Topic 5d: Tools & Diagnostics

Welcome to this topic, where we will explore diagnostic tools to help our mentees learn more about themselves, their strengths, beliefs, values, development areas and much more, it may be appropriate to use a diagnostic tool.

Tools & Diagnostics

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Identifying preferences, uncovering insights, setting goalsTo help our mentees learn more about themselves, their strengths, beliefs, values, development areas and much more, it may be appropriate to use a diagnostic tool. These tools can help a mentee to structure their reflections and focus on aspects of themselves or their situation that they may not explore through mentoring questions alone.

Using diagnostics

Examples of diagnostics could be a learning styles questionnaire, a personality profiling tool (e.g. MBTI, Insights, DiSC), reflective activities such as Wheel of Life or a Values assessment. All of these will provide information that the mentee can use to increase their clarity and shift their perspective, all of which is helpful in making progress towards their goal. It is good practice for the mentor to complete any diagnostic tools themselves, before asking their mentee to complete them (this means you have a clear idea of how they work, and what to expect from the results). These tools are intended to generate insight, ideas and discussion. The results of the assessment or diagnostic can be explored during the next mentoring session, giving the mentee control over the meaning they take from the results:

Using diagnostics

Example questions

There are three main caveats for using diagnostics with a mentee:

Using diagnostics

1. Be an expert in the process, not on the result

2. Don’t pigeon-hole the mentee

3. Encourage the mentee to consider other options

It’s good practice for a mentor to complete a tool for themselves, before asking the mentee to do it. This is also a useful way for you to continue to build your own self-awareness, learning about your own preferences, strengths and values, and how these affect your approach to mentoring.

Activity: Using diagnostics

The following are links to diagnostic tools you may find helpful in your mentoring practice. Have a go at a few of these, and reflect on the results that come back. What have you learned about yourself? How would you introduce these tools into a mentoring session?

16 Personalities: Personality Profiling Tool

The Wheel of Life

Drivers Questionnaire

Learning Styles Questionnaire

VARK Questionnaire

• Clutterbuck, D (2004) Everyone Needs A Mentor. CIPD. London.
• Hill, P (2004) Concepts of Mentoring – A Guide for Managers. Chandos Publishing, Oxford.
• Starr J. (2016) The Mentoring Manual 4th Ed. Pearson. Harlow.
• Whitmore, J. (2017) Mentoring for Performance 5th Ed. Brealey Publishing. London.

References

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Example questions

• How accurate do you think the findings are?
• What interests you about your result?
• When are you more or less like that?
• What causes you to change?
• What are the implications for your role or what you’re trying to achieve? What are your real strengths?
• When do they help you and when do they trip you up?
• Which aspect of the results would you most like to be different?
• When have you shown the qualities you’d like more of?

Be an expert in the process, not on the result Your coachee will often want you to tell him/her the implications of their results/ report. What does it mean? What should they do as a result? Your role is to facilitate the reflection and awareness of the coachee, not to wear the expert hat and tell them what they should do. Encourage your coachee to reflect on which aspects of their results help them in their role and which aspects get in the way.

Don’t pigeon-hole the coachee Some assessments, such as the Myers-Briggs personality test, tend to put you in a box. People often like these tests because they’re straightforward but there’s a danger that a coachee may just take the test result at face value, without reflecting on its implications. Everyone has preferred personality traits, but these can shift at different times. Your natural preference may be to stay low profile but in certain situations, with certain people, you may be much more gregarious. The decision for a coachee is what ‘profile’ would be most helpful in their next interaction? How do they achieve that in a way that remains true to them?

Encourage the coachee to consider other options It is unlikely that a coachee will be able to change their personality. For example, if someone lacks empathy, it might be difficult for them to become empathic. But if the coachee knows that he/she is not empathic, at least they can start to think about what they can do to get a better sense of what’s going on for other people. They might enlist the help of someone in the team who is very empathic. That person caN act as a guide for them on what the team is thinking. Or it could involve just asking a few more questions around the team.