The coaching skills assessment.

A coaching skills assessment maps how a manager actually coaches, as opposed to how they describe it. Managing directs the work; coaching transfers the thinking. Most managers do some of each without knowing which, and the assessment’s job is to make the pattern visible: whether you direct or develop, how you set accountability, and what you do when a direct report brings you a problem you could solve in thirty seconds.

This page covers what the COACHindex™ measures, what the read-out shows, what it is honest about not being, and what to do with the result. There is a two-minute self-check below if you want to start with yourself.

What the assessment measures

The COACHindex™ is the manager’s coaching self-assessment. It reads your habits against the models in the Coaching & Accountability Matrix™ program, so each result maps to something you can practice.

It places you on the Coaching Box, a two-by-two of relationship and accountability. High relationship with low accountability is the buddy, who gives people a pass. Low on both is the absentee landlord. Low relationship with high accountability is the micromanager, on a leash about six inches long. The coaching box is the corner where both are high. It shows which steps of the Coaching Skills Cycle you skip: create safety, transfer thinking, transfer ownership, then provide guidance and accountability. It locates you on the Coaching Continuum from tell to ask. And it surfaces your coaching derailers, the sixteen habits in four families that turn the coach into the problem.

What it is honest about not being

The COACHindex™ is a development diagnostic rather than a psychometric instrument. It does not produce a norm-referenced score, it does not claim validation, and it is a self-rating, which means it measures how you see your own coaching. Its value is the conversation it starts with yourself and the plan it produces.

That honesty matters when you compare it with instruments that promise more. A coaching “profile” that assigns you a type has told you something about your preferences. The COACHindex™ tells you something about your behavior, mapped to a model that prescribes the next move. The second is more useful on Monday.

The gap the matrix exposes

The read-out gets practical when it meets your actual direct reports. The Coaching & Accountability Matrix™ places each person by two axes: the accountability level they are ready for (task, process, or outcome) and the coaching approach that fits (tell, tell-and-ask, or ask). Most managers discover the same thing: they coach everyone the way they themselves like to be coached, which over-coaches the capable and under-coaches the new.

Consider a nursing unit manager with fourteen reports who scores herself as a strong coach. Her COACHindex™ places her in the buddy corner, high relationship, accountability pitched at task level for everyone, including two charge nurses who have been running the floor for years. The matrix puts the charge nurses at outcome-level accountability and asking; she has been telling them which supplies to reorder. The plan for each is one line: the box they are in, and the next one. The assessment did not tell her she was a bad coach. It told her she was coaching the wrong people the wrong way, which is a fixable thing.

What to do with the result

Pick the next box, not the best one. That is the work of coaching skills training, and it starts here: for each direct report, the matrix names the box they are in today and the one after it, and you can’t skip boxes. Practice the move that gets them there, in the one-on-ones you already run: tell-to-ask, the question funnel (open what, why, and how questions at the top, where the critical thinking transfers), and B.I.G. feedback, which names the behavior, shows the impact, and then guides, ideally by letting the person generate the guidance themselves.

Then re-take the assessment. Movement is measured one box forward. And count what came back to your desk this week that used to be delegated. That number is the result the instrument exists to move.

Where to start

Start with the self-check above, honestly, on a busy week. Then take the COACHindex™ in a Skill Preview and place your three most capable reports and your three newest on the matrix. If the six of them land in the same box, you have found the thing to practice first.