Do you find that your coaching sessions are more one-way because you are doing all of the talking? Does it feel like coaching isn’t working no matter how much time you spend with a particular employee? After hiring, coaching is the most important thing you will do in a given week. Using a combination of these coaching questions will help you have more meaningful coaching conversations.
The purpose of coaching is to draw out the ability, competence, and knowledge that will enable the coachee to effect changes that will result in improvement. Employees have hopes of achieving optimum performance and dream of advancing their careers. Coaching is where those hopes and dreams collide.
The best coaches guide people along the path by spending more time asking questions than they do giving answers. By coaching through questions, you are helping your employees improve performance, make better decisions, learn new skills, and reach their career goals. Using this technique also helps gain buy-in to the solutions because they are deciding what, how, and when.
Do you want to be the coach that tells others what to do or the coach that helps bring out the best in people?
Questions That Create More Meaningful Coaching Conversations
- What do you want to get out of this coaching session?
- What goal do you want to work on?
- What is the ultimate outcome and what are the benefits of achieving this goal?
- What steps have you taken towards meeting this goal?
- What progress has been met towards this goal?
- What has stopped you from achieving this goal so far?
- Who do you know that has achieved this goal and what have you learned from them?
- What are your options?
- On a scale of 1 to 10 how serious/urgent is this goal?
- What do you think you need to do to get a better result?
- How are you going to go about it?
- What has worked for you already and how could you do more of that?
- How will you know when you have done it?
- What obstacles could get in your way?
- What small step could you take to get started?
- When are you going to do that?
- What three actions would make sense for you to take this week?
Start weaving these questions into your coaching sessions to get you and your employee thinking differently about how coaching should work. Maximize your coaching sessions by asking more questions than you provide answers.
Last updated on August 8th, 2020 at 06:47 am
