How Digital Assessments can Help Coaches in the New Normal - International Coaching Federation
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How Digital Assessments can Help Coaches in the New Normal

Posted by Joe Sanchez | October 1, 2020 | Comments (0)

Are we at the new normal yet? So much is still changing about the world of work as the COVID-19 pandemic rumbles on that it’s hard to tell what changes are temporary and which are more permanent. It’s certain, however, that working life is going to look very different for the rest of the year—and beyond. Of course, the impacts of COVID-19 have thrown up new challenges for coaches, as you search for viable alternatives to those invaluable face-to-face conversations with clients. But it’s also brought new opportunities to support organizations. In this blog, I want to show you the opportunities I see and how digitally native psychometric assessments can help you deliver even more value to your clients.

What Are the Opportunities?

From conversations with organizations in every sector in the global economy, I’ve seen two trends:

  1. Leaders are struggling to adapt to the changes that COVID-19 has brought to their workforces and to lead them through this uncertain time.
  2. Managing employees and teams who are now working remotely is proving difficult for managers at all levels in a multitude of industries and organizations.

These aren’t challenges that leaders can wait to solve. If they can’t lead a dispersed and unsettled workforce effectively, they risk the future of their entire organization. And it’s not just a question of technological skills. The challenge for leaders of organizations across the world is one that coaches have been helping to solve for years—how to empathize with, motivate and inspire groups of people to perform at their best.

How Do Psychometric Assessments Help?

In the new normal of remote working and limited in-person interaction, it can be much more challenging for coaches to get to know their clients and get to a position where they can provide the expert guidance they’ve been hired to give. In short, psychometric assessments can help fill this gap by providing unbiased, scientific insights into the personalities and behaviors of your clients. In fact, the insights psychometric assessments offer can go beyond filling gaps to help you create a tailored coaching program that capitalizes on your clients’ strengths and shores up their weaker areas, helping them navigate these uncertain times with confidence.

For coaches working with C-suite executives, you can use the insights from assessments to help your clients lead their organizations more effectively through the immediate challenges they face. You can help them identify their own inherent preferences and biases which might lead them to make poor decisions, and then counter them to keep things on the right track. And because modern psychometric assessment tools can generate results instantly, there’s no waiting for results or complex distillation of outputs to generate a report for your client.

If you’re working with middle management and line managers, you can use the data to help your clients understand how they interact with others—what works for them, what they find challenging, and how those preferences affect those who they manage (and their own managers).

Data to Help Leaders Adapt

Whomever you’re coaching, the data from psychometric assessments will help you have more productive and value-add conversations with your clients, helping you overcome the challenges of limited face-to-face interaction.

There is a range of psychometric assessments in the marketplace that can help you gain valuable insight into your leaders, such as Thomas International’s Behavioural Assessment. These assessments give you insight into the way an individual is likely to behave at work under normal circumstances and how that behavior changes under pressure. The assessment shows you how they view their own behaviors. Showing clients this information makes them more aware of their own behaviors, and therefore, more able to capitalize on or mitigate those behaviors to become more effective.

For instance, you may uncover that your client prefers sticking to tried and tested methods of leadership and communication—meaning they may need to push themselves to embrace new technologies or styles of leadership as they adapt to managing a remote workforce. Or you might uncover that under pressure, your client tends to become very directing and autocratic, so you can help them devise strategies to avoid letting that tendency cause problems when dealing with other people. The applications are many and diverse. For example, such behavior tests have even been used to help elite sports players  improve their game!

I hope these insights have been useful and shown you the potential value that psychometric assessments can add to your coaching conversations as we go forward into the new normal. Even as face-to-face conversations become the norm again in the future, embracing the power of psychometric tools—especially digital-first assessments that can be completed in minutes—will help coaches like you to add real value to your clients, and resolve their challenges every day.

Joe Sanchez headshot

Joe Sanchez

Joe Sanchez is a data-driven leader, who proactively uses data to better understand markets and anticipate customer and competitor movements. As a big believer in practicing what he preaches, he uses assessments to compliment the recruitment and development journeys, hire smart, ambitious people and  encouraging his cross-cultural sales and operational teams to challenge and contribute, giving them the freedom to grow. Originally from Ohio, Joe graduated from Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.) in Foreign Service & International Business. He currently resides in Berkshire, UK with his wife and three children, and he describes himself as an aging triathlete. If you are interested to learn more about behavioral assessments, please visit Thomas International’s website.

The views and opinions expressed in guest posts featured on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of the International Coach Federation (ICF). The publication of a guest post on the ICF Blog does not equate to an ICF endorsement or guarantee of the products or services provided by the author.

Additionally, for the purpose of full disclosure and as a disclaimer of liability, this content was possibly generated using the assistance of an AI program. Its contents, either in whole or in part, have been reviewed and revised by a human. Nevertheless, the reader/user is responsible for verifying the information presented and should not rely upon this article or post as providing any specific professional advice or counsel. Its contents are provided “as is,” and ICF makes no representations or warranties as to its accuracy or completeness and to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law specifically disclaims any and all liability for any damages or injuries resulting from use of or reliance thereupon.

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