The Business Coaching Toolkit

CHAPTER SEVEN

A New Twist on SWOT

Socrates believed an unexamined life was not worth living. Honest self-evaluation can be a powerful tool to help you quickly and deeply understand your areas of strength and weakness while helping you take advantage of opportunities and stay aware of threats.

A classic tool for accomplishing this is a SWOT Analysis. SWOT, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, can be used on an individual basis, but is most powerful when used by a group of people to evaluate a business or team.

A BUSINESS CASE FOR SWOT

There has been much written about focusing on strengths in the psychology and, more recently, business literature. Since Freud, the field of psychology has been built on the medical model. When I (Stephen) was teaching psychopathology in a graduate psychology program, many students were frustrated to learn the traditional textbook definition of “normal” was “the absence of pathology.” In other words, anyone who doesn’t exhibit signs of abnormal behavior is considered in psychological terms to be “normal.” Many leaders define their teams in the same way—if the team is not fighting, they are fine.

One of the many problems with that approach is how self-limiting it can be. Just because a team, or small business, is getting along does not mean they are performing at their optimal level. As a former mental health therapist, I’ve had many people ask me what the difference is between psychology and coaching. Here’s a helpful ...