OD Church Assessments, Coaching & Mentoring

​Organizational Development Church Assessments

Literally scores of publishers supply, score and compile results from assessments of a wide variety of skills, behaviors and attributes.

Among the more popular at the present time are assessments of communications skills and working relationship attributes, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Universal Multi-Rater Social Style Profile, and the DiSC Profile (of which there are many varieties and versions). 

A number of personality inventories are available, and unfortunately not always used correctly.  Proper administration of these requires a trained, sometimes certified, professional.

Several leading publishers provide evaluations of key leadership skills.  Some of these assessments are quite lengthy, requiring up to 90 minutes or more to complete them for one person.  However, they are quite comprehensive, and some offer comparisons of an individual skills to peer groups across industries.

Increasingly popular are assessments of emotional intelligence (the ability to recognize and control one’s own emotions as well as the ability to help others recognize and control their emotions). 

Many vendors offer customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction survey products.  One of the most popular of these is the Q12 developed and distributed The Gallup Organization.

​Organizational Development Executive Coaching

Executive coaching is a process designed to improve an individual’s chances of success in the workplace through a series of interactions with a trained professional.  (Some mistakenly label coaching as corrective, some kind of effort to “fix” an individual.)

Coaching focuses on skills (e.g. communications, innovativeness, and negotiations), attitudes(e.g. optimism, inclusiveness and respectfulness) and attributes (e.g. character, judgment and resilience). 

Coaching typically does not emphasize technical or business disciplines; see mentoring. However, coaching often does focus to some degree on the skills, attitudes and attributes required to succeed in a particular organization’s culture (see also Culture Change). 

The trained professional serving as the executive coach keeps confidential the conversations with the coachee (unless something extreme or dangerous comes to light).  This boundary helps ensure that the coachee can freely discuss concerns, relationships, incidents or decisions with the executive coach.

​Organizational Development Mentoring

Very similar to executive coaching, mentoring differs from coaching in two key ways.  First, while the focus remains on improving the mentee’s likelihood of success, mentoring emphasizes the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in a given organization or discipline (e.g. accounting, human resources, supply chain…).  Second, the mentor is a person seasoned in the organization or discipline, with a track record of success, one who passes along best practices and lessons learned.  Mentoring relationships typically last a minimum of several months to a year, and may last much longer. 

Successful mentoring programs have several key factors in common.  The mentors voluntarily participate with a desire to help others succeed.  Mentoring typically consumes 2-3 hours a week in the early months, and about an hour a week well into the process, so both the mentor and mentee need to commit the time, and the sponsoring organization needs to support their time commitment.  Mentors should come from someplace in the organization other than the mentee’s own management structure.

Church organizational development assessments, executive coaching & mentoring

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