I’m looking forward to a busy July, and getting ready for it has coaching questions on my mind!
This month, I'm teaching Coaching as a Leadership Skill, a 4-week fully asynchronous course for Library Juice Academy.
And then the jumpstart session for Lead With Curiosity: Coaching skills for library leaders is later in the month. You have until July 15 to join us!
In both, we spend a good amount of energy on learning to ask effective coaching questions, because it takes time and effort to build a habit of asking these sorts of questions.
Just talking about coaching questions in abstract terms feels fairly easy, but in practice, there are several common patterns that tend to get in the way.
Before I jump into those patterns…
What makes a good coaching question?
If you’ve ever attended one of my free webinars, then you’ve heard this list before!
A good coaching question is:
- Open-ended, like a good research question!
- Authentically curious and transparent. You don’t have any hidden agenda.
- Succinct
- Nonjudgmental
- Thought provoking
- Grounding
- Intentional
That all sounds lovely, but how do you put that into practice?
The only way I’ve found to get good at asking effective coaching questions is to practice, make mistakes, and learn from them!
Common mistakes
1. Doing too much!
Most new coaches struggle with keeping their questions short and simple. We’ve been socialized to want to include a whole bunch of context and explain WHY we’re asking that question. But that tends to lead to some really convoluted wording. And that distracts from the question itself.
Sometimes, you really can leave that explanation out.
Sometimes, though, some context is helpful. In that case, think of it as setting the stage, instead of as part of the question itself. Take a moment to reflect back what the person said, and then ask your succinct question.
Consider this example (try reading the examples out loud):
How will you encourage those that you are coaching to provide constructive feedback regarding your own developing coaching skills?
This isn’t bad on its own, but now consider this rephrase:
You mentioned wanting to get feedback from those you're coaching to help you continue developing your coaching skills. How are you going to encourage that?
These questions highlight one small piece of a longer response, so the context is useful. In the first one, my brain is parsing the context and the question at the same time, which distracts some of my focus from the thought-provoking part of the question. In the second one, I get the context first and have a moment to parse that, and then here comes the short and sweet, to the point question.
2. Suggesting possible answers
This could also fit under the “doing too much” heading, but I didn’t want it to get overlooked!
Another way that this urge to explain ourselves can show up is in adding a bunch of examples of the types of responses you had in mind.
At best, that distracts from the question itself. At worst, it leads someone to your presumed answer instead of giving them space to figure out what their answer actually is.
While I’m drawing examples from the asynchronous course for this post, I mostly see this show up live on Zoom in Lead With Curiosity. When the person being coached needs a moment to think, the person doing the coaching starts to worry that their question wasn't clear enough.
Sitting in silence is HARD.
But holding that space to support someone in thinking about a perspective they hadn’t considered before is incredibly valuable.
3. Using closed questions
In a good conversation, this isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. In a lot of contexts, people will respond as if there were an implied “and why” attached to a yes/no question. But, you can’t always count on that.
And getting into the habit of asking open-ended questions can help you ask questions that provoke deeper thought.
Consider this example:
Have you thought of any ideas about how to engage with them and build trust that feels authentic?
Now consider this rephrase:
I heard you say that it's important to you that you engage with them and build trust that feels authentic. What ideas do you have for how to do that?
The first question leaves open the possibility that you haven’t thought of any good ideas. So maybe you respond with all of the reasons you haven’t thought of any ideas!
The second question assumes that you have some ideas. Maybe you need space to talk through them and/or brainstorm better ideas. Maybe you would have said no if you had been given that option because they still need so much work, but this question assumes that you’re not starting from zero.
4. Asking informational questions instead of thought-provoking questions
When you lean into your curiosity for curiosity’s sake, everything becomes a topic to explore further! But, that makes it easy to wander off into the weeds.
Coaching is a technique to help someone work toward a goal. That means staying focused on moving forward toward that goal.
Sometimes, being mindful of this pattern means choosing not to ask certain questions.
I run into this challenge sometimes while working with clients in detangling some dysfunctional patterns in their libraries. My inner gossip wants to jump in to ask for all of the tea on some mess, but my job is to recognize that going off on that tangent doesn’t help my client reach their goal. If that same situation comes up over and over, then we might dig into it more to find out what we can learn from it. But as long as it’s just me being curious because I’m nosy, I stick to questions that will help my client move forward.
Assuming we’re asking something that is useful to ask, though…
Consider this example, in the context of working with someone who said they want to practice more self reflection:
What are some effective ways to practice regular self reflection?
That’s open-ended, curious, non-judgmental, and so on. And in the right context, it can be taken as a prompt to think about what might work for them. But it can also be taken as a request for advice on self reflection strategies that might work for the person asking!
Now consider this rephrase:
How do you plan to practice regular self reflection?
This brings the focus onto how you personally are going to move forward in doing the thing you said you want to do.
5. Sticking a question mark onto a suggestion
It’s really hard to stick to asking genuine coaching questions instead of jumping in to solve every problem!
But if your goal is to empower your team members to take ownership of their work, then you need to practice asking questions that help them reach the solution that works best for them, not jumping in with your own solution.
Sometimes this gets complicated because you have information or knowledge that they don’t, and you can best support them by sharing.
In that case, the key is to be honest and transparent, instead of sneaking that suggestion into the conversation disguised as a question.
Instead of wrapping that information or idea in a “have you considered…?” quesuggestion, acknowledge that you have some information or an idea to share.
And share the information or idea.
And then ask a genuine coaching question. An easy one that I use a lot is “how does that land for you?”
Invite them to think through how they’d like to move forward (or not) with that information or that idea, instead of suggesting the path that you think is best.
Now, there’s a lot of nuance and discernment here, so don’t take this as a pass to jump in with a solution every time the urge strikes! Challenge yourself to focus on their ideas for how to move forward as much as possible. But be transparent when you shift gears.
Which of these hit home for you?