Coaching: Questions?

Coaching can involve asking a lot of questions — I’ve mentioned several examples already in “A few things about coaching” (where I was surprised by how much people appreciated some wide-open questions when I thought I had nothing useful to say) and in “Coaching: Understanding the options” (including how useful it can be to discuss some questions up front, before coaching even starts).

In this post, I’ve got a few more notes about questions.

What kinds of questions should you ask?

Some advice from a course with Macpherson Allan Practice has stuck with me: through various exercises, they helped point out that most people’s default is to ask “information-gathering” questions. We seek to ask about more detail to understand a situation or challenge, the reasons it’s come about, the context around it.

Whether you’re coaching someone, or a friend / colleague has come to you with a challenge, it’s natural to ask lots about the detail — but this takes a lot of time and probably still doesn’t let you unpack all the thinking and facts behind the story. Worse than that, asking for lots of info can build an assumption — in both you and the person who brought the challenge — that at the end of all this info gathering, you’re going to provide the answer or take the issue away and get it fixed. This is definitely a trap I’d fallen into in the past.

Try to avoid information-gathering questions unless they’re really needed, and try for more action-oriented and future-focused questions.

• When thinking through a thorny challenge, it’s common for people to go over and over what’s happened, why the situation is this way, and maybe to keep circling round “To solve it I need x to happen, but that won’t because…”. We’ve all been there.
• Coaching questions can help bump us on to a different track: what things could you do that make x more likely? Who might help? What else could change that means x is unnecessary? What might happen if you tried that?
• One aim of these questions is awareness raising: helping us look at a problem from different angles and realise there’s other ways to tackle it.
• Later in the conversation, once new perspectives and options have been uncovered, it’s helpful to move on to generating responsibility: which of these steps are you going to take? How confident are you it’ll happen? What might get in the way?
• I’ve certainly had lots of experience of deciding what the right answer is, then finding I’m too busy, it’s too daunting, or one of a range of other reasons that mean I find I’m still stuck weeks later. Talking through how to make it happen is valuable — and sometimes, just knowing you’ve said to someone you’ll do this and that you’ve got a follow-up date when you’ll talk about it helps give it a chance.

For all of this, it isn’t the coach who’ll decide what to do or assign the actions and deadlines; their role is to help the client work through what they think is important and what they might do about it.

Asking the perfect question

It can be extremely satisfying when you ask a “powerful” question as a coach: the right phrase, at the right moment, can make someone stop and suddenly have a completely new way to look at a situation they’ve been stuck on. There are a lot of other skills needed in coaching, and sometimes trying too hard to come up with just the right question can get in the way of everything else you should be concentrating on.

I have notes from a training course from Salma Shah that outline this risk:

• Models have a place, but coaching starts with powerful questions.
• Goal today: get you to think, develop your awareness, get you to listen differently when you’re coaching.
• Coaching will be powerful just by you being present, listening. Let go of the idea of needing to ask the perfect question.

Having said that, it’s still a useful skill to practice! Here are a few exercises that have helped me:

• Coaching with an observer: I’ve often done this with other coaches — each bring a challenge and rotate round the coach/client/observer roles. Getting feedback after each round helps hugely in understanding how the conversation went.
• Troika consulting from Liberating Structures is similar: client describes their challenge then turns their back, and two coaches discuss what questions they might ask or advice they might offer. Hearing feedback afterwards can be surprising — it’s not easy to guess what questions might have been a huge help.
• An even more question-focused exercise: after a short challenge intro the client sits quietly, while a group of coaches try to come up with as many “good” questions as they can. No other discussion, just a stream of questions — and the client notes which ones strike them as particularly powerful. Then, as above: ask for feedback.

Related reading (and listening)

The idea of coaching conversations to help “bump us onto a different track” of thinking reminds me of the “futurespective” workshop format (also known as pre-mortems). There’s lots of ways to go about this (I wrote about one format), but all of them encourage you to predict everything that’ll go wrong with your plans, and can uncover all kinds of risks and weaknesses while there’s still time to do something about them. Gary Klein’s Sources of Power book (mentioned in my “How do you *do* that” notes) encourages the use of these to help you look differently at a plan you might be too proud of to notice flaws in:

The idea is that they are breaking the emotional attachment to the plan’s success by taking on the challenge of showing their creativity and competence, by identifying likely sources of breakdown.

— Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

The “You Are Not So Smart” podcast had an interview with Warren Berger, the author of A More Beautiful Question, and has lots of helpful advice about using questions well. His description of a good question for consulting sounds very like the notes I wrote above: “Actionable — you can take action on it — and it has the possibility to bring about change.” The book’s title comes from an E. E. Cummings quote: “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question”.