Sneak Peek Series - Your Assessment Toolkit

Welcome to the business of executive coaching. I'm Ellie Scarfe, an ex lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years I've coached in house, I've been an associate coach and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutiques, startups and organizations doing good in the world. I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like minded peers. I'm a traveller, a reader, a mum, wife and dog parent and I know firsthand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses. The executive coaching business is tough and I've learnt all the lessons through plenty of mistakes and also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable and that supports your personal goals, whatever they are. I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors. If you want to level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is the place for you. Hello and welcome back to the four week series that I'm running on the podcast with some sneak peeks into the curriculum of the Corporate to Coach accelerator.

So we have a number of courses.

That exist within the accelerator for members and this month I've released two new courses just for our accelerator members. One is the 90 day quick start Challenge. This course is a group challenge where our members get a chance to develop or review all of their key assets and key foundations over the course of 90 days. So about 12 weeks. And the course includes three key things. There are weekly videos guiding them through the writing and updating of their core assets and those, those big foundational principles. So it includes defining ideal clients, building their offer suite, rewriting a coaching bio or setting coaching bio up, LinkedIn profile, website copy, website build. So it's perfect for people who are starting out, but it's also really good for people who are going through a bit of a review process where they, they feel like something's not quite working, they might not have done everything as intentionally as they'd liked, or they're heading into a new iteration of their business and they want all of their assets to reflect that. So they have weekly videos for all of that. They also submit all of their assets to me along the way and I send video feedback on, on anything that they submit to me. And we have a lot of really hands on personal support. So they're getting feedback and questions answered on their own questions. And that is through our weekly coaching calls in our Facebook group and also in a WhatsApp channel that will be established just for this challenge. It is very exciting. I, I'm, I really can't wait to launch it. And it' coming out as this podcast comes out, that's when the courses are being released to accelerated members. So the other course being released this week to my accelerator members is the Business Development Accelerator Framework. And so this is a guide to the marketing activities that you need to do to be able to grow your business to build a sustainable business in less than five hours a week. So in this course we do all the setup that is required. So we go step by step through what is involved in establishing your sales pipeline. We build the quarterly content plan. You get the tools and the processes to follow, the metrics to report on so that you can get traction with your business development now and you can maintain growth over time. And that includes building the foundations and the implementation strategy for five hours of business development activity per week. That works around your preferences, personality and your flexibility needs as well. So it's very, it's both, you know, here's best practice, so. And we apply it to you and your needs. So I am really proud of these courses. I really love them and mostly I think that's because my thinking has really evolved and these courses are built based on the reality of running an executive coaching business. So the courses factor in the most common challenges, both practical and mindset and implementation challenges that I see in coaches.

Right.

That I see you face. And the courses are extremely practical around that. So this is not about, you know, some theory in isolation. This is about how do we take the theory and how do we get results. So I'm, I'm super excited about the courses. So over the next four weeks on the podcast, I'm going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to share a series of snippets from within both of these courses. And by snippets I mean I'm going to take whole lessons out and I'm going to share them with you and it's going to be sharing really practical advice and it's also going to give you an insider's view of what we do inside the accelerator. So if you are wanting to build or grow your executive coaching business, and particularly if you want to get your next 10 high paying corporate clients, you want to do less than five hours marketing a week, you want to do it in community Then do book a strategy call with me so we can discuss whether the accelerator would be a good call, a good fit for you, and you know your next steps in business. And there are two ways that you can do this. You can head to the Show Notes where you'll find a link to book a call with me. The link is elliscarf.com.

Or you can.

Send me a DM on LinkedIn with the word call and I will just send you my booking link so that you can book in at a time that works for you. I do also have a sneaky bonus if you decide to join the accelerator and you let me know that you joined after listening to this podcast series, you'll receive an extra month on your membership for free. Meaning that if you join for 12 months, which is part of which is what our standard membership is, you'll receive access to the accelerator for 13 months. So one extra month for free. Now in the episode Today I'm sharing a lesson from my signature course, the Corporate to Coach Blueprint. Now this is not one of my new courses, but it is a holistic course for new executive coaching business owners who want to set up all the foundations of their business. And it is included in the Corporate to Coach accelerator. And it's also a course that you can buy as a standalone self paced course. So if you're interested in that, you can head over and have a look at@elliscarf.com blueprint. So take a look at it there. The lesson out of the blueprint that I've chosen to include is all about what should be in your toolkit of assessments. As a coach who sells coaching services to corporate clients, I'm asked often about what assessments people should be certified in. It's a common discussion topic with my accelerator member. So if you have been wondering what you should or shouldn't get certified in insofar as it relates to assessments, here are all of my thoughts. Now onto the lesson.

Welcome back to Module two, Lesson two, where we're going to talk about your assessment toolkit. Now, I really like using assessments and I've spent an extraordinary amount of time debriefing assessments. That's another masterclass in and of itself. But what I want to talk about today is what assessments you have in your toolkit because it's really important. As a coach, assessments are important on a number of levels. One of those is that they're a way of bringing data into your coaching engagements and so they are often expected by clients, organizational and individual, and they can be really helpful tools to set the tone for the types of conversations you want to have with your coaches. And they can bring in alternative perspectives when your coachee may have one view of the world that might need to expand. Now, there are downsides to assessments. They can be expensive. Particularly getting accredited in assessments can be really expensive when you're talking about 360s and psychometrics. I've seen a lot of coaches in the early days over invest in getting accredited in loads of assessments and have so much on their plate that they don't get the chance to properly learn them through applying them. So it's better to be strategic and to layer them in. If you are still working for an employer, it's also an option to get them to fund your accreditation if you will have a chance to use it with the employees at that organization. So then it's a win win. What I'm going to do is I introduce you the categories of psychometrics that I think you need to have at least one tool in. And then once you have one in each of the categories, then you can expand from there and follow your interest to the things that you find interesting, you think your clients would be interested in, or that you think could represent a business opportunity. Because sometimes you'll be brought in purely because of your accreditation in a particularly particular instrument. And that can be really helpful. Some tools can multitask, so those are really valuable early. So for example, the Hogan, one of my favorites, has a really great psychometric and I use it very frequently and so do most of my coaches. But it's also got a 360 tool that you can easily add an accreditation for. And it's also got a team tool that you know really gives you extra data for working with teams using the same model. So lots of tools can multitask. It's something that you should think about when you're choosing. When you are using psychometrics in organizations, you also need to be a little creative and sometimes you're working with existing assessments within the organization and I wouldn't shy away from that. So sometimes organizations will have their own tools that they've custom built. They will have ones that they've invested a lot of money in and therefore that is the one they're going to need to continue to use so that they don't they can leverage that that previous investment. I think it's really important for you to make sure you are not afraid of using what they've already got or presenting that there is only one option which is working with the assessment tool that you like best. So I think giving them optionality generally works better from the ability to build trust with your clients if they're organisations, and also to be able to sell a program to them if you're willing to be flexible. I would also say that you can DIY some psychometrics and I'm going to talk you through a DIY 360 tool that I use quite a lot and I've got a guide for that in your workbook as well. The assessment tools that I'm going to share as I go through the categories, some of them require accreditation, some don't, some of them are, you know, wildly expensive and some of them are quite reasonable or even free. So it's important to do your research into those as you, as you go through and I would say say tap into your network. So within your network people will have been accredited in most of the assessments that I'm going to talk about. And I'm not pretending that these are the only ones out there either. You can probably, you can probably think of four or five more in each category that I haven't even mentioned. So, you know, be willing, find out from people who've done it, whether they like them, how they're using them with clients. I think that's a really important question. Not just what's it like to be accredited, but what's it like to use this tool with a client? What was the impact? What outcomes did you get? So what are the categories of assessment that I want to talk you through? I think you need to have an assessment that you can use in each of these categories. A psychometric or personality assessment, a360 tool, a strengths assessment and a team tool. So let's go to psychometric to start with. Now, many psychometric or personality assessments are quite similar and that's because they come from the same research base. A good tool in this category is one that is going to allow the coachee to really reflect on their strengths, their derailers, and it may also look at their values and preferences. It'll help them reflect on how they show up in certain circumstances, their preferences and styles. When it comes to things like communication and conflict, they're usually pretty broad, these sorts of assessments. Now, the sorts of ones that you'll come across, the Hogan suite of assessments. So the hpi, the HDS and the MVPI are the three assessments that sit within Hogan and those are strengths, loosely personality or performance strengths assessment derailers, which is, you know, what are your derailers that emerge when you're under pressure and your motives, values and preferences. So Those are the three reports. People still use the MBTI. I got accredited in MBTI in the early 2000s and used it quite a lot in law firms with individuals and with teams. Some people still use it and there's a lot of advanced reports. Look, I personally don't use it anymore but you know, I prefer the Hogan or something with a little bit more evidence based. But that's not to say it's not still a very useful tool. Many people use Big five and some people use disc with individuals as well. Although I'm not sure that that goes to the layer of depth that I would need with my coaches and then 360s. So 360s are really fascinating and they can have so much impact if you debrief them well. So a good psychometric is one that will allow the coachee to really. Well actually it depends. So360 you choose, you have to think about what you're going to use it for. So if you're using it with the leadership team, you need to think about a tool that can standalone for the individual but where the data can also be aggregated to give a team picture. If it's for individual development, you want one where you can see the differences between self perception and the perception of others and that will help to grow the self awareness of the individual that you're debriefing and give them more targeted direction into their leadership development typically. So the one that I personally prefer, actually I'll just read them as a list and then I'm going to share my favorites. So you could use the Hogan.360 is one. The Leadership Circle profile is another. LSI is one that back when I started coaching was very popular and everywhere it's extremely expensive to get accredited in. I don't see it as popular now. I don't see as many people using it, but it's definitely still out there. Most organizations of of a certain size will have an internal tool that they use that is sort of custom built for the sorts of things they want to know and then 360. I mentioned that you can DIY some of these tools and one that I really like and I recommend very frequently is a stakeholder interview process. I've included a guide on how you would go about running a stakeholder interview process in your workbook. But at high level what it involves is you as the coach interviewing six stakeholders as identified by your coachee, their leader and you in collaboration. And for each of these six people, you would interview them for about 20 minutes each and you would ask a series of standard questions and then some targeted questions. So, you know, you. I've got some guide to those questions, but really what you're trying to understand is how is your coachee perceived either generally or in a particular context, and what is the experience that these stakeholders have of your coachee? The benefit of a stakeholder interview process, and I think what puts it above an assessment tool in many cases is the richness of the data that you can get. Because I often find that when I'm using a360, the part that really adds value to my coaches is actually the commentary. And some of the assessments, like the leadership Circle profile, have got a really great way of capturing commentary, but some of them don't and some of them are quite bland. And it's working through a lot of data. I find stakeholder interview processes can be quicker. They can get you richer data. And one of the big issues with senior leaders is actually getting people willing to give feedback in an assessment. So if you're having an interview, you have the chance to put these people at ease, to tell them that you will be anonymizing the data. And yeah, I find that to be really helpful. And most clients also love the idea of it. So, you know, consider that as one of the tools that you can put into your toolkit as well that does not require any certification or any costs associated. The third category I think is helpful to have a tool in is strengths assessments. Now, things like the Hogan and Will Die and even some of the 360s will assess strengths in many ways. But I think if you're going to be working with teams and if you're going to be working sort of with people beyond very senior leaders, sometimes these strengths assessments are all that you'll need. The ones that I like best are the Via character strengths. I've seen a lot of people lately using Clifton strengths, and I do like the how strengths profile is written and what's included in that. So they're the ones I think you should look at. Most strengths assessments funnelly don't require accreditation, but it is important that you look at what's involved in them because I think you need to be really familiar with them and you need to be familiar with actually what the strengths are and how they might manifest and what the shadow side of them is before you can debrief them accurately. So, you know, even if you, if you're choosing to put one in your toolkit, get really familiar with it, do it on yourself, learn about it, have a play with it, you know, do a trial run with a. With a peer and that. Yeah, that would be my recommendation. The fourth category is a team assessment. Now, team assessments, they're so wildly variable and so you have to use them based on the need that you have. I use the Hogan a lot in a team context, where I've already debriefed every member of the team individually. And then we use the Hogan as a shared language to explore similarities, differences, how we want to work together, themes, shared values, low anchor values, all of that sort of stuff. It's really rich tool to use with teams. You can also use the MBTI with teams. You can use the Disc with teams. A lot of people use disk with teams. And particularly if you've got a lot of people and you aren't able to do individual debriefs, I recommend that one. Any of these tools can be. You can debrief the individual component as a team rather than doing it one on one. Doing it one on one is an absolute luxury and I will always try and get the opportunity to debrief everyone one on one or get my team to do those debriefs because sometimes it can be a lot, but sometimes you don't have that. Don't have that luxury. You might also use strengths profiles as a team. So I've found the Via Character Strengths works really, really well as a foundation of a team workshop. But again, depends on the need of the team. Is it we've got a team that's having trouble working together or is it we want to have a team building activity. So, you know, you choose your assessment based on the need. So what are my favourites? I think if you were to put three or four tools in your toolkit, the ones I would choose are the Hogan. Absolutely. And I would do the Hogan regular accreditation and then do the extra education that will get you the certificate to use the360 as well. I would get familiar with the Via Character Strengths one because that's a really fun tool to use with teams in the team building capacity. I would then go on to the leadership circle profile as a360 tool. I love this tool. I find it really, really rich for the conversations you're having with your coaches, particularly leadership level coaches. It's not for everyone unless your person is reasonably senior. It's not going to. It's going, possibly going to be too complex. So this is a very complex tool, but I find it really, really powerful when, when it's used. And then another tool that you might want to consider, maybe not in that initial phase but as the next step development tool is the Leadership Maturity Framework. So the Leadership Maturity Framework is a developmental assessment that measures vertical development and it is all about perspective, taking capacity and looks at, you know, what is your ability to think in increasingly complex ways about yourself in the world. This is something you need to be very deliberate about how you use it with clients. So a client that's never done any sort of, you know, self development work, you wouldn't probably do an LMF with them, a Leadership Maturity Profile with them. Sorry lmp. But for one, for a fairly sophisticated coachee, it's, it's, it's absolute gold. And what I will say is that the accreditation process is wonderful development for you as a coach as well. So I highly recommend it. I've included a link in your workbook to where you can do that with the Institute for Developmental Coaching with Maya Stanievich, Andre. She's quite brilliant as a facilitator, so highly recommend that. Feel free to send me emails if you want to ask any more questions about any of those tools. So to wrap up, I want you to think about what will be in your toolkit. What is in your toolkit now? What do you think you would like to add as a priority? Have you got one in each of those four buckets? If you don't have one, do some reflection, do your research, ask some people and then fill in your sheets. So you've sort of got like a literal toolkit there ready for you to take into your coaching engagements. These will feed into our conversation about professional development as well later on in the course. But with that, that's the end of this lesson and I look forward to speaking to you in the next lesson about your pricing.

Thanks for tuning in today. I hope that it's been really helpful for you. And please don't forget to head to elliscarf.com forward/bookacall or jump over to LinkedIn and send me a DM saying call and I'll send you a link so that you can book a time that works for you. If you would like to discuss your corporate coaching business, what the next steps looks like for you, what your strategy is going to be in 2025 for your business. I think this will be a great discussion and I'd really like to learn a bit more about your business. So thanks again and I'll be back next week. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Business of Experience Executive Coaching. If you found it helpful, please share it with a colleague or friend on LinkedIn. And don't forget to tag me so I can say thanks. I would be tremendously grateful also if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts. More reviews means more people can find us. Have a brilliant week and I look forward to talking to you again soon.