Coaching Essential: Questioning

Supportive Yet Challenging

Coaching conversations should be both supportive and challenging in a balance that invites the team member to create new options that they come up with themselves. The challenging part of a coaching conversation is there to stretch your team member’s thinking so that seeing things differently will encourage them to experiment and do something differently.

The skill in challenging is getting the balance just right so that the team member feels able to act without being too scared or unconfident because the proposed change is too difficult, or too comfortable to do anything because the action is too easy. This level of ‘stretch’ will create the best chance for their learning, increasing their confidence and their sustained improvement and success.

Initial questions

How does the team member feel about their issue?
- stuck/frustrated/scared (Is it too big? Very important?)
- supremely confident/bored (Is it too easy? Not meaningful?)
On a scale of 1 to 10 how confident does the team member feel about the next step?
- If it is less than 8, how motivated and engaged is the team member to take on the challenge?
What skills and resources do they have and how supported do they feel? By you? By others?
What have they done so far, that makes them hopeful? Where else have they done something similar and what worked then?

Challenging does not mean making the team member feel wrong, shamed or guilty, nor is it about offering a different view or solution they have not thought of or pushing them in a direction you think is important. It is about creating just enough discomfort (with an effective question or silence) to create the opportunity to stretch their thinking and therefore create options they have not considered before.

You also need to consider that someone with low self-esteem may
find a slight nudge really challenging, whereas someone else with lots of confidence may respond better to a question more strongly phrased.

For example, instead of saying “Won’t that be difficult given your home situation?” ask:

“What are the obstacles that you may need
to address here?”

or more gently

“How might that affect your home situation?”

Timing is also important. If you challenge too soon then your team member may disengage from the conversation, if you leave it too late you may have missed the moment they are most open to change.

The Scaling Framework

Taken from the solutions-focussed approach to coaching, this tool offers a basic structure for encouraging your team member to make small, but significant, movements.

The scale is not a measurement tool but a way of helping your team member talk through in a concrete and real way what is working and what success, and progress towards it, looks like. It is not about agreeing a score, and you do not have to agree with the number they give.