Want to become more coach-like? Coaching and leadership expert Michael Bungay Stanier has seven simple questions to make your coaching sessions richer and more impactful.
What does it take to run an effective coaching session? Does the coach need to have undergone a comprehensive training program in order to provide value to their mentee? Do they need to develop a 12-step action plan following the session to help put their mentee on the right path?
According to coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier, often it’s just about learning how to ask better questions.
“If you can coach somebody in five minutes or less, everybody wins. And sometimes that’s having the discipline to ask them good questions, and then [staying quiet] and listening to their answer,” he said in a recent episode of AHRI’s podcast Let’s Take This Offline.
His book The Coaching Habit has sold over a million copies worldwide because, in his words, it “unweirds coaching”.
“I didn’t write the book for coaches because they already love coaching. What I was trying to do was [write something] for all the people who are like, ‘My organisation is making the coach. I don’t really want to do it, but I have to. Where do I start?'”
He wanted to help them see that coaching can be baked into your everyday interactions without a huge amount of extra effort and time, which is exactly what time-poor managers need.
7 questions for an effective coaching session
Often, what trips managers up when running a coaching session with their team members is adding structure to their line of questioning. They might go into the conversation with the goal of learning about the employee’s learning and development ambitions or to understand more about how they want to progress in the organisation.
However, Bungay Stanier thinks it’s often best to just let the conversation unfold naturally and learn what’s on their mind.
Following decades’ worth of experimenting, he landed on what he believes are the seven most important questions to ask in a coaching session:
- “What’s on your mind?”
- “And what else?”
- “What’s the real challenge here for you?”
- “What do you need?”
- “How can I help?”
- “If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?”
- “What was most useful for you?”
They might seem overly simple, but that’s the point. And he says that, time and time again, they prove to be fruitful questions.
One that he often gets positive feedback on is: ‘What’s the real challenge for you here?’. Because we’re prone to trying to solve other people’s problems, we often jump at the opportunity to impart our hard-earned wisdom and advice, but that’s not always useful.
“We’re all so wired to get on with stuff. Our advice monster shows up and we start trying to solve the first thing that has come up,” he says. “But the first thing that shows up is never the real challenge. It’s just the first challenge.”
“If you can coach somebody in five minutes or less, everybody wins. And sometimes that’s having the discipline to ask them good questions.” – Michael Bungay Stanier, author and coaching expert.
People are testing the waters, assessing how safe it might be to disclose the actual challenge they are facing, he explains.
For example, they might mask their deep dissatisfaction with their manager by instead talking about frustrations they’ve experienced during a recent project.
“Curiosity takes you closer to figuring out what’s really [concerning] the person that you’re working with. So it works both at a strategy and a cultural level.”
For HR professionals, being the person who can figure out the root of an issue will make you “immensely more valuable to your organisation”, he says.
“And you have far more impact because you’re willing to say, ‘My job is to figure out what the real challenges are.’ That is a strategic act.”
The way the question is structured also helps, he adds.
“It’s not just, ‘What’s the challenge?’. Because, if you ask somebody [that], you’re going to get a bit of a restatement from what you’ve already heard, when you asked them, ‘What’s on your mind?’. When you add the word ‘real’, what you’re saying is, the first thing you told me isn’t the real challenge. So immediately, you’ve got them thinking.
“You can feel the difference. What’s the challenge, what’s the real challenge? It’s like a different question, even though there’s only one word added.
“But then I think the magic happens when you add ‘for you’ at the end of that question: What’s the real challenge here for you? Now they’re not talking about the problem out there. They’re talking about, ‘Here’s why I am wrestling with this. This is what’s hard for me around this.'”
Download a one-page guide to Bungay Stanier’s 7 questions for an effective coaching session.
Coaching the coaches
A lot of what Bungay Stanier talks about will relate directly to HR practitioners, who themselves need to be effective coaches to leaders, managers and employees. However, often they’ll be the ones teaching managers to level up their approach to coaching employees.
Sometimes that means being willing to tell managers that they’re prone to giving too much advice, rather than listening deeply to what their mentee is saying to them (or what they’re not saying).
“You could say, ‘There’s a really important place for advice, just not as fast or as omnipresent as you’re currently delivering it. So let me introduce curiosity as an element of leadership that is underdeveloped in you right now,”’ he says.
But what about those leaders who don’t want to be coached?
“For most leaders, if you come up to them and say, ‘Hey, I’m from HR. I’m here to coach you.’ The typical reaction is [to resist that]. So I usually don’t make a grand announcement that the coaching has begun.
“When you push into a system, it pushes back. It’s a survival mechanism driven by your lizard brain – your amygdala. So don’t make a big deal about it. Just be curious.
“So if I’m starting to work with a leader, I’ll go, ‘How can I help? So what’s the challenge here for you? And then I go, what else? So what’s the real challenge? So what do you need?’.
“You can call that coaching, or you can call it having a conversation where you’re trying to be as helpful as possible.”
This is an excerpt of a conversation from AHRI’s new podcast, ‘Let’s Take This Offline‘. Listen to the full episode here.
