The tool
What is it?
Coaching Signatures is a web-based, evaluative, self-reflective and metaphor-rich projective psychological profiling instrument that aims to enable coaches to recognise and understand their most developed and natural coaching style. It identifies eight different coaching styles and measures the relational space between the coach and the client, demonstrating how the coach changes and responds with different clients and in different contexts.
Coaching Signatures is a subset of the Personal Ecology Profile (PEP), which is based on the idea that a person’s life can be viewed as an ecological system; the interaction between a person and their environment. Developed by Simon Walker, managing director of Human Ecology, from his research at the University of Oxford, the PEP can also identify Learning Signatures and Leadership Signatures and is based on a number of theories, including attachment theory, impression management, metaphor theory and social constructionism.
How does it work?
Unlike most personality profiles, which work on the theory that there is an embedded personality within a person that can be identified and measured, the PEP focuses on what is happening between people. It uses a landscape metaphor and invites the coach to create their own visual landscape in response to a series of cues. Upon completion of the online process (about half an hour), a report is generated that identifies the coach’s unique Coaching Signature and the signature style they are using with particular clients. By understanding these, the coach can develop their repertoire of coaching skills and strategies.
The three dimensions of the Coaching Signature are closely related to the cognitive and influencing
character of people development:
- Empathy: the distance a coach seeks to establish between themselves and their client.
- Linearity: information processing, recognising patterns and making sense of experiences.
- Control: how the coach manages the emotional space within the coaching relationship.
The qualitative and quantitative data the profile yields can be collated to build a confidential log of the coach’s work, identify areas for development, evaluate practice and highlight issues for exploration in supervision.
For more information, contact The Coaching Supervision Consultancy. 01491 638941 info@coachingsupervision.co.uk
The administrator
Using the tool
One of the reasons I like to use the PEP is that it provides a coaching metalanguage to develop a coach’s understanding of their style and the strategies and interventions they may use to suit different contexts. Another reason is that the profile is a dynamic process. In this case, for example, my supervisee client first completed the profile at the end of 2006 and again at the end of 2007. The latter report showed that her coaching signature had not changed, although there had been a slight shift along one of the dimensions. By exploring her profile data, she was able to reflect on a particular client issue and discuss different approaches she might use.
The verdict
Coaching Signatures helps coaches to understand how they can become more flexible in their behaviours and styles by learning to “roam” around the model. This enabled my supervisee to identify a particular concern and articulate this for reflection and then action with her client. It helped her to understand how she was currently coaching and how she could develop appropriate coaching strategies and interventions to best serve her clients’ agendas.
Patti Stevens is director of The Coaching Supervision Consultancy
The client
The experience
When my supervisor suggested using this tool, I assumed it would be a similar experience to doing a personality questionnaire. How wrong I was! As a task-orientated person, having to create my own virtual space when I thought I was simply going to answer some questions frustrated me at first. However, that quickly passed as I started to see where it was taking me. I was amazed at how my virtual space changed depending on which one of my clients was there.
The application
The first time I used the tool it really helped me to understand how I liked to work as a coach and why I was drawn to certain topics. It also highlighted that I should explore different styles and this made me challenge myself more and consciously work with different topics. The second time I used the tool I was pleased to see that even though my personal coaching signature hadn’t changed, my coaching signature style had changed for some of my clients.
The verdict
What I like about this tool is that it makes you focus on the relationship between you and your client and how it is affecting what your client is trying to achieve. I also like the fact that you can revisit client relationships to see if anything has changed.
From a practical perspective, this tool really makes the most of your time with your supervisor as you have already identified areas that may need to be explored. This is extremely useful for someone like me, who could spend most of my supervision on why the relationship isn’t working rather than how to take the relationship forward so the client gets what they need.
Anne Bates is a senior manager at KPMG
Coaching Signatures: pros and cons
UPSIDE
- Enjoyable and creative to complete
- Generates comprehensive report
- Measures the coach/client relationship
- Raises awareness of own and others’ styles
- Facilitates coach/client matching
- Increases repertoire of coaching strategies
- Provides supervision framework
DOWNSIDE
- Requires initial engagement with online process
- Follow-up supervision session is required for report feedback
- Not “off the shelf”
- Requires a trained and skilled administrator
COACHES’ WORKOUT
Other people’s shoes
“The person I’m coaching seems resistant to change. They’re often defensive during our conversations’’
First, consider the situation objectively. What is it that makes you think they are resistant or defensive? Spend a little time reflecting on what their experience is. “Try on” the following questions yourself:
- How might you be the cause of their resistance: perhaps they feel you’re trying to “fix” them?
- Are they engaged in what the coaching might achieve? How is their attitude different to the first session?
- How happy are they with the progress being made?
- How open are you being? Do they know you feel they’re resisting?
- How could you be more flexible in your approach to this situation?
- What else might be causing this?
Look for potential causes of resistance. Ways include:
- Relax about it; focus on being less directive. Try using open questions, gentle summaries and observations.
- Check results from their perspective. Stay tuned to their needs and adjust.
- Offer your thoughts and considerations in an open, neutral manner, don’t put them at fault.
- Be creative, for example, look for other tools such as profiling.
- Revisit the “set-up” stages of the assignment, for example, confidentiality and goals
Once you understand more, you can respond. Be prepared to accept that the issue may be with you. Trust yourself and the process.
Julie Starr is director of Chrysos Consulting and author of The Coaching Manual www.chrysos.co.uk
Core competencies
This column explores the key competencies of a coach at mastery level. Looking at best practice from established coaching competency frameworks from a range of professional bodies, and drawing on expert opinion from around the world, Lisa Wynn takes a regular look at what best practice looks like in the different competencies.
This issue: the Association for Coaching’s competence of “effective communication”, focusing on how the level at which we listen affords the client a more effective space for self-discovery.
While there are many facets to effective communication, the Association for Coaching’s head of accreditation, Carol Wilson, sees listening as the key skill involved. She says listening is “too often overlooked in favour of other tools such as asking powerful questions” and “when we get it right the rest tends to follow”.
Wilson describes five levels of listening from “waiting for our turn to speak”, where the listener’s response may not even reflect the content of the speaker’s words, through to the level of active listening, where the listener is using their intuition, exploring what else might be behind the speaker’s words, prompting for more and opening up the speaker’s thinking.
It is all too easy as a coach to believe that you have good listening skills and to become rather
complacent about listening. Wilson describes how in active listening, the client feels that they are in control of the conversation. They feel safer, more relaxed and are less likely to be defensive. In this area of safety and relaxation, the coaching space is a more expansive one, with a greater sense of possibility.
So what are the behaviours and skills that we would expect to see and hear in a coach who is highly
skilled in this active listening arena? Take a moment to answer the question for yourself. Reflection on our practice is always a great thing to do.
Reflecting the client’s words
One of the key behaviours identified by Wilson was that of clarification of the client’s own words. She explains how when we reflect back the words that our client has used, we validate them, demonstrate the level of attention that we were paying to them and help them to understand their own thinking more clearly.
Tell me more
“Tell me more” is such a simple statement or request, and yet potentially one of the most powerful prompts in coaching. I don’t believe you can overestimate the power of being listened to in this expansive way, with “the luxury of having someone listen and whatever you say, they want you to tell them even more”, as Wilson so beautifully puts it. So often in coaching, a critical moment is missed by a coach who responds to an urge to ask a “powerful question”.
“Tell me more” demonstrates profound curiosity and leaves that sense of control with the client, so they lead the conversation.
Asking for permission
Another complacency that I observe often in coaches is that we believe ourselves to be “intuitive”. When we are too quick to share our intuition, we risk taking control from the client. Wilson identifies “asking for permission” as one of the key ways to leave control with the client. If we ask permission to share what we think, what we are hearing or something from our own experience, the client can say no or ask to hear our offering.
Lisa Wynn is a master certified coach, an International Coach Federation (ICF) assessor and director of coaching for Corporate Potential: www.corporatepotential.com. She is also a business mentor for the Prince’s Trust.
The Association for Coaching: www.associationforcoaching.com
Next issue: the ICF competency of “managing progress and accountability”
Volume 3, Issue 1