How Digital Assessments can Help Coaches in the New Normal
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:
- Leaders are struggling to adapt to the changes that COVID-19 has brought to their workforces and to lead them through this uncertain time.
- 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.