Coaching Beyond the Questions
Insights From Experienced Coaches
For a combined total of four decades, we've honed our coaching skills in both corporate settings and as independent coaches. Working with a diverse range of clients has exposed us to a vast array of challenges, each enriching our understanding of effective coaching. We use the term "client" consistently, whether working with direct reports or external individuals. It reinforces the core principle – coaching is a service, and the client's needs are paramount, regardless of the context.
Tip: try reframing your ‘direct report’ as a ‘client’ and see how it shifts your mindset/attitude.
We've distilled our learnings into what we believe are the most valuable coaching principles for managers. By sharing these insights, we hope to empower you to develop your own coaching skills and unlock the full potential of your team. After all, skilled coaches can be a game-changer for any organization, multiplying success rates and driving results.
11 Key Learnings
Questions are important but not sufficient
It’s important to start with what we mean by coaching. Coaching is a predominantly questioning mode of conversation. However, pure, pathological coaching (wherein you only ever ask questions) is a great way to drive a client bananas. Once you’ve mastered the basics, it’s actually okay (and sometimes important) to have opinions of your own as long as you’re careful in how you present them. We sometimes ask people to picture a mentoring spectrum with pure coaching (questions-only) at one end and pure teaching (answers-only) at the other. As a coach, you need to be very deliberate about where the conversation needs to be on that spectrum and why. Understanding what will best serve the client is critical.
Use spectral thinking
More generally, spectrums are a consistently powerful framing tool. We use them often in our coaching. For example, if someone can’t decide how many people to consult when making a decision, invite them to imagine what it would be like to consult either no-one or 100 people. From there they can start to unpack which things improve / degrade as they move the slider up and down the spectrum.
Build the sandwich
One key spectrum is the range of challenges and goals a client might prioritize. The focus can be top-down (ever more sophisticated versions of “what do I want to be when I grow up”) or bottom-up (“how do I solve problem X next week”). Wherever you start, the ultimate goal is to help these two conversations meet somewhere in the middle, bridging their long-term aspirations with their immediate challenges.
Start in the middle
Speaking of focus, good coaching is often inherently messy. As one of our clients put it, ‘before coaching, my thoughts often feel like a tangled mess of spaghetti, and working with you has been like having someone reach in and help pull out the really important strands that matter.’
As a coach, don’t fret too much about which thread you pull on first. Everything is generally connected to everything else. A client might start talking about an argument they had with a colleague over some aspect of product strategy. But, as you encourage them to step back, they might perceive that the argument stemmed from systematic differences in how they approach product goals. These differences might have arisen due to inconsistent standards on the team which have never been adequately addressed by their manager, who actually needs feedback about this. And so, by pulling on a thread about a minor argument, they end up thinking about the feedback culture on their team.
Meaning is a journey, not a destination
As you help your client to pull on threads, it’s helpful to establish goals to aim for. Inevitably, this is a conversation grounded in their sense of purpose. As such, it’s tempting to ask lots of direct questions about what matters most to them. Just remember that people often have to stumble into meaning by exploring, trying things and failing. Assuming people should ‘just know’ what’s important to them is a recipe for shame.
Focus on resolution
Perceived injustice is a common theme at the heart of many clients’ problems. Whether that perception is right or wrong, help them get to a solution rather than win a war. If someone feels betrayed because their manager hasn’t fairly assessed their performance, it might feel ‘just’ to rail against how unfair they feel their manager has been. It will be more effective, however, to have a direct conversation with the manager, talk about the disparity and unpack why they see things differently. To quote Stephen Fry, “I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective”.
Decomposition is key
A more general version of the same point is that people mostly understand the world narratively. This fact can be anything from empowering to debilitating (another spectrum). When someone’s internal stories are limiting their progress, ask them to decompose those stories into facts (impartial truths), inferences (conclusions built from the facts) and judgements (classifications based on the inferences). Then have them walk themselves back from judgements, through inferences to just the bare facts. What does that do to their confidence in their story?
Reach for the popcorn
One narrative constant is that life is often silly, sometimes absurd. Occasionally take a moment with your client to appreciate the circus. Recognize that sometimes we can’t make sense of the chaos and that acceptance is an important practice. It can take the sting out of things.
Embrace failure
Help your clients to embrace failure because it is all around us. Failure is often a source of shame for clients. There are myriad cultural and psychological reasons for this but that shame is almost always an unhelpful impulse. If your client can’t see failure as valuable, they can’t grow. Most / all of their other problems will have to wait until you can address that one together.
Play is the foundation of learning
The flip side of shameless failure is a playful, experimental attitude. Encourage the client to identify at least one new idea or behavior to play with by the end of every session. Aim to help clients stay in a state of 1% continuous improvement. To us, that’s one of the things that keeps things grounded in coaching versus veering into therapy territory.
Growth goal honesty is vital
How a person frames their most valuable growth opportunities is a complex mix of their wants, desires, strengths, weaknesses, inclinations, and the needs of others. Whatever emerges from this ‘soup’ of influences must feel genuinely motivational. We’ve seen so many personal growth plans that simply parrot what a manager has shared or what a peer group apparently expects. These plans do a real disservice to everyone, not least the owners, because they slow the rate of growth for the sake of growing the ‘right’ / ‘acceptable’ things. Put simply, growth plans should be personal, selfish and honest. Anything else is a wasteful PR exercise.
⚡️ Ready to take action?
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We’d love to hear your comments, questions and challenges on this topic….