Why Great Coaching Needs More Than Conversation: The Role of Assessment in Leadership Development

Great coaching starts with conversation. A well-timed question or a different way of looking at a difficult situation can help a leader see something they haven’t seen before. I’ve built my coaching practice around those kinds of conversations.

But there’s a limitation we don’t talk about enough: the coaching conversation begins with what the leader—and the coach—can already see.

Leaders typically come to coaching with a good deal of information. They know the challenges they’re facing, the relationships that are difficult, the goals they want to achieve, and often some of the behaviors they want to change. What they don’t necessarily know is how consistently those behaviors show up, whether other people experience them the same way, or what may be motivating some of their choices and reactions.

That’s where I find assessment particularly useful. The question isn’t conversation OR assessment. It’s what becomes possible when we bring conversation and assessment together.

The limitation of coaching only what comes into the room

Coaching often begins with some version of, “What would you like to work on?” It’s a good question, and one I use regularly. But it depends on the leader knowing where the most useful work lies.

In practice, that isn’t always the case. A client may come in wanting to work on executive presence, for example, when the more interesting issue turns out to be how they involve others in decisions. Another may describe a conflict with a colleague as a communication problem, while the assessment data gives us reason to explore something quite different.

The very nature of a blind spot is that we don’t know it’s there.

I’ve worked with leaders who were quite clear about what they thought we needed to work on. Then we looked at the assessment results and found something that neither of us would necessarily have identified through conversation alone. The original issue didn’t disappear. We simply understood it differently.

That distinction matters. Conversation can take leaders deeper into what they already know. Assessment can reveal something they didn’t know to bring into the conversation in the first place.

Better material to be curious about

This is one of the reasons I use assessments in my coaching at MRG. I’m not looking for a report to tell my client who they are, and I’m certainly not looking for a score to tell us what needs to be “fixed.”

What I want is better material to be curious about.

Instead of asking only, “What do you think is happening?”, we can look at a pattern in the data and ask, “What do you make of this?” Sometimes the client immediately recognizes it. Sometimes they disagree with it. Sometimes there’s a long pause followed by, “I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

All three responses give us somewhere useful to go.

Two MRG assessments are particularly helpful because they give us different information: the Leadership Effectiveness Analysis (LEA) helps us examine leadership behavior, while the Individual Directions Inventory (IDI) helps us explore motivational drivers.

LEA: How does your leadership actually show up?

Leadership isn’t simply what we intend to do. It’s what other people experience us doing.

The LEA examines 22 specific leadership practices. Importantly, these are behaviors rather than personality traits. In the LEA 360, we can compare a leader’s self-perception with feedback from bosses, peers, and direct reports.

That comparison is often where the interesting coaching work begins.

A leader might see themselves as highly collaborative, for example. Rather than deciding whether that perception is right or wrong, we can look at how different groups experience the leader. Perhaps direct reports see a great deal of involvement while peers experience something different. That immediately gives us better questions: What changes across those relationships? What are you doing differently? What does collaboration look like to you? And is the way you’re using it helping you accomplish what you need to accomplish?

One of the things I value most about the LEA is that a high score is not automatically considered good, and a low score is not automatically bad. In fact, that is explicitly part of the way we interpret the instrument. A strongly used leadership practice can be an asset in one situation and create problems in another.

Empathy is an easy example. High Empathy can reflect sensitivity and concern for others, but when strongly emphasized it may also be experienced as difficulty confronting challenging interpersonal issues. The useful coaching question, therefore, isn’t “How do we raise or lower this score?” It’s “When is this behavior effective for you, and when might you need another choice?”

That is much closer to what leadership development looks like in the real world.

IDI: What might be driving the behavior?

Behavior is only part of the picture. Once we understand what a leader tends to do, another question becomes possible: What might be driving it?

The Individual Directions Inventory explores motivations and preferences—what people find satisfying, what attracts or interests them, and the kinds of roles, environments, and approaches they may naturally gravitate toward.

This distinction is important because motivation is not the same thing as behavior. The IDI doesn’t tell us what someone will do, and I wouldn’t use an IDI score to explain away a behavior. Instead, it gives us a hypothesis we can explore with the client.

This can be especially useful when a leader says some version of, “I know I do this. I just don’t understand why I keep doing it.”

A client may notice that certain assignments energize them while others feel disproportionately draining. They may repeatedly step into situations other people avoid, become frustrated when a particular need isn’t being met, or make career choices that look puzzling until we understand what they find intrinsically satisfying.

Those are much richer conversations than simply labeling the pattern a strength, weakness, or personality characteristic.

Behavior tells us what. Motivation helps us explore why.

And when I have both kinds of information, I can ask better questions.

What the assessment cannot do

This is an important part of the conversation because an assessment report, by itself, does not develop a leader.

A leader can read a report, recognize themselves in every page, and change absolutely nothing. Awareness is useful, but awareness and behavior change are not the same thing.

The work comes afterward: Where does this pattern show up? When is it useful? When does it get in your way? What happens under pressure? Do certain people or situations bring out a different response? What might be motivating that response? And, most importantly, what would you like to do differently?

With the LEA, we are working with behaviors, which means the leader can experiment. A client can choose a specific situation, try a different leadership practice, observe what happens, and bring that experience back into coaching. The assessment gives us a starting point; the leader’s actual experience tells us what to do with it.

That’s a much more useful role for assessment than treating the report as an answer key.

Assessment doesn’t replace the coach

I understand why some coaches are cautious about assessments. None of us wants a report reducing a complex human being to a collection of scores.

That’s not how I use them.

An assessment result is data, not a conclusion. A discrepancy is something to investigate, not something to correct. A motivational pattern is a hypothesis, not an explanation for everything a person does.

The coach still has to listen, challenge, notice contradictions, understand context, and help the client decide what matters. In fact, assessment data often requires more skill from the coach because the temptation to interpret too quickly can be strong.

The value isn’t assessment instead of coaching. It’s assessment-enabled coaching.

Great coaching needs richer conversation.

Some of the most useful moments I’ve had with clients have come when we’ve put a piece of assessment data on the table and neither of us has rushed to explain it. We’ve simply gotten curious.

Why might your boss see this differently from your direct reports? Why does this particular situation take so much energy from you? What makes this behavior so effective in one part of your role and less effective in another? What are you doing that you may not realize other people are experiencing?

Those are conversations worth having.

Conversation helps leaders make meaning. Assessment gives us more to see.

For me, that is the real role of assessment in coaching. It isn’t there to provide the answer. It helps us discover better questions—and sometimes those are questions neither the coach nor the client would have known to ask.

Key Takeaways:

• Executive coaching and leadership assessment work better together: coaching creates meaning, while assessment can uncover leadership behaviors, blind spots, and motivational patterns that conversation alone may not reveal. 
• MRG’s Leadership Effectiveness Analysis (LEA 360) examines 22 leadership practices and compares self-perception with feedback from bosses, peers, and direct reports to explore how leadership behavior is experienced by others. 
• MRG’s Individual Directions Inventory (IDI) explores motivations and preferences, helping leaders understand what may be driving their choices, reactions, energy, and satisfaction at work. 
• Assessment data is a starting point, not an answer: effective executive coaching uses assessment results as hypotheses that lead to better questions, greater self-awareness, and intentional behavior change. 
• Assessment-enabled coaching creates richer conversations: the LEA helps explore what a leader is doing, while the IDI helps explore why—giving coaches and leaders more to see and discuss.