What the data says is just the beginning.
Assessment without a sustained coaching relationship produces insight without development. SPARC changes that.
Most executives have done the assessments. The CliftonStrengths debrief. The 360. The DiSC workshop at the offsite. There was a moment of recognition — yes, that's me, that's exactly what happens — and then the report went into a drawer and not much changed.
That is not a failure of the instruments. It is a failure of what surrounds them.
Assessment data produces insight. But insight alone does not produce development — it is the first necessary step, not the destination. What closes the gap is a sustained, skilled coaching relationship that turns a moment of awareness into meaning-making and active learning. That is what changes things.
Not another tool. Not another report. A coaching relationship sophisticated enough to make the data mean something — over time, in practice, in the leader's actual professional life.
The meaning belongs to the leader. Getting there is the coach's work.
Assessment literacy as a coaching competency.
Not every coach knows how to work skillfully with assessment data. Reading a report is not the same as holding what it reveals inside a sustained coaching relationship — and synthesizing what the data shows against what is actually happening in a leader's professional life, in real time, in conversation, is a specific and advanced capability.
Both SPARC founders hold ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credentials alongside Gallup CliftonStrengths certification and Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) practitioner certification. That combination — doctoral-level practitioners, globally accredited coaches, certified in the instruments most consequential for executive leader development — is genuinely rare.
When assessment data enters the coaching conversation at SPARC, it is held by coaches with the depth to know what questions it opens, the skill to ask them well, and the presence to stay with what emerges. They do not interpret the data for the leader. They create the conditions in which the leader can make meaning of it for themselves — and then act.
The leader does the work of making meaning. The coach makes that work possible.
Tools we administer.
SPARC coaches are certified to administer two primary instruments in executive coaching engagements. Both are chosen for their depth, their research foundation, and their particular power in the hands of a skilled coach who knows how to hold what they reveal.
CliftonStrengths
Gallup's CliftonStrengths identifies 34 talent themes — the natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that define how a leader operates at their best. In coaching, the report opens a conversation: not here is what this means but what do you notice? Where does this land? Where does it miss?
The leader is the expert on their own experience. The data is an invitation to look more closely — and to ask what those patterns make possible, and what they make harder.
Leadership Circle Profile
The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) is one of the most sophisticated leadership assessments available — mapping both the creative competencies that drive a leader's effectiveness and the reactive tendencies that can limit their impact.
Its power in coaching comes not from the scores but from the questions they open. Why does this pattern show up? What is it protecting? What becomes possible when it shifts? The LCP gives a leader a mirror. The coaching conversation helps them decide what to do with what they see.
Instruments you bring.
Many leaders arrive at SPARC carrying assessment results their organizations have already generated. A DiSC profile. An Enneagram debrief. An MBTI from years ago. A 360 that named something important but was never fully followed through. We do not set any of it aside.
SPARC coaches are skilled at working with assessment data across frameworks — not because we administer every instrument, but because we have the training and depth to help a leader make meaning of what they already hold. Prior results do not get replaced. They get brought into the conversation — examined alongside what the leader is experiencing now, connected to the questions they are currently carrying, made useful in ways the original debrief may never have reached.
If you have done this work before, bring it. The coaching conversation is richer for it.
The question we are always working toward is the same regardless of instrument: what does this tell you about yourself, and what do you want to do with that?
When the work is organizational.
Assessment-informed coaching serves individual leaders. When the question shifts — from how do I develop as a leader to how do we lead together, what kind of leadership team do we need to become — the work becomes something different.
That is our leader and team development practice, where CliftonStrengths and the Leadership Circle Profile are deployed not in service of one leader's development but in service of a team's collective capacity — building the shared language, the honest self-knowledge, and the leadership culture that outlasts any single engagement.
For some leaders, what begins as team development opens a deeper question about their own leadership. That is where our executive coaching work often deepens.
If something in this resonates, let's talk.
If you are exploring what assessment-informed coaching might open for you, we would welcome the conversation. This will be a conversation, not a discovery call.
Connect with SPARCIf the question is organizational.
When the work is about how a leadership team develops together — what kind of team they need to become — that work lives in our leader and team development practice.
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