I often get asked what assessments I will use as part of my coaching practice. They are a common tool to help create a basis of self awareness around behavioral and thinking patterns. This can help leaders not only understand how they show up, it sometimes helps teams of people understand each other better. I’m talking about assessments such as Hogan, Insights Discovery, Emergenetics, Disc, MBTI, and CliftonStrengths, just to name a few I’ve relied on the most over my years in Corporate. In addition, 360 assessments can give insight into how others view you, identifying potential gaps or blindspots between your own awareness and how you show up.
So it seems that these would be great tools to use for coaching and yet, I opt not to use any of them if I don’t have to. Why is that?
First, you know yourself better than you think. When you come to coaching as an authentic version of you, an assessment isn’t needed to identify your patterns. These are all laid out in the thoughts you verbalize during the coaching process. And when you can identify them instead of someone telling you what they are, it’s so much more powerful.
Second, as part of the assessment process, behavioral or thought patterns are all categorized and labeled for ease. It makes sense. Our brain loves a pattern, it’s the basis for how it functions given that it’s digesting so much information on a daily basis. The downside of this is that these labels often get weaponized, by ourselves and others. Instead of “My brain sees a problem and wants to solve it”, we condescendingly say “Of course, you jumped in, you’re a Director” or “I expected that, you’re a D” and all of a sudden, what was simply a pattern unearthed becomes a character flaw. In meetings, teammates start to roll their eyes when the one person with a strong pattern for detail and process speaks because the rest of the team has a preference for creativity. Or even worse, knowledge about weaknesses becomes a weapon when we start to tell ourselves that we aren’t good at it and therefore avoid it or use it as a basis for self criticism.
What if instead, we just start with a blank slate and ask ourselves who we will be at our best when we fully step into the role we want to play? No external influence required, just our own authentic opinion. There is so much more power in creating that self image than relying on who we think we need to be for others and then constantly searching for integrity as a result. Assessments cloud our ability to do that. There have been times when I had received so many assessments on myself and the information was so jumbled, I didn’t even know who I was as a leader anymore. There is peace in stepping away from all of it and re-discovering ourselves, how we want to show up, and what feels good for each of us individually.
There is no right or wrong way to lead and sometimes assessments can have us believing there is, especially when we look at someone we admire and their results are drastically different than our own. So let’s just decide who we want to be without the comparison. I promise you there is room in the leadership ranks for all of it.