish that you had a way to see beyond that veil that even your client’s conscious mind cannot penetrate. There are ways of course: decades of psychotherapy, days of strategy coaching, hour of hypnotherapy, or a few assessments and just minutes to analysis. The choice is yours. Years or months or minutes. Ignorance or bliss.

Assessment Coaching Can Part the Veil

By assessment coaching, I am referring to coaching that uses the results of statistically proven assessment instruments to gain insights into the basic style, values and talents of your clients. The point here is that these assessments give insights delivered directly from your client’s subconscious, without the benefit of filtering or masking. Without this filtering or masking, the results are often as much a surprise to your client as they are you.

So Where Do You Stand?

A good question: Where do you stand? Are you prepared to do the work to learn how to administer assessments and then to interpret them? To add assessment coaching to your tool kit, or not? If you are interested and willing to invest the time and effort into learning how to do this, you might be able to help hundreds of more clients, and save many hours in the process. So if your goal is to do the most good, and have the biggest positive impact, well then, take the time to investigate for yourself the area of coaching based on assessments. And having done that, make the decision to persue this important area of coaching.

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Dave Iuppa
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

Technorati Tags: Assessment Coaching, Executive Coaching

With assessment coaching, building high performance teams is a science. And while great leaders may follow this approach using their intuition, you can follow it with uncanny success using assessments. Assessments are “psychological instruments” – you might call them personality tests – which are validated on huge sample sizes, over many years to give scientifically reliable insights. Here is how it works.

Balancing Personality Styles

In assessment coaching, we first determine the personality style of each member of your team. This describes “How” they do things. In what is called the DISC system, people’s styles are a combination of the “dominant” style, the “inspiring” style, the “supportive” style and the “cautious” style. This is simplified of course, but the idea is to identify all of the tasks that the team needs to do, and then divide up tasks so each team member gets the tasks best suited for their style. Once this is done, adjustments may need to be made to make sure every task is assigned to an appropriate person. It may be necessary to bring in new team members to accomplish this.

Balancing Personal Values

The second element of assessment coaching is to determine the key values held by each member of the team. These are ranked in order of importance from most important to least important. The top two or perhaps three values rule each team member’s behavior. These values typically include: aesthetic, economic, individualistic, political, altruistic, regulatory and theoretical values. Each task is best performed by a person who ranks certain values highly. For example in sales, a person should value the economic value highly, but if they value the altruistic value too high, you will have someone who aggressively pursues the sale, but who will give away all the profits when negotiating the price. So your job is to match each task to the team member with the best combination of style and values. You might be thinking that this is pretty complicated, but keep in mind that all these factors are in play whether you acknowledge them or not. If you ignore them, it is like building your team by throwing darts at a board.

Using Assessment Coaching to Guide Group Leadership

Assuming that you have done all of the needed assessments and you have matched all the tasks to the right team members, you need one last element from assessment coaching. That element is knowing how to motivate each member of your team. Each DISC style includes a preference for or against factors such as fast pace, attention to detail, uncertainty, etc. Each value preference includes preferences for or against factors such as following rules, giving selflessly, harmony and balance, etc. Therefore, to optimally motivate each team member, you need to tap into their style and value preferences, and show how what you want team members to do will fit with their style and values. By doing so, you are using powerful fundamental internal drives to motivate your team members, and your team as a whole. So by tapping into these insights provided by assessment coaching, you and your team will be on track to achieving superlative results.

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Dave Iuppa
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

Technorati Tags: Assessment Coaching, Executive Coaching

There is nothing like clairvoyance to impress your mortal clients. Know them better than their closest friends. Reveal their deepest secrets during your first encounter. It’s all possible – well, sort of – once you make assessment coaching a standard part of your new client intake process.

If You Are Familiar with Assessments, Skip this Paragraph

Assessment coaching involves administering and interpreting standardized psychological instruments which analyze the style, values and skills of clients. Some of these assessments are so well grounded and insightful, that they can make you seem almost clairvoyant. And when properly administered and interpreted, they are even accepted by the courts.

Dazzling Individuals, Couples, Parents and Children

Using assessments as part of your new client intake process will give you instant credibility and save you as much as a month in getting to really know and understand your new client to this depth. That’s time better spent helping your client.

Using assessments in your coaching can also greatly increase your effectiveness in coaching complex situations like coaching couples and families. Coaching with assessments can deliver insights that might not be available any other way, and those insights can bring breakthroughs that can save marriages and families.

Develop Business Clients with Assessment Coaching

In business, time really is money. And so is a happy, productive workforce. Businesses are willing to pay serious money for assessment administration and debriefing, because these services can save time, increase productivity and reduce organizational tension.

High paid executives and teams can be coached to work better, but one of the most important uses of assessments comes before a person joins the company. This is because assessments create a style, value and talent profiles that can be matched against the profiles of people who are most successful in a particular professional role. This can really take the guesswork out of hiring, and ultimately reduce turn over and increase bottom line results. Assessment coaching can also significantly increase your bottom line as well!

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Dave Iuppa
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach

Technorati Tags: Assessment Coaching, Executive Coaching