Should I share personality profile data?-The Experts Weigh In
We recently published an issue called “Sticky Situation – Should I share personality profile data?” written by Victoria Trabosh, CDC, CEC; Suzi Pomerantz, MT, MCC; .and Craig Carr, BCC, PCC, CPCC.
The Situation: I’ve been doing team coaching with a group of leaders and the organization would like to roll this program out more broadly but wants to also share the personality profile data with the entire organization. How would you approach this?
Here’s what one of our experts, Suzi Pomerantz had to say…
You said you were “doing team coaching with a group.” Not all groups are actually teams. Team coaching works with an intact team with a shared purpose. Group coaching works with any other grouping of people and requires a different approach. Do they actually want to make group coaching available across the organization rather than team coaching? Teams cut vertically as well as horizontally, and have distinct and different purposes.
What would be the purpose for rolling out an enterprise-wide team coaching program? What outcomes do they expect? What are they hoping it will do for their teams? To evaluate these questions, use the Team Diagnostic Survey, the Harvard-created diagnostic tool that is an MRI for teams.
It provides data on the six conditions that influence high-performing team effectiveness and analyzes whether they are really a team and whether they have a sound structure, supportive context and compelling purpose. How do they measure up in the areas of effort, strategy, knowledge and skill? How effective are they and where are the gaps for improvement? This data would be worth sharing organization-wide to determine which teams actually need team coaching and why.
Now, for your question of personality data sharing – there’s a bit to unpack: Does the organization have the right to share the data from one team (or all teams involved in team coaching) with the whole organization? This could be a moral/ethical/values issue. Do they value the confidentiality and personal privacy of the employees? The trouble with sharing personality profile data across the organization (even if you had permission from every employee to share their data), is that you still have the “so what, now what?” phenomenon of personality profiles.
It makes sense to share this data within an intact team whose members need to work closely together daily, but why more broadly? What good will it do if, for example, the head of marketing knows the data of the head of janitorial services, and vice versa? What does that do for the organization? How does it advance stated goals and objectives?
Dig into why they want to expand the team coaching program and for what purpose. Then co-create with your clients the solution that will best serve what they actually intend.
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