As a Psychologist who has fully transitioned into Life Coaching, I work with people who are more interested in designing a future rather than getting over a past.  Clients who want to live their life more fully, both personally and professionally, value having a personal coach.  Because of this, many coaches are hired by corporate clients, professionals, and entrepreneurial small business owners who want to be more purposeful in living their life in balance, and who want their job to reflect their values adding to their life purpose rather than subtracting from it.

In the corporate or professional business life, there is always the need to improve upon communication with staff and customers.  There is also a growing recognition that relationships within the workplace are important to the overall success of the company or business.  The emphasis on 'emotional intelligence' (from Daniel Goleman) in the work environment shows how the bottom line of a company or business is improved if the employees are happier and communicate and function as a team that works well together and resolves conflict early.

A large part of working well together requires working with different personalities and styles within the work place.  These different styles often lead to conflict rather than an appreciation of the unique gifts and skills that each personality might bring to a collaborative work environment. Psychologists and counselors have for decades used various personality assessments to give them added information on the general tendencies and communication strategies of the clients they worked with.  I have especially enjoyed utilizing the more positive and less clinical assessments such as the FIRO-B, Meyers-Briggs, and the DISC.  However, Dr. Mike Lillibridge has developed an even more user friendly and powerful personality assessment in the People Map.  The People Map is quickly completed and easy for all to understand.  For that reason alone, it offers less opportunity to get obfuscated in jargon and labels than the aforementioned assessments.  The People Map is a very useful and understandable tool for the client to comprehend and recognize their general personality type and how it reveals itself in work, family, and social environments.  Imagine how useful it would be to quickly assess your personality tendencies, and your 'Achilles heels' as well as gathering the same information for those you work and live with.  The People Map is a tool that lets you quickly understand your self and others and how each personality style or tendency has its unique strengths and necessary attributes.  I, for example, as a Free Spirit/Leader, am an adventurous, innovative and creative leader who is a motivator and visionary for those around me.  But, I need to surround myself with people who are more detailed oriented and task oriented because those are not my strengths. I can learn those if need be, but I am much more happy and productive if I realize and utilize the unique strengths of those I work with.  Additionally, understanding my Achilles' heels, or those areas of potential weakness, allows me to become aware of tendencies that might undermine my success or get in the way of successfully relating and collaborating with those I work with.  When one becomes aware of both one's strengths and areas of potential conflict, then one can be more sensitive to the ways that other people view and respond to the environment differently.  Just like learning to use one's left hand (if you are naturally right-handed) one can become skillful in our weak areas, if we must.  But one can at least use the understanding of the different personality tendencies to create better harmony and understanding with the people in their work and personal life.

The People Map is an incredibly useful and powerful tool for helping individual and companies understand the various personalities that comprise their company or business and it is a fun way to understand your own strengths and areas for improvement, both in your professional and personal life.  We in the profession of Life Coaching (or business coaching) find the use of this assessment as a very valuable addition to our tool box, for understanding the uniqueness of everyone and in our desire to bring out the brilliance and excellence in those we work with.

An example of how I have personally used The People Map with an executive coaching client might prove useful to show the practicality and power of this unique assessment.  Carol came to me for coaching to improve upon her role as Vice President of a department with a major international bank.  She was very happy with her work but was having difficulty with her team.  Specifically she was getting word that they often saw her as a tyrant and that she appeared aloof at times.  That was not her intention, so she wanted some coaching that would help her be a better manager.  I, of course, told her to be a better manager she would also need to learn to coach her employees more than supervise or manage.  A good manager brings out the best in the individual members so that the team works efficiently and smoothly.  As part of my coaching, I told her about the People Map and asked if she would be willing to take it and go over the suggestions with me.  She was very willing and had already completed the Myers Briggs assessment recently as well as a 360-degree assessment with her staff.  I sent her the people map questionnaire (only 7 questions!) and she was amazed at the report generated from her data.  Carol's profile showed her general tendencies to be Leader-Task, the most common combination for managers.  As we reviewed the strengths and the Achilles' heel of her personality type, she was amazed and how accurate it was and how similar to her Myers-Briggs profile. But she commented on the user-friendly quality of this assessment and wanted to give it to her entire team after we expanded her knowledge of the data for her own edification.

As a Leader-Task, Carol had many strengths that made her a great manager.  However, to improve on her stated goals, she learned how to more effectively communicate with the other 'types' on her team. She also learned to appreciate each of their unique contributions to the team as well as potential conflicts that she could address in coaching with them. As for her own style, she affirmed that she was results oriented and worked with an attitude of 'get the job done.'  Because of this tendency, she sometimes could appear driven and resistant to change or letting go of some control.  She also learned that one of the weaknesses of a strong Leader-Task personality, she might have difficulty being relaxed and not be able to 'loosen up.'  This struck her as a core understanding and we began using our coaching in the weeks to come to focus on:

1. Delegating more responsibility to her staff
2. Coaching her team rather than managing them.
3. Finding opportunities for her to lighten up and be more fun while maintaining her vision on the results she wanted the team to achieve.

Carol had also recently taken some training on Emotional Intelligence and The Workplace and she was beginning to believe that managers today do need to care about the humanity of their team and to not just treat them as objects.  With the People Map results she became aware that a potential weakness for her is overlooking the feelings of others.  As a manager/coach, she could treat her staff as responsible adults, who also have some emotional needs in the workplace.  An effective team is like a family and relationships can sometimes manifest personality conflicts.  The People Map can help her whole team understand everyone's unique strengths, Achilles heels, and how to communicate and interact with that understanding.  Carol eventually gave the People Map to her whole team and we had two conference calls to go over the results.  They all felt acknowledged and empowered to working more effectively as a team, and they all appreciated Carol for her openness to the willingness to change.