What Tools Do Coaches Use

I’ll start by making one important point.

Every coach is different, and every coach will bring their own unique life experience to their work.?

That’s essential, and in most cases, a coach's life experience will define what kind of coaching they do.?

Before I was a coach, I was lucky enough to be involved in a very successful family business co-owned by my father which is now a leading PLC UK retail company. I’ve also been a manager, so I’m very well acquainted with the trials and errors and occasional baptisms of fire that go hand-in-hand with managing other people. That’s why, when I decided to become a coach, business coaching was the perfect fit for me. I wanted to combine my new skills as a coach with my wide-ranging experiences in business and people management to help make my clients more successful and bring out the best in them and their team members.

Of course, the natural extension to that is you can’t run a successful business without focused, productive and happy employees, and that took me quite naturally into the arena of personal development coaching and life coaching. As a result, even though business coaching remains my speciality, I’m in the fortunate position of having a fairly even split between clients who want to grow themselves in business and clients who want to grow themselves in other aspects of their life. The tools I use are essentially the same, but I'll modify them according to the client and their situation.

AND THAT BRINGS ME TO MY SECOND IMPORTANT POINT.

Every coach has a set of tools, tools they use all the time, and other tools they can use if their regular tools aren’t appropriate. You’ll always recognise a high-quality coach by the number of tools they've got in their toolkit and their willingness to explore and adopt new tools that could be beneficial to their clients. A high-quality coach usually has a lot more tools than other coaches. We never stop learning, whether from our mentors, peers, or by keeping up-to-date with the genuine superstars in the personal development sector. We’ll actively seek out new techniques and approaches, and we'll adapt them to suit our personal style.

THIRD IMPORTANT POINT (LAST ONE, I PROMISE)

As I hope I’ve made clear in the previous articles, good coaching is all about careful listening, asking the right questions at the right time, and knowing what tools to use to help the client find their own answers. It’s a bit like jazz. You know how some people can get a bit snarky about jazz musicians because all they think they do is walk on stage and make it up as they go along? That’s the kind of criticism I've heard levelled at coaching, too, by people who don't understand it.?

The fact is, the great jazz musicians are among the most knowledgeable and accomplished musicians in the world because they know their art form inside out. It’s impossible to make anything look and sound so relaxed and easy and yet have so much impact on the hearts and minds of your audience unless you understand all the rules before you break them.?

At the risk of sounding a bit wonky (substitute one of those letters with an a), a high-quality coach is exactly like that. We have to be, otherwise, every time we sat down with a client, we wouldn't know how to deal with whatever might be coming next, and we'd be like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

The upshot of all this is, I’ve personally got a whole raft of tools that I use as a coach and describing all of them would be very long and tedious unless that kind of thing turns you on. So, instead, I’m going to tell you about one of my favourite personal development tools and how you can use it yourself without any of my help.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

There are a lot of personal development tools out there, including Myers-Briggs, Kolbe, Disc, the list goes on. Most of them can be extremely valuable when you use them correctly. Unless you’re using Hogan because, in my opinion, Hogan is the absolute satan of personal development tools. If you use it, stop. If you’re thinking of working with a coach who uses it, don’t. Hogan is all about the bad and none of the good. It’s like the personal assessment equivalent of that creepy monk in The Da Vinci Code who thinks locking himself in a room and whipping himself repeatedly is the answer to everything, when all it did was push up the sales of antiseptic cream.?

I might rant a bit more about that later on (the evil of Hogan, not the creepy monk in The Da Vinci Code.)

Combining one or two personal development tools can be helpful, too, so long as each tool focuses on a completely different aspect of the assessee's personality. There's no point in combining tools that are designed to highlight the same things. The results you’ll get back from them will be so confusing they’ll probably do more harm than good.

For me, the most exceptional personal assessment tool that I’ve ever come across is CliftonStrengths.

INTRODUCING CLIFTONSTRENGTHS

CliftonStrengths is an assessment test that’s designed to uncover what you and your team members naturally do best so that you can focus on developing your/their greatest talents and use them to achieve the most awesome results possible. For example, when you know your innate skills and talents, it will open the doorway to possibilities and opportunities that you’ve probably never considered. Alternatively, when you know what your employees' natural abilities and talents are, you’ll be able to combine them into one outstanding team that complements their strengths and eliminates their weaknesses.

HOW DOES CLIFTONSTRENGTHS WORK?

CliftonStrengths asks 177 paired questions and only allows twenty seconds to answer each question, ensuring the answers you provide are honest responses coming from your authentic self. In other words, CliftonStrengths is pretty much impossible to cheat because it doesn’t give the assessee time to mull over the answer and deliberately choose the one they think you’ll be looking for. Having said that, if your employee does set out to lie on a personality test, you've got much bigger problems than that on your hands.

Based on your answers to those questions, CliftonStrengths measures your natural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving so that you can harness your skills and use them more effectively to succeed at your goals.

Thinking you already know what your skills are? You’d be surprised, and it isn’t as simple as that. We all have skills that we’ve forgotten because we stopped using them a long time ago or didn’t realise how valuable they were. We’ve also got skills that we take for granted because we use them every time, so don't even think of them as skills at all. When that happens, the skill atrophies because we’re limiting it and not using it to our full potential. We've also all got skills that we never know we have, things that we innately do that will only need a little bit of tweaking to become much more powerful.

An example would be someone who works in a charity call centre and spends their entire day trying to raise money for a good cause and having the phone slammed down on them. That kind of work involves reading people very quickly through just the tone and rhythm of their voice, encouraging reluctant strangers to engage, negotiating with them, and the resilience of constantly being shut down and having to do it over and over again. Just imagine where any of those skills could take that call centre person if they just applied one or two of them to other areas in their life. But it’s unlikely they'll realise they've even got those skills or, if they do, it's doubtful they'll have ever thought of applying them to help them achieve their goals.

CliftonStrengths uses the four domains of Strategic Thinking, Influencing, Executing, and Relationship Building to describe how people work with information, make things happen, influence others and develop relationships. Each domain is then broken down into a series of themes that gives you (or your team members) even more insight and understanding into what you can do.

For example, the themes within Strategic Thinking include Analytical (identifying people who are talented in hunting out reasons and causes), Ideation (identifying people who are more fascinated by ideas), and Learner (identifying people who have a hunger to learn and a need to improve continuously.) The themes within the Influencing domain include Activator (identifying people who are talented at turning their thoughts into actions) and Woo (identifying people who love the challenge of meeting new people and winning them over.) Want to know which of your team members is a talented organiser, and which one is better at dealing with problems? You’ll find those answers within the Arranger and Restorative themes of the Executing domain.

HOW SUCCESSFUL IS CLIFTONSTRENGTHS?

Personally speaking, it’s the best personal development tool I’ve ever used.?

I always use ClitonStrengths in my very first session with a client because I’ve found that the insights it gives both of us are invaluable. Having said that, as I mentioned a few moments ago, it’s far from being the only tool that I use; I’ve got a lot of other tools like the GROW model, The Slight Edge, Inside Out and many more in my armoury. Sometimes, depending on the client and what they need my help with, I may not even continue to use CliftonStrengths for very long, and only refer back to it from time to time. However, it is a tool I wholeheartedly believe in, and that’s because it’s always given me and my clients consistently excellent results.

Research has shown that individuals who use CliftonStrengths are more engaged and productive at work and 3x more likely to enjoy an excellent quality of life, and employers and managers who use CliftonStrengths to identify the talents and motivations of their staff build happier, more empowered and higher-performing teams.?

When I took my CliftonStrengths assessment and then went to Gallup (who own CliftonStrengths) to be fully trained and certified in the use of their tool, only something like 12 million people had used it. That was back in 2014. Now, just over 25.5 million people have taken a CliftonStrengths assessment and hopefully harnessed the power that it's given them. But, when you consider how many people there are in the world and how many businesses, I still believe that CliftonStrengths is one of the world's best-kept secrets.

Another advantage to CliftonStrengths is that it's a one-time-only assessment, unlike other personal development tools like Myers-Briggs and Disc. People who don't clearly understand CliftonStrengths will occasionally say you can re-use it regularly just like every other test, but you fundamentally absolutely can't. One of the reasons for that is CliftonStrengths goes into much greater detail and asks much more thorough questions than other assessment tests. Whereas other tests, like Myers-Briggs, for example, claim there are only a minimal number of personality types in the world (Myers-Briggs says 16), CliftonStrengths works on the basis it’s a lot more complicated than that. When you take the full CliftonStrengths assessment, it will show you the top 34 of your natural talents, including the order they come in. Even though the cheaper version of the CliftonStrengths assessment only unlocks the top 5, there's only a one-in-thirty-three-million chance that anybody will have the same top 5 natural talents as you in the same order, so that's still an incredible insight that you can use to your optimum advantage. Considering only 25.5 million people have only taken CliftonStrengths so far, that’s probably never happened. CliftonStrengths works because it recognises how unique we are and doesn’t try to squeeze us into a small number of unhelpful psychological pigeonholes.

HOW YOU CAN USE CLIFTONSTRENGTHS… WITHOUT ANYONE ELSE’S HELP

Go to the CliftonStrengths website (www.gallup.com ), click on the Services and Solutions tab, then CliftonStrengths Assessment, and then select the assessment that’s right for you. At the moment, a Top 5 CliftonStrengths assessment will cost you USD 19.00, and a complete 1-34 CliftonStrengths assessment is USD 49.99. That’s a bargain, especially when you remember that if a company wants the rights to buy CliftonStrengths for their private use, it can cost them upwards of several thousand dollars.

Alternatively, you can always hire a CliftonStrengths certified coach like me to do the test with you, and then they can help you understand your results and then put them to practical use. Because, regardless of what kind of personal development assessment tool(s) you use, it’s essential to remember that they Are. Only. A. Tool. They’re not a quick fix or a magic bullet, and for them to be effective, you have to know how to interpret the results, apply them, and understand they're a vital foundation of a much bigger process.

Having said that, even just knowing what you're capable of is invaluable because it gives you options you’ll never have considered before. Anything that gives you deeper insight into who you are and how you tick is always worth investing in.

Unless it’s Hogan.?

I poured scorn on Hogan earlier, and you might be wondering why, so I’ll quickly pour on a bit more scorn to explain it.?

Most personality assessment tools, like CliftonStrengths, are designed to show you what you’re good at so that you can develop those strengths and capitalise on them.

Hogan does it the other way around, by putting you under pressure, showing you what you’re rubbish at, and then making you spend time fixing what you’re rubbish at. It’s complete negative reinforcement, and it's the polar opposite of what personality strengths testing should be. If any coach or company claims to use Hogan because they want to help people, then they're delusional. All Hogan does is facilitate a blame culture by bullying people into feeling insecure about themselves. It’s one of the worst products I’ve ever seen, and I can't believe it's actually being used.?

So, on that uplifting note, I’d strongly encourage you to investigate CliftonStrengths for yourself or explore all the other personality assessments out there to find the one that feels most comfortable to you. Just bear in mind that it’s only via the Gallup website or a CliftonStrengths certified coach that you’ll be able to access the CliftonStrengths assessment. Other assessments, like Myers-Briggs, are being offered by a range of different websites and companies, so there isn’t the same level of quality control. You get what you pay for, so buyer beware!

Oh, and if you’d like to find out more about CliftonStrengths and some of the other tools that are out there, I recently had the pleasure of chatting to Neil Foley about that on his excellent Business Growth podcast. Why not give it a listen? https://businessgrowthclub.net/assessment-tests-wont-work-in-isolation