Personality tests and 360 feedback tools

Many people do coaching to learn more about themselves. There are numerous reasons why someone chooses to work with a coach.  For example, they may want to develop their skill set, learn about how others perceive their behaviour, analyse their work/life balance or prepare themselves for a more responsible role.

All of these require a level of self-awareness and the ability to reflect on where they are and where they want to be.  A coach's job is to help their clients through that journey of discovery and there are a number of tools they can use to help their clients achieve this.

Oxford dictionaries define self-awareness as:

conscious knowledge of one's own character, feelings, motives, and desires.

So how do coaches help their clients get a greater conscious knowledge of their own character, feelings, motives and desires?  There are a number of approaches:

1. Personality measures/instruments - these look at personality traits or type.

A well-known type inventory is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) which is a useful tool for development as it helps a client to consider themselves in light of the four key measures of Extraversion/Introversion; Sensing/Intuition; Thinking/Feeling and Judging/Perceiving.

MAPP stands for Managerial and Professional Profiler and is designed to measure personality and motivation against 19 personality dimensions within People, Tasks and Feelings.   Other common personality instruments include SHL's OPQ-32, Firo-B and Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI).

Some instruments are more socially focused such as the Strengths Deployment Inventory (SDI) which as well as looking at an individual's motivational values it also considers how people behave when they are in conflict with others.

There are others that are designed to look specifically at emotional intelligence which, in essence, are designed to help increase and individual's self-awareness about their intrapersonal intelligence and interpersonal intelligence. Salovey and Mayer (1990) described it as knowing and handling one's own and others' emotions.

2. 360 degree feedback tools - these attempt to improve self-awareness by getting a range of feedback from the individual, their manager, their team members and colleagues/suppliers. 

Getting developmental feedback via 360 degree feedback tools can be an intimidating experience and using a coach to help discover the key themes can be a great experience for some people as it stops them feeling overwhelmed by the process.  If run in conjunction with a personality measure it can help both the coach and the individual link the feedback themes to particular personality traits and types leading to a greater sense of self-awareness which allows the client to make different, and informed, choices.

For all of the instruments mentioned here the coach needs to be properly accredited so our advice is to always check this out before you use them.

Further reading:

The business case for 360 degree feedback: http://lcp.org.uk/index.php/2011/04/business-case-360-degree-feedback/

An introduction to psychometric testing on YouTube: