Someone familiar with human resources management recently told me that it comes down to this: results, rules, and character. That is, any given person either produces results in what they do while working for a company, or they don't. They either follow the rules of the company, being sensitive to the company's culture, or they don't. They either exhibit the kind of personality that is conducive to a good working relationship with others in the company, or they don't. If they don't, then some kind of coaching is usually attempted, and if that is not successful, then eventually they probably will not be working for that company.

Such coaching can be broken down into corresponding types.

There is skills-based coaching that attempts to train a person in how to do something. For instance, one takes a few minutes and shows someone else how to run the copy machine. That is skills-based coaching.

There is performance-based coaching that examines how well any given person does what he or she does. How efficient is a person at running the copy machine?

Then, there is developmental coaching that addresses the character, or personality, of people in the company, and usually this is most salient in people who hold management positions. Here the coaching would be about how well one gets others to run the copy machine, and how efficiently he or she gets them to do that, and how fulfilled they feel when they do that because they have been working together on a team of some kind with this particular manager.

These boil down to what you can do, how well you can do it, and who you are.

Here is an important observation: no one can do what he or she does completely on their own without having to work in some way with others. Consider a professional athlete such as a tennis player. Now, I admittedly know very little about the game of tennis. But if you watch it, two people meet on a court and bat a ball back and forth over a net. It would seem that the quality of play is, at that point, completely an individual matter. After all, nobody is going to run out on the court with a racket and catch the ball going down the line just out of reach. One person's good play can only be seen as "good" in comparison with what his or her opponent is doing. Further to that, before the match, countless hours of coaching have gone into the preparation of the tennis player. During the match, the people officiating the match influence how the match is being played. We may work in what seems like an "individual sport", but we find that we cannot do what we do without others.

No one does what he or she does in complete isolation. You do not get to be a top executive by standing in front of a mirror and rehearsing glib slogans and hyperbole. Likewise, your team will not succeed because you see yourself as the powerful and driving leader at the top, demanding extra performance from the people beneath you. And that gets us to character, or personality, who you are as a person.

Who you are as a person points to the subject of personality, and that pertains to the abiding characteristics that distinguish one person from another. Some understand personality in terms of types while others understand personality in terms of traits.

The Wikipedia contrasts these succinctly as follows: "Personality types can be distinguished from personality traits, which come in different levels or degrees. According to type theories, for example, there are two fundamental types of people, introverts and extraverts. According to trait theories, introversion and extraversion are part of a continuous dimension, with many people in the middle."

Two popular tests for personality types are the DISC profiling instrument (based on the theories of emotion advocated in 1928 by William Moulton Marston), which is often used in business because of the simplicity of its terminology and overall model, and the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (based on the writing of Carl Jung, in his 1921 book, Psychological Types).

The Big Five personality theory is an example of trait theory in personality assessment, and one of the major assessment instruments used to evaluate that in people is the NEO-PI-R. That instrument is also widely used in industrial and organisational psychology and is supported by a vast body of research literature. Trait theory for understanding personality comes from the work of Raymond Cattell (who proposed 16 traits based on extensive factor analysis) and Hans Jürgen Eysenck (who proposed three traits-extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism). The more sophisticated five-factor theory of personality suggests that who you are can best be understood as a mix of where you can be found along five continuums: high to low neuroticism, extraversion, openness (to experience), agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Thus, developmental coaching using typology accepts as a given that people are set at an early age and cannot change, but it then goes on to outline how certain types of people can best communicate with one another.

By contrast, developmental coaching using traits suggests that people can move along the continuum of these various ranges of character and actually change the way they interact with others that is, to change who they are in the world with the implication that they can change the effect they have on others.

Character is the elephant in the room of business. Typically, the discussion centres on results and rules, but character is regarded to be largely out of bounds, because it is the realm of psychology and business people have no business trying to practice psychology. Well, yes and no. Since the negative effects of imbalanced personality can undermine the bottom line in business, it behooves companies to address character up front as they are hiring and then afterwards as they are evaluating the person they have hired. Often, though, this will require obtaining the services of a knowledgeable professional.

l Contact Dr. Brownell: phil@gtib.org; www.doctorbrownell.gtib.org