Simon P Walker

Overview:

The Coaching Signature Profile provides an evaluative and self-reflective psychological profile, which enables coaches to recognise and understand their most developed and natural coaching style. It is a subset of the Personal Ecology Profile (PEP) and is a metaphor rich, projective profiling tool and technique, which creates self-awareness through reflective and reflexive practice. It is based on the idea that a person’s life can be viewed as an ecological system; the interaction between a person and their environment and the people they engage with within that environment. The image of a personal landscape captures this notion of personal space in a tangible, visual way. The Coaching Signatures Profile provides an organisation’s leadership and management with an ongoing framework and shared language for the supervision, development and evaluation of coaches.

The web-based Coaching Signatures Profile generates eight different coaching styles and measures the emergent relational space between the coach and coachee demonstrating how the coach changes and responds with different coachees and in different contexts thus raising awareness and giving rich, vital data for supervision. The model provides a framework for coaching supervision to develop and extend the supervisee’s repertoire of coaching styles, thus increasing their coaching effectiveness and ability in whatever context they work.

The Process:

Drawing on the ecological metaphor, participants are invited to create their own imaginary, visual landscape, in response to a series of cues. Upon completion of this on line process (approximately half an hour), the data is analysed and a report is generated which identifies the coach’s unique coaching signature and which signature style they are using with particular coachees. Coaching Signatures Profile data can continue to be plotted over time and builds into a confidential reflective log providing focus for supervision issues such as:

• Which coaching styles and strategies are currently being used
• Which styles and strategies need to be developed
• Which styles and strategies more accurately meet the needs of the coachee
• Which styles and coaching contexts are not appropriate to the coach/coachee
• Difficulties or ‘blocks’ in the coaching relationship

The Benefits:

The Coaching Signatures Profile helps in the coaching supervision process by enabling coaches to understand how they can become more mobile and flexible in their coaching behaviours through learning to ‘roam’ around the different coaching styles and to appreciate how their current coaching strategies are impacting on their coachees. The coach thus becomes more aware and empowered to make choices and behave in a way that will improve their standard of practice, coaching ability and performance through:

• Identification, awareness and analysis of their unique coaching signature
• Provision of a framework to develop, monitor and evaluate coaching practice
• Creation of strategies for developing alternative and appropriate coaching interventions
• Matching coaching practice appropriately
• Providing a more developed, versatile, confident and reflective coach