• This Month's F.ree IDM Teleforum :: HOW IS IDM EDUCATION DIFFERENT FROM CONVENTIONAL COACH TRAINING, AND HOW IS IT INTEGRATED WITH HR AND OD CONSULTATION?

• Free Virtual Sessions for ICF Conference Attendees and other Interested Coaches :: Three Remaining Opportunities to Preview and Prepare for the IDM Seminar at the Upcoming ICF Conference in San Jose, CA on November 12, 2005.  

• NEW Stand-Alone Courses for Multilingual European Participants:: German-English Stand-Alone Course for European OD & HR practitioners and coaches, with an introductory Teleforum on October 3, 05, 18-19 CET   

• Featured Article :: There are Assessments, and Then There are Assessments by Dr. Otto Laske, PhD, CEO and Director of Education, Interdevelopmental Institute

• IDM October Courses :: Many coaches have found that their view of the profession has changed forever on account of IDM courses they have taken; Discover the difference for yourself!

• IDM Announces New Director of Administrative and Technical Services :: Greg Welstead

 

IDM is broadening its monthly free Teleforums to include multilingual European HR and OD professionals as well as coaches. We provide answers to your questions in English and German as desired.

The monthly English Teleforum will be presented by Ambassadors Antoinette Dawson and Nancy Moynihan, while Jon Ebersole will present the German Teleforum.

The next German Teleforum will be held on October 3, 2005, 18 CET (12 n ET).

Starting this Fall, our overall emphasis is shifting from an exclusive focus on coaching to the broader issues of HR and OD. Our methodology fully equips us to provide assistance on Human Resources Management and Organizational Development. We include coaching as a natural part of these broader disciplines, rather than a stand-alone specialty.

Our certificate and non-certificate courses are henceforth based on Otto Laske’s forthcoming book MASTERING HIDDEN DIMENSIONS: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF FULLY ENGAGING OTHERS, issued by the IDM Press. The book will appear in the form of a series of e-books in November 2005. It will be reviewed in the October issue of the newsletter by Chris Wahl, Georgetown University.

E-book orders will be accepted beginning October 15, 2005, at ebooks@interdevelopmentals.org

IDM's Monthly Teleforum is held every first Monday of the Month, 12 noon to 1PM ET (& correspondingly 18 CET)

REGISTER HERE for this upcoming Teleforum!

F_.ree Virtual Sessions for ICF Conference Attendees and other Interested Coaches :: Three Remaining Opportunities to Preview and Prepare for the IDM Seminar at the Upcoming ICF Conference in San Jose, CA on November 12, 2005.

In San Jose, IDM will present a two-hour seminar entitled “There is more to what your client tells you than you think: How deeper answers to client questions surface.”

Conference attendees as well as other interested coaches are invited to a preview of the seminar. We are presenting three more preview sessions spaced two weeks apart, to introduce the central ideas on which the seminar is based, and answer questions regarding the topic of the hidden dimensions of coaching.

You are invited to benefit from these sessions for your own practice!

Schedule of Sessions:

• Sept 26, 05 @ 12 noon ET/9 am PT

• Oct 17, 05 @ 9 pm ET/6 pm PT

• Oct 31, 05 9 @ 12 noon ET/9 am ET

These sessions will be held by Antoinette Dawson and Nancy Moynihan and will be primarily interactive, discussion based events.

Register Here for one of these f_.ree sessions.

NEW Stand-Alone Courses for Multilingual European Participants :: Starting in October of 2005

In October 2005, IDM is starting a series of courses and workshops explicitly geared to multilingual European participants (German and English). The courses will be held in the language of the majority of participants, with the option to switch to the other language if desired. All courses are non-certificate, stand-alone courses without any precondition of prior courses taken. North-American offerings are equally open to European participants as far as they conveniently fall within the European time zone.

Class size is limited to 10 participants. All participants receive an IDM Acknowledgement of Achievement at the end of the course or workshop.

Feature Article :: There are Assessments and then there are Assessments!

by Dr. Otto Laske, PhD, CEO and Director of Education, IDM

As a result of interest in research- or evidence-based coaching, many coaches and consultants have renewed their interest in what is called “assessment.” This is a very broad term that can be highly misleading. At IDM, where all teaching, coaching, and mentoring is assessment based, we care about practitioners having a more solid understanding of what ‘assessments’ are and can be. This short article is meant to contribute to such understanding.

It seems to us that the following questions are foremost on readers’ mind:

1. What kinds of assessments are there?

2. How do IDM assessments differ from other, well known assessments?

3. What does a particular assessment look like, exactly?

4. Which assessments are learnt most easily, and with greatest effect (also on my practice)?

5. Is it worth learning complex assessments, either in terms of my professionalism or the benefit of my clients?

1. Kinds of Assessments

All assessments here in question are tools for getting to know clients better. That is their ultimate raison d’etre. One way to slice the universe of assessments is to distinguish three dichotomies::

• Quantitative vs. qualitative assessments

• Questionnaire and survey based vs. interview based assessments

• Horizontal vs. vertical (developmental) assessments.

These three – or rather six -- distinctions are actually largely synonymous. The warning to issue, though, is that some assessments are both quantitative and qualitative, as are most IDM assessments.

Quantitative assessments are called quantitative because their results are numerical, and the resulting numbers need to be interpreted. Another meaning of the term is that the results hold true for larger groups, not just individuals, so that statistics can be done on them. The DISC, 360-Feedback assessments are a case in point. Opinion surveys (e.g., by assessment generators) are another. At IDM, we consider such assessments ‘horizontal’ or ‘behavioral.’ This essentially means that they are one-time snapshots directed toward the past and present, and in no way predictive. They are also non-developmental, since they don’t take the across-time development of individuals into account.

Qualitative assessments can be based on questionnaires or interviews. They are called qualitative since their results group people into different kinds of types, categories, or other behavioral sets. Qualities revealed differ widely. They can also be developmental stages, types of cognitive reach, life-work balance, and so forth. There is a major distinction between those qualitative assessments that are questionnaire based, where canned questions are used, and those based on interviews which are customized to the particular client. Interviews can be either totally unstructured (without predefined questions or prompts) or semi-structured, so that certain questions or prompts reoccur regardless of who administers the interview. (This is the case in Kegan’s subject-object interview.)

Here again, most qualitative assessments are non-developmental, that is, horizontal and behavioral. HORIZONTAL means (Wilber 2000) that findings deriving from a horizontal assessment can be interpreted at many different developmental levels.. For instance, you can be ‘Enneagram type 5’ at many different developmental levels, and then that means very different things at each level.

2. How IDM Assessments Differ

In its instruction, coaching, mentoring, and consulting, IDM is assessment based throughout. Its courses are courses about assessments meant to demystify adult development. Our courses teach how to make assessments, and how to use their findings in practice. This is a novelty: IDM is presently the only post-graduate coach education program entirely based on assessments. Below, the first two of these assessments are developmental, the last one is behavioral:

• Assessment of social-emotional development (ED): taught in the Workshop, Gateway, and Module A of Program One

• Assessment of cognitive development (CD): taught in Module B of Program One

• Assessment of individuals’ Need-Press profile (NP): taught in Module C of Program One.

Most importantly, these three assessments are not kept separate in our teaching. In fact, Module D of Program One brings them all together for the sake of a case study students write to get certified as developmental coaches. Why is this important?

The real power of horizontal and vertical (developmental) assessments only becomes clear when their results are joined, to render a complete profile of the client (or the coach, for that matter). What matters here is the holistic nature of the profile, the fact that we can EXPLAIN behavior rather than only DESCRIBE it, as in horizontal or behavioral assessments. For example, if a client has a ‘time management problem,’ that’s a description of a behavioral issue, nothing else. (It often figures as a presentation problem clients bring to coaching.) To explain WHY the client may have this problem requires a VERTICAL, developmental assessment. This is so since a ‘time management problem’ differs from one developmental stage to another, and coaching focused on it therefore has to differ with developmental level.

3. What a Particular Assessment Looks Like

Here, let’s restrict ourselves to one, the vertical (developmental) subject-object relations assessment originated by R. Kegan’s work, and used in Gateway and Program One Part A. This interview based assessment – described at length in Otto Laske’s forthcoming book Mastering Hidden Dimensions – requires learning a novel interview technique where the CONTENT of the interview is conceptually separated out from the interview’s STAGE STRUCTURE. The interview is therefore not read for content, but for finding out the client’s developmental level or stage (which counts as structure). This is revolutionary since any content can be spoken from any stage (structure), and content, vertically considered, is thus not relevant per se. You can tell me about your grandmother or your boss or spouse, -- as a schooled developmental coach I will get to know your developmental level either way.

Clearly, this one-hour semi-structured interview requires high discipline, and a complete mastery of the theory of adult development in terms of developmental levels. In addition to the conceptual knowledge you need, you need to follow an interview style that is restricted to focusing clients’ attention, without any interpretation, why questions, commenting, enacting of novel behaviors, and so forth. It is an art and a science learned in IDM’s Workshop, Gateway, and Module A.

4. Which Assessments are Learned Most Easily?

This has to do with what in software engineering is called GARBAGE IN/GARBAGE OUT. You get results commensurate with the effort you expend to get them. A simple assessment gives simple, superficial results. A deep assessment takes time to learn, and gives profound results. It’s as simple as that.

So, if you want to go for simple assessments, where you just push a button, do so, but don’t expect results that are truly significant for helping your client!

Not only do simple assessments have superficial results. THEY ALSO DON’T CHANGE YOU, THE USER! Such assessments remain outside of you, as it were. They do not touch you. This is so since you haven’t used YOURSELF as the instrument of your research, as you do in developmental interviews. As you will hear from many students at IDM, they report that they have personally changed and made developmental shifts simply by learning how to carry out developmental interviews!

5. Is it Worth Learning Deep Assessments?

Answering this question is your call! Your answer will depend on your intellectual disposition, your developmental level (coaching level), your experience, your desire to make developmental shifts, and other factors.

Regarding your clients the answer is equally complex. Some of your clients won’t care about their developmental level because they don’t realize that all they think, feel, and do, their goals, etc. is predictable based on their developmental level. If you don’t enlighten them about that, and thus understand them developmentally, that’s your choice. In this case, you might not be able to be of the greatest benefit to them, because neither you nor they can are developmentally informed or make actual developmental shifts. And since such shifts underlie all other behavioral changes – in fact, are required for the changes to be lasting ones -- you might want to think twice about developmental (vertical) assessments, and about learning them. As I have said, you have to start with yourself in this, because you are going to be the instrument of your research, and there is no other! You are yourself a unique instrument.

We hope this short article has given you a new perspective on yourself as a user of assessments, and on IDM courses, mentoring, and consulting!

Learn more about the Interdevelopmental Institute courses and programs by viewing the table below and by visiting the IDM website.

IDM October Courses :: Discover the Difference for Yourself!