A challenge (and maybe some wisdom) about using the TLV

[Laura]

Hey, y’all –

Thanks for all the great wisdom and resources on this forum. I haven’t gotten all the way through it, but I am determined to do so!

As for what I have to offer at the moment, it’s more of a challenge I encountered, and maybe a little bit of wisdom (or maybe not).

Late last year, I found myself coaching two partnership relationships, completely separately; meaning two equal leaders of two different organizations.

I was really excited about sharing the Team Leader View with each of these partnership relationships. I knew it would enrich the work we were doing in the coaching, and I not secretly hoped it might lead to my working with each of their whole teams.

Well, I gave it the ‘old college try.’ And it did enrich their coaching, to a certain extent. We were able to have several coaching sessions on the definitions of the Positivity and Productivity Factors, where they thought their teams were on the quadrants, etc. And that was all good.

The challenge, however, was the confusion experienced by all of the individual partners while they were taking the assessment. What team were the questions referring to? Was it the two of them as a leadership team? Was it the team they led together? Or was it sometimes one and sometimes the other? This confusion then led to confusion during each of the debrief sessions. They often couldn’t remember how they’d interpreted the questions associated with the answers they gave that resulted in the data revealed to them.

Even as I’m writing this, it’s hard not to get confused myself!

So, what wisdom do I have to share? I guess multi-faceted. In the future, should I come across this situation again, I will:
1. Do my best to explain to them, before they take the assessment, which team the questions are referring to,
2. Maybe even have them take the assessment in my presence. That way, I will be there to help them with any confusion about what the questions mean, and
3. Short of having TCI create a new version of this assessment, I would definitely employ TCI to map out by hand the overlay of their answers so that the interpretation of where they are in relation to each other will be more clear.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them. Chances are that this will happen again. Thanks!

[Author]

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