When coaching someone how can you assess their personality?

Before answering this question we need to consider some other factors, for example, is personality an important factor, why would we need to know bout it, how can it be measured, what can it add to the coaching sessions?

1. Yes personality is often an important factor in coaching a person because it has an influence on a number of key aspects of a person such as their motives, their styles, their ways of responding, their ways of learning and most crucially their behaviors. It is also helpful to me as a coach to have some insight into a coachee's personality to help me to understand more about them as a whole person and to adjust my questions, style and challenge to them in a way that I judge to be most effective. It is also useful to set their personality alongside mine and to think about how my styles, personality and learned behaviors may need to be assessed and modified in order to bring out the best in both me and in the person that I am coaching.

2. Why do we need to know about it? Well there is no absolute rule in coaching that states that a coach must know and understand a personality in detail before they can start to coach them. But in my experience it is an important factor to understand about a person and therefore in most coaching situations I will make this assessment either intuitively or in a more scientific way.

3. How can personality be measured?
We can and do make assessments and judgments about a person intuitively, whether we like it or not. We infer things about them from what they say about themselves, from their language and use of it and from their body language and cues that we pick up using our senses.
We also get information about them from their goals and objectives for this coaching that they explain to us, compared to those set out by their sponsor and from the issues, barriers and potential actions and approaches that they explain to us.
We can also measure a personality more scientifically using one or more of the psychometric tests that are available on the market for BPS (British Psychological Society) Approved testers. The sorts of personality profiles that I sometimes use when coaching people are the following, depending upon the objectives and needs of the individual coachee:-
16pf, Myers Briggs, Team Management Systems Roles, Belbin Team roles, Schein's Career Anchors. I would only use any one or two of these profiles with the open agreement of the coachee and I would give, explain the reasons for its use and go through the details of this profile and its mechanics, advantages and limitations to the coachee.

4. So in summary the understanding of a coachee's personality has a number of benefit's for both the coach and coachee's point of view and very few disadvantages - providing that the coachee readily give their agreement to it, that it has a purpose linked to the coachee's goal and objectives and that appropriate confidentiality and professionalism is adopted with respect to the use of any psychometric profiles involved.