This is where knowing your and your team’s Spotlight profile can help. In addition to using a coaching leadership style, you can also adapt it to each person in your team. In this article, we will give you some pointers about how to adapt your coaching leadership style to each profile to make sure your team thrives. 

What’s a coaching leadership style? 

First, let’s talk about what a coaching leadership style is and how it can benefit both your team and business. 

Coaching leadership is a style of leadership that is characterised by collaboration, support and guidance. It involves and facilitates people’s engagement by drawing out, understanding, and empathising with their specific and individual motivations.

Coaching leadership aims to bring the best out in teams by guiding them through their goals and challenges. The ultimate purpose of this leadership style is to develop people and create a continuous learning environment.

You can read more about the coaching leadership style here. 

Learn a bit more about Spotlight Profiles 

Spotlight and other diagnostic tools are not new. They are widely used in organisations, and when used effectively, they can be incredibly beneficial for everyone in the team. 

A Diagnostic Profiling tool helps you identify your personal preferences (how you behave, how you prefer to communicate, etc) and it can deepen your understanding of yourself and your team. Even more, you can use this knowledge to get the best out of each person on your team. 

Read more about Spotlight and how it can help you and your team here:

• Styles of communication in the workplace. 
• Enhance team performance using personality profiles. 

How can you adapt your coaching leadership style to each profile?

Let’s start by reaffirming that every person is uniquely different, even if they have similar profiles. Each of us is a complex individual and this is not about putting people in ‘boxes’, but rather about better understanding each other and how we can work more effectively together.

Red/Forceful Profiles

Tend to be goal-oriented, direct and to the point, determined, unfiltered and assertive. 

People with this personality preference tend to focus on action, they want to get things done and like to communicate directly. 

As a leader, you can adapt your coaching leadership style by:

• Being direct and to the point in your communication. Make sure conversations are fast-paced and practical in nature. 
• Giving consistent feedback and supporting them to move forward. 
• Helping them to consider more options before deciding what action to take. 
• Helping them to consider that not everyone moves at the same pace as them. 

Yellow/Expressive Profiles

Tend to be people-oriented, enthusiastic, expressive, persuasive, and sociable individuals. 

People with this personality profile tend to be big-picture thinkers, they prefer to talk about the why rather than the how and can struggle with details. 

As a leader, you can adapt your coaching leadership style by:

• Supporting them in creating a stimulating and dynamic environment. 
• Asking about their thoughts and feelings on the topic. 
• Helping them frame their big ideas towards practical action.
• Staying authentic and open-minded in your interactions with them, allowing them to voice their true concerns. 

Green/Empathic Profiles

Tend to be amiable, encouraging, and relaxed. They also like collaboration. 

People with this personality profile tend to be team players, they like for everyone to be heard before making a decision and they can struggle with change for change’s sake. 

As a leader, you can adapt your coaching leadership style by:

• Demonstrating sincere interest in them as a person. 
• Helping them focus on the impact of their actions on their future goals and other people. 
• Ensuring they feel supported when tackling a challenge. 
• Giving them time to think through important decisions. 

Blue/Logical profiles

Tend to be detail-oriented, analytical, cautious, and deliberate. 

People with this personality profile tend to be analytical, they like details and they want to make sure that things are done correctly even if it takes longer. 

As a leader, you can adapt your coaching leadership style by:

• Giving them enough time and space to process information and articulate their thoughts. You may want to give them directions or information ahead of a meeting. 
• Helping them look at the big picture. 
• Being ready to provide data and details when talking to them. When giving feedback, make sure you have enough data to corroborate your feedback. 
• Supporting and encouraging them to stand their ground on important matters. Don’t disregard their attention to detail, or their risk and rules assessments. 

The Optimist View

As mentioned above, there are so many nuances to each individual. There is no black and white when it comes to people. However, the tips and pointers in this article aim to support you in making the best out of each interaction with every person on your team. 

If you’re ready to learn more about Spotlight and about yourself and your team, get in touch with us and find out how diagnostic profiling can help you become the best leader you can be. 

The post How to adapt your coaching leadership style with Spotlight profiles – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

Team as a Collection of Strengths

In the corporate world, a team functions much like the England Rugby Team. It is a collection of individuals, each with distinct strengths and capabilities. When these strengths are recognised and effectively harnessed, they propel the team—and, by extension, the business—towards achieving remarkable goals.

Benefits of Playing to Your Strengths

Increase engagement and productivity and reduce turnover

According to a Gallup analysis people who use their strengths every day are three times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life, six times more likely to be engaged at work, 8% more productive, and 15% less likely to quit their jobs.

Increase individual overall well-being

According to studies; by using our strengths, we can feel an increase in happiness, improve our relationships, build resilience, strengthen our ability to overcome problems (Hammond, 2010), and enhance our overall well-being (Linley et al., 2010)

“In an intervention promoting people’s top five character strengths at work, employees reported increased life satisfaction and psychological well-being.”

(Forest et al., 2012).

Enhance performance

Team members who not only feel better about themselves and the contribution they’re making but who also feel engaged will perform better, which undoubtedly will enhance their performance and therefore the performance of the team and business. 

How to tap into strengths??

Identifying individual strengths begins with a thorough assessment process. Tools like personality profiles, strength-finding surveys, one-on-one coaching sessions, and peer feedback can help uncover the unique capabilities of each team member. 

Once everyone in the team has identified their strengths, we need to bring these strengths together. First, we need to gain awareness about our own and others’ strengths and then work on how everyone can use those strengths to enhance collaboration and performance. 

Another way we can use our strengths is to understand possible conflicts and gaps. Knowing our own and others’ preferences and strengths can help us foresee possible conflicts but also be more empathetic in managing them. Additionally, we can identify gaps. Games like The Empty Chair help us reflect on the possible gaps we may have as a team and create better strategies. 

Read more about using this knowledge to increase team performance here. 

The Optimist View…

By embracing the concept of “Play to Your Potential,” companies can unlock the full potential of their teams, helping to drive performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction. 

Just as the England Rugby Team thrives on utilising the unique strengths of each player, your business can achieve remarkable success by recognising and harnessing the individual strengths within your team.

At Optimist Performance, we believe in playing to our potential, which is why we use diagnostic tools and expert coaches to work with individuals and teams to delve more deeply into strengths and preferences, avoiding a “sheep dip” approach. 

Are you ready to unleash your team’s potential? Get in touch with us and learn more about how we work with individuals and teams to do just that. 

The post Play to Your Potential – What Does It Mean for Your Business? – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

This is where Spotlight and other personality profiles can help. Personality profiles help to raise our own and others’ awareness about our preferences, our strengths, our view of the world, styles of communication and more. This awareness will, in turn, enhance our team performance.

Understanding Spotlight Diagnostics and Personality Profiles

Spotlight will give us a much better understanding about our mindsets and behavioural styles. It will bring awareness about our drivers, strengths, stressors, coping mechanisms, how we deal with challenges, and much more.

There are 4 main styles, and we all have a combination of all of them. The difference is that for each person, the intensity of each style will change. 

While identifying our preferences can be incredibly helpful, it can also lead us to limit individuals to simplistic categories, which is the complete opposite of what personality profiles should be about. 

So, it’s important to remember that every person is different and that while we may share some personality aspects, there are many individual nuances to each one of us. There is no right or wrong, no one aspect is “better” than another…it’s all about how we utilise different elements across different situations. In simple terms, when we need to dial up or down our natural preferences for the good of the team. 

How can we enhance Team Performance using Personality profiles?

Now that we have clarity on what personality profiles are and that they are not about putting people in boxes, let’s focus on how they can help enhance our team performance. 

Sometimes, it’s easier to fall into the trap of believing that everyone ‘thinks, feels and does’ the same way we do. This in turn can lead us to see people’s behaviours and comments as an attack on ourselves when, in reality, it just means that they are different. 

The way personality profiles help is by raising awareness about ourselves and the rest of our team. This, in turn, can help us:

Improve our communication

Knowing how each person prefers to communicate can help us adapt our communication style to the person that we’re talking to. This can help us with feedback, challenging conversations, and overall communication with others.

For example, if you know someone has a direct style of communication, you can lead the conversation with facts and clear points, rather than use a ‘story-telling’ approach. 

You can also read more about styles of communication here. 

Enhancing collaboration

Understanding how people like to collaborate and what their preferred behaviours are can help us align roles and responsibilities, assign projects, and create ways to collaborate that best suit the people in the team. 

For example, if you have people who are highly creative and need time to explore different ideas, maybe you can organise creative meetings, and let people know in advance what the meeting is about, so those who need time to plan and reflect as opposed to ideate ‘in the moment’ can fully engage in the conversation too.

Avoid conflict

As we mentioned above, it can be easy to misinterpret other people’s behaviours and comments. However, understanding people’s preferences can help us see their behaviours as just different from ours, rather than a criticism. 

For example, on a team, you may have some people who prefer details and others who are more of a big picture. By understanding these dynamics, the team can address potential friction points proactively and find common ground. 

Increase empathy within the team

When team members learn about each other’s personality profiles, they gain insights into their colleagues’ behaviours and reactions. This deeper understanding can cultivate empathy, patience, and a more supportive team culture where people are more likely to accommodate each other’s working styles. 

Enhance job satisfaction

When people feel understood, they are utilising their strengths at work and they feel more connected to the team, they will have higher job satisfaction. This will, in turn, impact their individual performance and, ultimately, enhance our team performance too. 

The Optimist View…

A great leader is one who is self-aware, who knows themselves and the people in their team too. 

In the fast-paced environment we work in, dedicating time to understanding ourselves and others better can be seen as something not critical for our overall success. 

However, a team is a group of people working together, which means that if we want to enhance team performance, we need to get the best out of each person in the team, and the only way to do this long-term is by focusing on the person behind the job rather than on the job itself. 

This is why at Optimist Performance, we focus on people and people’s behaviours to increase their performance. 

If you want to know more about how we can help you and your team, get in touch with us today for a free consultation. 

Check out what our Eternal Optimists say about Spotlight here. 

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