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Continuing our new series, Coaching at Work
road-tests the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behaviour questionnaire (Firo-B)

The tool

What it is
The Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behaviour questionnaire (Firo-B) examines interpersonal needs and behaviours. Business psychology consultancy OPP, which owns the tool, claims it is “an exceptionally powerful tool for increasing self-awareness, and for helping to understand different workplace relationships and the impact of one person’s style on others”. There are no right or wrong answers.

How does it work?
The results of the questionnaire and feedback session reveal how the individual interacts with others, based on the following needs:

• inclusion: how you participate in forming relationships with others;
• control: how you prefer to be involved in decision-making, control and influence;
• affection: how you build rapport and openness between individuals.

The individual displays either an “expressed” or “wanted” need, eg, the extent to which they initiate or wish others to initiate that behaviour.

Using the tool
The instrument can be used in one-to-one, team or group situations. It is suitable for all employees, including board level. OPP says it is ideal for use with new and experienced managers to “enable them to understand their natural style and what impact this has on the way they communicate, to involve others in decision-making and to delegate responsibility”.

Professionally led feedback sessions and narrative reports give practical suggestions for how to improve relationships or increase effectiveness. OPP says the tool can be easily combined with others, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), for use in self- and group development.

Individuals
OPP says that when Firo-B is used to coach individuals, it “will help them increase their self-awareness and interpersonal effectiveness, by identifying and understanding their interpersonal style”. It can help senior people to look at their impact.

Teams
A Firo-B assessment enables the team to identify likely sources of compatibility or conflict. This can help to improve communication and trust and resolve conflict, says OPP.
The instrument is available online or by email via OPPassessment. The questionnaire enables practitioners to produce the following reports:

• the Firo-B profile report, designed to help with feedback;
• the Firo-B interpretive report, for organisations to help clients understand how they can improve their effectiveness in the workplace, highlighting areas for development.

To administer Firo-B, you need to complete the qualifying workshop.
For more information on Firo-B, visit www.opp.co.uk

The administrator

Using the tool
There were question marks over how to do teambuilding with a small or similar team because there isn’t the diversity to explore applications.

Although MBTI gave all three team members similar profiles, Firo-B showed differences in expressed and wanted needs. It was useful to discuss these within the context of their work with the team and their clientele. We looked at differences in terms of affection and how these might play out with clients.

The verdict
I felt the exercise was really useful, helping the team to recognise individual strengths, understand how they work together, how to express their needs better, where the gaps were and how to address these.

I use Firo-B a lot in coaching because it gives an angle that is difficult to see using any other instrument. It helps people to understand what they need and the behaviours they express. It’s simple to use but can be used in complex ways. However, the administrator needs to be aware of their own competencies and boundaries.

Gil Parsons is a lead consultant at OPP Learning and an independent coach

The client
We support around 150 homeless people a year, helping them to gain employment. It can be stressful and we rarely stop to reflect. We wanted to look closely at how we communicated with our team of three and how we reacted as individuals to stress.

The experience
We received individual feedback for both MBTI and Firo-B prior to the day, so we could reflect on our results. It was quite heavy, introspective stuff. On the day, we looked at both tools.

I am fairly extrovert and need to talk things through and it was useful to see that the others might find it harder to say what Firo-B had shown them.

The application
The tool has helped us to look at how we respond in the team and to business clients and vulnerable people – the latter can be needy, misinterpreting our responses.

It was good for my manager to see I have a low need for being controlled whereas she has realised she needs to ask for more support.

Another team member had a low expressed need but a high want for affection, and it was helpful to realise that she internalised feelings. This will help us to minimise stress as a team.

It was really great to put myself in the others’ shoes, to think about how things might be misinterpreted.

We have started to think about how difficult it is for some of our clients to express emotions and about the language we use with business clients.

The verdict
The tool, along with MBTI, is fantastic, but it’s more that it is a catalyst to get things going within the team and to encourage time out.

It was an intense day and hard work, with lots to absorb. It was challenging because we had different levels of familiarity with the tools and it was hard to look at both tools in one day. Although they are fairly easy to use, you do need to go away afterwards to reflect.

We got added value doing MBTI as well. It was a really useful foundation to build on, although Firo-B would have worked on its own.

By a job coach and client support manager at a charity working with the homeless in London

Firo-B: pros and cons

UPSIDE

• Works well in combination with interventions such as MBTI
• Helps individuals to gain insight into how self and others interact
• Powerful in improving team effectiveness and communication
• Multi-layered yet easy to use

DOWNSIDE

• Time consuming
• Hard work
• Requires a trained and skilled administrator
• Requires time and willingness to reflect on findings before and after

Coaches’ Workout

When clients get stuck
There are always going to be moments when clients get stuck when you ask them to come up with solutions or ideas. Next time this happens, try to stay calm (breathe!). As a coach, your emotional state needs to be relaxed and focused.

Reflect on the cause

• Do they need reflection time? A period of gentle silence helps.
• Do they need a more general question, such as: “What are your options?” or “What thoughts are you having now?”
• Are they confused or overloaded? A gentle summary can give them a “rest”. In extreme cases, offer a break.
• Have you uncovered enough information? Backtrack, eg: “Okay, I’ve heard you say that long hours, plus the travelling, are the real issue – can you say a little more about that?”
• Do they even believe there’s a solution? Use a question that encourages possibility, eg: “You’ve said you want to sort this out – what would ‘sorted’ look like for you?”

The client may not have a solution
You still have options though:

• Make a gentle observation without being too directive, such as: “You’ve said that it’s out of your control and also that your boss is rarely around – I’m wondering are those linked?”
• Acknowledge the situation: “Okay, I may have led us up a dark alley, shall we pause? What would you like to do?”

Above all, stay open, relaxed and flexible. An uptight, frustrated coach flounders while a calm, resourceful coach creates progress. Trust yourself and trust the process.
Julie Starr is director of Chrysos Consulting and author of The Coaching Manual www.chrysos.co.uk

Core competencies

This new column explores the key competencies of a coach at an advanced level. Looking at best practice from established coaching competency frameworks such as the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC) and the International Coach Federation (ICF), and drawing on expert opinion from around the world, Lisa Wynn takes a look at what best practice looks like in different coaching competencies and standards.

This issue: coaching presence, focusing on the key skill that the ICF describes as “the coach’s depth of partnership with the client”.

Coaching presence can be considered the absolute key to the core coaching competencies – with a strong energetic presence, the other competencies start to fall into place. When coaching presence is strong and clear, questions come from intuition; listening happens in a space of absolute and limitless possibility; rapport happens naturally and trust and intimacy flourish.

Presence is clearly a vast topic and one in which a lot of subjectivity must exist. So we will hone in on the key skill of “the coach’s depth of partnership with the client”.

Setting the agenda
In the early stages of coaching development, coaches tend to be taught that the client sets the agenda for the session and that the coach must stay with that agenda rather than leading the client off down the coach’s choice of path.

The ICF points to a development of that non-directiveness by encouraging the coach to “treat the client as a full partner choosing not only the agenda, but also participating in the creation of the process itself”.

Margaret Krigbaum, who was chair of the ICF’s credentialing committee for five years, refers to this level of partnership as one of the hallmarks of presence. She gives the example of a client who says they want to clean their desk. The coach who is in partnership with the client might well ask:
“What issues do you think you need to address to clean your desk and keep it clean?” and: “How would you like to go about that?”

In this way, the coach is inviting the client to come further into the process itself. A metaphor for masterful coaching presence that I love is “to walk alongside” your client, helping them to design their own journey and being intensely curious about them – what works best for them; what is true of the times when success flows.

This level of curiosity puts the focus on the client rather than on their problem or challenge. It encourages the client not simply to solve the issue, but to grow in their understanding of themselves and how they work – to create a manual for their own “inner software”.

Some great questions for deepening your level of partnership with the client are:

• “What would constitute effective support for you?”
• “How would you know you were receiving that support?”
• “How would you like to reflect on it?”
• “What works well for you when you are exploring a new topic?”
• “What are some of your usual habits or patterns of behaviour that might get in your way as we work together?”
• “How will I spot them?”
• “How shall I respond if I think I have spotted them?”

And a favourite request of mine:

• “If you spot them and I don’t appear to have done so, please could you point them out to me?”

Lisa Wynn is director of coaching at Corporate Potential. She is director of membership for the International Coach Federation (UK), an ICF master certified coach and an assessor for the ICF credential system. She is also a business mentor for the Prince’s Trust www.corporatepotential.com

Next issue: the EMCC standard of “beliefs and attitudes” of the master practitioner coach