Executive Coaching - A Guide For The HR Professional.pdf

What Are the Steps in the Coaching Process? 49
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organization. Consulting firms and publishing companies offer
dozens of forms for specific applications—supervision, sales management,
leadership, and so on. If properly chosen or developed, a
360-degree feedback rating form will address important, relevant
dimensions and will be a good foundation for coaching.
Multi-rater feedback can be used to support coaching, either to
help a client develop his or her potential or to address a performance
concern. Such data can be useful for identifying developmental
needs of future leaders. It is helpful for communicating
behaviors consistent with new organizational values or principles
or to provide senior leaders with valid data so they can make finetuned
adjustments to their leadership styles. Typically, results are
shared only with a client, who now “owns” the data.
The 360-degree feedback methodology is used because it provides
the coach and the client with a language and a set of concepts
with which to conduct their sessions. Multi-rater feedback can be
used together with personality tests, appraisals, or other data sources.
Depending on the style and model used by the coach, multi-rater
feedback can be used as a source of information to validate concerns
the client has, to better define issues that are not well understood,
or to explore for possible “soft spots” that might cause trouble in the
future.
In some situations, there may already be existing multi-rater
feedback, and the client can allow the coach to gain access to it.
The data may have been part of a leadership development program,
or it may have been generated for administrative purposes. If it is
recent and appropriate, the data will serve its intended purposes as
an impetus for self-reflection and action planning.
In many organizations 360-degree data collection is regularly
used for “administrative” purposes, such as performance evaluation
or making decisions about promotions, compensation, or perhaps
even retention. One component of this application will be a formal
feedback session in which someone goes over the data with
the employee and may use it to begin a coaching process. In this
situation, the person doing the feedback—usually the boss or an