Personality Profiling for Dynamic Group Coaching

The Understanding Others phase is a critical part of team coaching, helping team members to suspend judgement, become open to different preferences or ways of doing things, having more empathy for others, and perhaps most importantly, understanding how they can collectively leverage their individuals’ differences
to make themselves a high performing team. In fact, the role of understanding each other in a team is so important that it’s even argued that a team (or group) can only be truly transformed to the extent to which its
members understand their fellow team (or group) members. So how do you go about achieving this successfully, and ensuring it has the right or needed impact?

Using Personality Profiling in Support of Group Coaching and Team Dynamics:
Here at t-three, we use the Facet5 personality questionnaire to enhance individuals’ understanding of their behavioural tendencies, strength, and risk areas. It uses a Five Factor approach to indicate whether, in comparison to a sample group, behaviours are likely to be more or less like most other people. In other words,
it allows us to gauge quickly how a group might interact and relate to each other. 

The five factors are responsible for the following workplace behaviours, amongst others:

• Will: How I set goals and make decisions
• Energy: How I engage and interact with others
• Affection: Whether I am task or people oriented
• Control: How I approach and manage my workload and responsibilities
• Emotionality: My overall levels of alertness and/or caution 

In each case, an individual may be high, mid, or low in comparison to others which will indicate quite different strengths. People in teams may demonstrate complementary scores, highlighting a need to better understand each other’s style and approach, or they might have similar scores meaning they may both have similar blind spots and run the risk of group think, i.e. where there isn’t enough diversity to incorporate alternate views and perspectives. Once each individual understands the key characteristics of their profile, they will be ready to
make the most of the characteristics of the group when it comes together. In coaching circles, understanding each other’s key qualities will assist the process; there will be those who prefer to reflect before giving their view, those who might be quite direct and factual or those who relish exploring possibilities just as examples. A group and its coach can become more effective by developing a deeper understanding of these preferences.

With Facet5, we use the TeamScape approach to understand group dynamics. This applies a Work Cycle principle meaning that, within a group individuals may or may not be naturally orientated towards one or more of idea generation, evaluation, decision making and implementation. The tendencies of the group overall across these four areas will drive the dynamics. A group coach can use these qualities to help facilitate the session in the best way.

Hear more from Daniel about Personality Profiling for Dynamic Team Coaching in our latest podcast series here: 

To find out more, why not download our brand new eBook 'The Collective Advantage: Group Coaching Solutions for Organisational Success'.