How Behavior and Communication Assessments
Aid in Coaching

Understanding What Makes People Tick

You may hear managers who have been trained in coaching skills say, “I’m not good at coaching. Each of my people is different and I don’t know how to get through to them”. It may not be they didn’t learn the coaching skills. More likely it’s that they don’t understand what makes their subordinates tick, what their hot buttons are and what motivates them. It’s easy to coach someone who is like us. The challenge is coaching someone who has different behavior and communication styles. Romano & Sanfilippo’s assessments provide insight into these styles and usually make a huge difference in coaching performance.

For example, take a manager and a subordinate at the extremes in styles. The manager is very aggressive, a direct communicator and very goal oriented. He tries to coach a direct report who is very change and risk resistant, quiet, who doesn’t like to focus on himself, and is a better listener than a talker. You have an incredible mismatch in communication and behavior styles here. It doesn’t matter how much time and effort the manager puts into coaching, the relationship will be strained and job performance stalled. With behavior and communication assessments from Romano & Sanfilippo, the manager can understand much more about how the direct report best receives communication, what motivates them and more. This is also true for coaching the coaches!

The other side of the coin is getting employees to understand what makes their coach tick. If you understand the person that you’re working for, you could be much more effective in understanding and applying direction she gives you. With a little practice by both the manager and the direct report applying the information in their reports, coaching results and thus job performance can be increased dramatically.

Focusing On Strengths

Another reason many coaches are not as effective as they can be is they focus on fixing an employee’s weaknesses instead of enhancing their strengths. Because managers don’t understand the learning styles, work styles, communication patterns, strengths and weaknesses of their people, their coaching is ineffective. The coach works very hard, but the individual isn’t applying the information. A person cannot be coached effectively unless it’s known how the person accepts information and how willing they are to learn. If the direct report is a good match for the job, if you know the person’s strengths and weaknesses up front and you focus on their strengths, you will get results almost immediately. In our sales management reinforcement training, we teach managers how to use the insights from subordinates’ assessments to greatly improve performance.

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