How to Use the Interactive Styles Quiz to Enhance Coaching Effectiveness
- Eric Shepherd
- Jun 4
- 6 min read
As a coach, helping clients understand how they communicate and assert themselves is essential to unlocking personal and professional growth. Talent Transformation’s Interactive Styles Quiz provides a structured framework for examining how your clients navigate interpersonal dynamics across three key dimensions: Submissive–Aggressive, Direct–Indirect, and Passive–Aggressive. This guide will help you interpret the personalized guidance report and weave these insights into your coaching practice to enhance self-awareness, strengthen relationships, and support meaningful behavior change.
Why Focus on Interactive Styles?
Focusing on interactive styles in coaching can uncover how clients navigate interpersonal dynamics—whether they tend to be submissive, passive-aggressive, direct, or indirect.
These styles often operate beneath the surface, shaping how clients express their needs, assert boundaries, and respond to conflict. By using the Interactive Styles Quiz, coaches gain insight into habitual patterns of interactions that may be undermining clarity, collaboration, or personal power.
Helping clients recognize when they are overly compliant, covertly resistant, or too blunt allows for greater emotional intelligence and more conscious relational choices. With this awareness, coaching can shift from managing symptoms of poor communication to building authentic, balanced interactions that align with the client’s goals and values.
Understanding the Interactive Styles Framework
As a coach, your goal isn’t to label your clients, but to understand the patterns that shape how they interact with others and navigate power dynamics. The Interactive Styles personalized guidance reports help you explore three key dimensions of communication: Assertiveness, Directness, and Passive Aggression. Each dimension reveals different aspects of how your clients express themselves and respond to interpersonal challenges.
Assertiveness sits on a continuum from submissive to aggressive. You’ll learn whether your client tends to avoid conflict and defer to others (submissive), or if they assert their needs forcefully, sometimes at the expense of others (aggressive).
Directness ranges from clear and explicit to indirect and nuanced. Direct communicators express their thoughts openly and without ambiguity, while indirect communicators may hint, suggest, or rely on context to convey their needs.
Passive Aggression reflects the degree to which someone appears cooperative but expresses frustration indirectly. Clients with high scores may avoid open confrontation yet resist or undermine through subtle actions.
By understanding where your client falls on each of these scales, you can guide more effective conversations, build awareness of communication patterns, and support intentional growth in how they relate to others.
Preparing to Use the Quiz
Take the Quiz Yourself: Learn about the quiz process and report format by taking it yourself. This firsthand experience will help you better understand how to guide your clients and use the report effectively.
Introduce the Quiz to Clients: Explain the quiz's purpose, emphasizing that there are no right or wrong answers. Encourage honest responses to ensure the most accurate and helpful results.
Access Client Reports: Clients can share their reports directly with you or through the Access Client's Quiz Reports feature (https://www.talenttransformation.com/access-clients-quiz-reports-user-guide). Use these reports as a foundation for deeper conversations.
Integrating the Quiz into Your Coaching Practice
Integrating the Interactive Styles Quiz into your coaching practice lets you explore how your clients typically express themselves and respond to others. Start by reviewing the client’s results together—whether they lean toward submissive, passive-aggressive, direct, or indirect patterns—and invite them to share examples from their personal or professional life.
Use these insights to gently uncover how these styles affect their relationships, workplace dynamics, or decision-making. From there, co-create strategies to enhance communication—for instance, helping a submissive client build assertiveness, or guiding a passive-aggressive client toward clearer expression of needs. This approach fosters greater self-awareness and equips clients with practical tools to communicate more effectively and authentically in different contexts.
Discuss Preferences to Tailor the Session
Before delving into the Interactive Styles personalized guidance report, ask your clients what they hope to gain from the session. Are they looking to assert themselves more effectively, navigate conflict, or understand why certain interactions leave them feeling unheard or misunderstood?
This initial discussion helps you align the session with their challenges and aspirations. Some clients may want to explore feedback they’ve received about being too passive or too blunt. Others may wish to learn how their style plays out in high-stakes conversations, like performance reviews or family disputes.
Inviting them to co-create the session’s focus fosters psychological safety and shared ownership. For example:
A client who avoids conflict may want to explore the roots of their submissiveness and develop assertive language.
A client perceived as too aggressive might seek ways to express strong opinions without overpowering others.
A client experiencing team resistance may want to identify and address passive-aggressive behavior patterns and develop healthier communication habits.
This early conversation ensures you focus on what matters most to them, framing the session as a space for reflection, not correction.
Using the Interactive Styles Quiz in Your Coaching
Tailor the Session to Their Goals
You could start with: “What situations do you find challenging in your personal or professional communication?”
This question invites clients to reflect on their concerns and aligns the session with their priorities. For instance:
A leader may want to reduce unintentional aggressiveness.
A student might seek ways to express needs without feeling guilty.
A team member may be curious about why they struggle with confrontation.
Promote Awareness of Behavioral Patterns
Use the results to explore their current style of interaction. Instead of presenting the results as fixed traits, use them as conversation starters:
“Does this sound like how you typically respond under pressure?”
“Can you think of a recent example of this communication style?”
This exploration encourages clients to share stories, increasing their ownership of insights.
Align Growth Goals with Interaction Styles
Support your client in building communication strategies that align with their values and objectives. For example:
A submissive client may want to learn assertiveness without compromising kindness.
A direct but aggressive leader might work on incorporating empathy without compromising efficiency.
A passive-aggressive employee might explore safer ways to express dissatisfaction and ask for support.
You can co-create practical steps such as assertiveness scripts, feedback models, or body language adjustments.
Apply Insights to Enhance Relationships
Once clients recognize how their interaction style affects others, they can begin adapting it for better collaboration. Encourage them to:
Reflect on how others may perceive their style.
Practice switching styles based on context and emotional safety.
Seek feedback from trusted colleagues or peers.
These efforts empower clients to become more self-aware communicators who can lead with confidence and compassion.
Frame Results Positively
Avoid framing any style as inherently good or bad. Instead:
Emphasize flexibility—the ability to shift styles depending on context.
Reassure clients that awareness is the first step toward choosing how to respond more intentionally.
Highlight strengths: Direct styles can drive clarity. Indirect styles may enable delicate diplomacy. Even passive-aggressive behaviors may reflect unspoken needs.
Use the passive-aggressive style as a window into deeper emotional patterns. Gently explore with your client:
“What makes it difficult to express your needs or boundaries directly?”
“Have there been situations where being direct felt risky or led to conflict?”
“What are some small ways you can begin to communicate more openly and assertively?”
Help clients identify the intent behind their behavior (often a desire to be heard, respected, or in control) and work together to develop healthier ways of meeting those needs. Role-play conversations offer language scripts for assertiveness or invite reflection on past interactions that left them feeling unseen or resentful.
By cultivating safety and awareness, you empower clients to replace subtle resistance with courageous clarity, transforming communication into a tool for connection, not protection.
Maintain Ethical Practices
When using assessments, it's essential to approach the process thoughtfully and responsibly. Keep these ethical principles in mind:
Respect Confidentiality: Reassure every client that their information will remain private unless they explicitly grant permission to share it.
Avoid Stereotyping: Treat results as starting points for exploration, not fixed labels. Recognize each client's individuality.
Stay Within Your Scope: Remember that quizzes are not diagnostic tools or predictors of success. Results are not to be used for hiring decisions, medical judgments, or value assessments.
Acknowledge Personality Evolution: Reinforce that one can evolve. Encourage clients to see these results as tools for insight and growth.
How Not to Use Quiz Results
To maintain ethical and impactful coaching, do not misuse the quiz results or the personalized guidance reports. Specifically:
Do not label or stereotype clients based on their scores.
Do not make high-stakes decisions such as hiring or promotions.
Do not judge someone’s worth; these concepts are neutral and context dependent.
Do not diagnose mental health conditions, which require professional expertise.
Do not force behavior changes that go against a client's core values.
Do not ignore context and situational factors that influence behavior.
Do not determine compatibility or relationships in rigid terms.
Do not measure skill or competence, which is separate from what this quiz is intended to measure.
Takeaways
The Interactive Styles Quiz and its personalized guidance report offer a powerful gateway to transformation, especially when approached with empathy and skill. This tool helps you:
Deepen your client’s awareness of their interactions with others
Develop strategies that foster healthy assertiveness and adaptability
Strengthen conflict resolution skills and improve team dynamics
Encourage authentic, intentional interactions that build trust
Support clients in recognizing and shifting passive-aggressive behaviors toward more direct, assertive responses
By integrating this quiz into your coaching practice, you create a safe and supportive space for reflection, growth, and meaningful behavioral change.
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