stevealu: Harrison Assessments in Executive Coaching

Introduction?

Executive coaching is designed to help facilitate professional and personal development to the point of individual growth and improved performance. Coaches need to have a strong understanding of individual differences in a work place as well as the ability to adapt their coaching style or strategies.

Executive coaches work their clients towards specific professional goals triggered by situations like

Wants to decide on which career to choose from after having travelled many years in their current vocation.
Join?s a new firm or starts a new career or a new role.
Is promoted to new level
Develop on competencies highlighted in their appraisals.
Wants to improve their performance.

Organizations use Executive coaches to help the executive find their core issues and help them overcome these issues. Some organizations also support their executives by the use of psychometric assessments and give them access to qualified empanelled Executive Coach?s.

Different types of Psychometric Assessments?

The word psychometric is formed from the Greek words for mental and measurement. Psychometric tests attempt to objectively measure aspects of an individual?s mental ability or personality. There are different kinds of Psychometric Assessments catering to different needs of an executive?s career. ? Copyright 2006 International Coach Academy Pty. Ltd. Use is governed by the Terms and Conditions at http://www.icoachacademy.com Last updated Feb 2006 3

There are two main types of psychometric tests:

Ability Tests ? Measure an individual?s ability to perform or carry out different tasks.

Personality Questionnaires ? Measure an individual?s way of doing things, and specifically the way they interact with the environment and other people.

Some assessments are called ?type models?, which classify tendencies and preferences, with no good or bad types, per se. DISC and Meyers Briggs fall in this classification. Meyers Briggs and DiSC are described as assessments, rather than tests. They are used to measure behavioral patterns or tendencies, with no right or wrong answers.

Other assessments are diagnostic, designed to point out problems and weaknesses. ?360? assessments fall under the ?diagnostic? label. Emotional Intelligence has been described as a way to measure both strengths and weaknesses.

These tests vary on the fundamental premise on which the tool is built and also what it intends to serve. Some tests provide perspectives which are relevant to an individual as a complete personality, while some tests are very specific to the executive?s Professional life only.

Relevance of Psychometric assessments in Executive coaching?

Psychometric testing is now used by over 80% of the Fortune 500 companies in the USA and by over 75% of the Times Top 100 companies in the UK. Tests are used by many employers across most sectors, including IT, engineering, energy,

banking, consultancy, accountancy, the civil service and other public sector, fast moving consumer goods and retail.

In such scenarios it may be mandated to Executive coaches by the clients to work with these reports to help the individual executive chalk out their path.

Executive coaches may also choose to bring in their own psychometric tests as they find it appropriate to the situation.

Usage of the right psychometric tools would aid the Coach to understand the executive much faster. These tools also help the executive to draw his own linkages and conclusions based on the reports. These would also help the executive gain perspectives of how one aspect of his behavior impacts which aspect of performance.

As per Sherpa Coaching Survey 2012, there has been a trend toward the use of assessments among executive coaches. A couple of years back, 8% of coaches reported they did not use an assessment at all. Last year, that number dropped to 4%. This year, 99% of coaches reported using an assessment.

In this paper, an introduction to Harrison assessments and its application is made.

Introduction to Harrison assessments?

Dr. Dan Harrison founded Harrison assessments in 1990 with a vision to help individuals and companies select and develop top talent. Dan Harrison with his background in Mathematics, Personality theory, Counseling psychology, Human Potential psychology and organizational psychology has been able to weave his diverse knowledge to create a powerful assessment tool.

Being a mathematician himself, Dr. Dan Harrison has been able to create a smart questionnaire which is able to gather information in about 30 minutes, what would have taken a full day of multiple choices testing equal to 2701 multiple choice questions.

Foundations of Harrison assessment methodology?

Some of the key foundations that Harrison assessment is built on are:

Enjoyment ? Performance Theory
Four core principles of Employee Development
Paradox theory

Enjoyment ? Performance theory?

As picture depicts, our performance improves as we do activities which we enjoy doing.

It also means that a right job for us, is one which we enjoy doing. And if we are in jobs or roles which require us to do a lot of tasks which we do not enjoy doing, our performance can dip.

Four Core principles of Employee development?

The 4 core principles of any strong employee development plan of an organization are

? Ensure the right placement.

As development takes a long time, it is prudent to focus on developing people who are in the right jobs. It may not be worthwhile to spend on developing people who are not in the right jobs.

? Consider technical and behavioral competencies

Focus on building both technical as well as behavior competencies as both play their roles in the final performance of an individual.

? Consider all relevant Job suitability factors

This reveals all the behavioral factors that affect job performance, work satisfaction and retention.

? Discover, acknowledge and utilize strengths

This provides encouragement and motivation for individuals to develop.

Paradox Technology?

Harrison Assessments is the only tool which harnesses the power of paradox. Paradox is the result of integrating two seemingly contradictory behaviors that both contribute to an individual?s success. Individuals with balanced paradoxes are more likely to succeed.

This figure, shows the result of integrating two contradictory behaviors of Frank and Diplomatic. This paradox has 4 conditions which are actually new traits.

Good communicator ? as in Balanced Versatility

Poor communicator ? as in Balanced Deficiency

Blunt ? as in Aggressive Imbalance

Evasive ? as in Passive imbalance

Balanced Versatility ? People who are strong in both traits are versatile and can exhibit either behavior as appropriate to the situation. Such people rarely exhibit the other 3 traits even under stress.

Aggressive Imbalance ? People who are strong in the dynamic trait which is represented on the Y-axis tend to exhibit aggressive behavior. Such aggressive?behavior often masks an underlying vulnerability. For example, bluntness is often used as a means of evading or deflecting attention from oneself when one feels vulnerable.

Passive imbalance - People who score low on dynamic trait but high on the trait along X-axis fall under passive imbalance. Such passive behavior could be an area to explore with the individual to identity improvement areas.

Balanced Deficiency ? People who score low on the dynamic trait and the passive traits could be probed to check whether they are in the right jobs which are in line with their life themes. Executive coaches could also probe on how these counter ? productive behaviors are coming in the way of performance

12 Paradox Pairs?

Harrison Paradox assessment includes an analysis of 12 main paradoxes, which are Certain : Open/Reflective

Frank : Diplomatic

Analytical : Intuitive

Risking : Analyses Pitfalls

Self-Acceptance : Self-Improvement

Self-Motivated : Stress Management

Enforcing : Warmth/Empathy

Persistent : Experimenting

Authoritative : Collaborative

Assertive : Helpful

Organized : Flexible

Optimistic : Analyses Pitfalls

These 12 paradoxes result in 12 ideal paradoxical behavioral competencies as follows.

Be confident and clear about ideas while openly considering all issues.
Respect oneself while striving to improve
Be straightforward and direct while being respectful of others.
Express your needs while being helpful and conscious of others needs.
Be highly self-motivated while managing stress and respecting others.
Be persistent in overcoming obstacles and trying new things.
Be logical while at the same time value intuition.
Be organized while at the same time adapt to changes.
Be willing to take risks and carefully analyse the risks for pitfalls
Enforce rules and guide performance while maintaining positive relationships.
Be responsible for decisions while collaborating with others.
Maintain a positive attitude while being mindful of potential problems.

Benefits of using the Harrison Assessments

Some Benefits of using Harrison Assessments for coaches are that ? they can quickly gain rapport and trust, facilitate core values and easily overcome resistance for development.
Additionally, this also helps the executive to understand their unique strengths & identify key areas for development
Paradox Technology? analyzes and determines a broad spectrum of potential counter-productive traits without the person having the slightest idea it is happening. This is vitally important since negative traits usually account for 60-75% of the factors that determine job success
Approaches to using Harrison assessments in Executive Coaching
There are different approaches to use Harrison assessments depending on whether the client organization is using Harrison assessments or not.

Organizations using Harrison assessments

In these organizations, as part of Harrison assessment implementation, the organization would have

Defined Job Success Factors for all key roles.
Employees who take the assessments get a complete set of 9 developmental reports.

Coaches can use

Job Success Analysis report to understand how well the executive is fitting the current job success factors.
Development for Position report to further explore with the Executive the various opportunities to improve and help them implement a feasible action plan.
?How to manage, develop & Retain? report to identify the essential, important and other factors which the executive needs to focus on to improve his performance.
Paradox graph the coach can go an exploratory conversation with the executive to better understand themself.
Traits and Definition report provides the Coach an insight into the primary work preferences and personality factors which the executive has. This report also shows the Life themes, Strengths and Preferred focus and traits which the executive does not prefer to use.

Organizations which do not use Harrison Assessments

In such situations, the Executive coach can use the Paradox graph and Traits and definitions report only to help the executive. It may not be prudent for the Executive Coach to suggest creating Job Success factors for the role which the executive is playing currently and then go about using all the reports which this step can enable.

Challenges in using Harrison Assessment

Some of the potential challenges could be
- Educating the executive about the basic premises of Harrison assessments. If the Executive does not seem to appreciate this tool, then it can lower the trust on the Executive coach.

- Harrison assessments works on the basis of work preferences only and at times an executive?s performance at office can be impacted by factors outside professional lives. Executive coaches have to be aware of this and factor them in their probing agenda.

- Executive coaches have to be certified to assess the executive?s reports and the experience of the executive coaches in using this tool only improves over time. So in the initial few reports assessment, the coaches may miss recognizing certain pertinent information.

- Executive coaches may be unable to get themselves certified due to cost or timing or distance issues. In such cases, executive coaches may have to leverage on other trained interpreters.

Conclusion

Executive coaching in a scenario where many organizations use psychometric assessments, it is advantageous for Executive Coaches to equip themselves with relevant skills to understand and interpret many different kinds of tools. Harrison assessment, being one of the leading workplace Preference inventories addresses the area of Job Success. Executive coaches can build this into their practices and also their Self development plans, depending on the target clients that they work with.

References:

1. Training material from Harrison Assessments International Limited.
2. http://www.psychometric-success.com
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaching#Executive_coaching
4. http://www.sherpacoaching.com/2012-executive-coaching-assessments.html

Source: http://www.icoachacademy.com/blog/coaching-resources/research-papers/satish-chandra-relevance-of-harrison-assessments-in-executive-coaching/

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