Assessment and feedback

Assessment

Many executive coaches see assessment as a crucial part of the coaching process. It can provide information on a client’s personality, thinking styles, emotional intelligence, leadership, learning preferences as well as identify strengths and areas of development.

There are many different ways to approach assessment, which include structured assessment or development centres, the use of instruments such as MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator), 16 PF (Sixteen Personality Factors), FIRO- B (Fundamental Interpersonal Relationships Orientation – Behaviour), emo- tional intelligence profiling, 360-degree feedback, one-to-one or group interviews and taking a developmental history.

Many assessment instruments can only be administered by trained psy- chologists. Peltier (2001), observes that psychological testing and assessment is ‘one essential area where psychologists have a clear edge over all other kinds of consultants’ and argues that assessment represents psychology’s ‘historic core competency’.

Psychometrics says Wasylyshyn (2003) ‘cannot be underestimated as an efficient way to surface relevant information and insights’ and Kiel et al. (1996) make the point that executives ‘trust data’ and therefore come to trust the executive coaching process when data are provided.

Experienced coaches tend to have their own favoured methods of assessment. Coaching psychologists often hold strong affinities to particular psychometrics but others believe that 360-degree feedback is a more useful method of data collection as it brings together a wider range of perspectives and adds that vital dimension of impact on others.

In addition to psychometrics and 360-degree feedback questionnaires there are several other means of assessment such as observing the executive in the workplace and interviewing colleagues close to the client – peers, direct reports and the manager. Taking a detailed life history can also be helpful as it produces the bigger picture of someone’s life and may reveal important themes and events that later help the coach to contextualise emerging issues. The breadth and depth of the assessment stage should be tailored to the situation. It is not always necessary or appropriate to undertake a full-scale process. Coaching assignments sometimes follow on from internally run assessment processes or a few months on from a 360-degree feedback exercise. It can therefore be uneconomic in time, effort and budget to repeat such a process. It often makes more sense for you, as the coach, to read all the data available and perhaps supplement it with some one-to-one conversations with the client’s colleagues.

In her review of the use of psychometrics in coaching, Rogers (2004) raises an important point when she says ‘the most important question to ask is why you are using a psychometric questionnaire at all’. She notes that new coaches are often attracted to these tools and techniques out of anxiety. The prepared report arising from a proprietary process can provide you with a sense of being on safe ground. Rogers rightly warns that coaches can be tempted to use questionnaires indiscriminately whether or not the client really needs them. My own experience as a coach trainer confirms this and I regularly observe huddles of course members intensely quizzing another delegate as to the latest psychometric or EI instrument that he or she has just been accredited to deliver. What often lies behind this anxiety is a fear of whether turning up and asking ‘how do you want to use this session?’ will be enough. Will the client bring any significant issues, will there be enough to talk about, and will I, as coach, be good enough?

This is not to devalue the place of assessment tools as they can be enormously helpful in raising a client’s awareness but you do need to be clear why you’re using them, be properly trained, and not become over-reliant on them. They are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

Rogers makes another interesting point when she notes that they can also disturb the balance of power in the coaching relationship. Instead of the 16 PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF EXECUTIVE COACHING

client determining the agenda the coach is back in the expert role and we know how quickly that can result in the client reverting to passive rather than proactive learner. Although Kiel et al.’s (1996) point that executives trust data is probably true, we should not forget that professionals also hold on to expertise – it acts as a comfort blanket.

Feedback

The assessment process can take many forms but the most important aspect of it has to be the delivery of the data. Accreditation courses to train coaches and consultants in the use of psychometrics involve the coach experiencing the process herself. However many coaches have not personally experienced a 360-degree feedback exercise. The idea of having several colleagues and pos- sibly customers and even family members giving detailed feedback about us would be enough to throw most people into a blind panic. Yet this is what we, as coaches, are regularly asking others to do. Most managers try to take a positive view and bravely say that they are bound to learn something useful about themselves. Some dread it and don’t believe they should have to sub- ject themselves to it. Either way it should never be taken lightly or without sufficient preparation.

Nor, when we take someone through a battery of tests, should we forget that the data can reveal a great many soul-searching questions for the client. This may be fascinating to some and torment to others. All of this depends to a large extent on four things: the client’s personality, the method of delivery of the report, the skills of the coach, and the degree of positives versus negatives in the data. Someone who finds negative feedback very difficult to hear will require highly skilled delivery. Every experienced coach who uses 360-degree feedback knows the feeling of looking at a report in advance and thinking ‘oh dear, this one is going to be hard’! These can be the heart-sink moments of coaching. They can also be some of your most important development opportunities. They take you out of your comfort zone and demand that you work at your best.

The capacity to work with feedback is a fundamental aspect of coach- ability and so the formal feedback session provides some clear indicators as to future coaching potential. To ensure the session or sessions are productive it’s important to bear in mind some practical as well as emotional guidelines. One of the most important is to leave sufficient time to do justice to the volume, breadth and depth of the material. Often coaches don’t schedule in enough time or they allow their clients to shave time off allocated diary time. A useful guideline is to schedule 2 to 3 hours for a 360-degree feedback report session.

It may be self-evident but it’s important to stress that you should not simply send reports to recipients to open, read and digest on their own.

This kind of practice does happen and can do more harm than good. It also undermines the credibility of the assessment/feedback process. There can be severely negative messages coming through processes of this kind for some clients and they require proper, skilled support to deal with them.