Whether you are building your own team or coaching a CEO, assessment coaching can be your secret weapon. Assessments, properly administered and interpreted, can almost instantly get you inside of peoples’ heads. So whether you are hiring or helping people perform as a highly effective unit, assessments can be the key to your success in coaching. Here are three insights that assessments can provide.

What Is Your Style?

Assessment instruments can give insights into Behavioral Style, Values and Aptitude. By behavioral style we mean the way we behave when we are being most genuinely ourselves. Now there are certain behavioral styles which are suited to certain professions. And on a team, various roles are best filled by people of differing behavioral styles. So by looking for specific behavior styles, known to succeed in specific roles, a hiring manager can nearly guarantee hiring success. By understanding how different behavioral styles interact, it is pretty straightforward to coach team members on the contribution of each team member, and how they can best work together.

What Are Your Values?

Our values drive our underlying motivation and therefore our actions. We seek what we value the most. Just as in behavioral styles, specific values are more successful in specific professions. And knowing this, you can use assessment coaching to maximize your success as a hiring manager or as a coach. For example, the behavioral style of a sales person and a customer support person may be similar, but you would expect the successful sales person reflect a high level utilitarian value, you would probably expect the successful customer support person to show a high level of altruistic value. On the one hand they may behave similarly, on the other, one is a successful closer, and the other can’t help but give the store away!

Using Assessment Coaching to Judge Aptitude

Another way of interpreting the combination of style and values is what you might call aptitude. So to take assessment coaching to a higher level, you can infer ones natural ability to perform certain job functions, or their aptitude. Now while you should not make hiring or management decisions based on assessment results alone, as part of a well developed hiring or management process coaching with assessments can nearly guarantee your success as a coach or as a manager.

Dave Iuppa
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach