This Is How the Best Bosses Coach Their Teams

The difference between coaching and feedback.

Your boss walks into your office, sits down, cocks his head to one said, and says, “Hey, can I give you some feedback?” How do you feel at that moment? What kind of emotional response does this question elicit for you?

Most of us aren’t particularly looking forward to what comes next. On the contrary, most of us are probably bracing for impact. Perhaps this is because feedback is backward-looking and corrective which doesn’t leave much room for growth, or exploration, or possibility.

Your team is no different. They don’t want feedback; They want attention.

They want you to meet them where they are, sit alongside them to see things from their perspective, and then help them figure out how to adjust what they’re doing to achieve better outcomes. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Your people want coaching. While feedback is retrospective, coaching is preparative. It involves less telling and more questioning.

And just like your team wants you to help them figure out how to get better, I suspect you are interested in how to be a better coach. Because we know coaching is good, but we don’t always know how to do it if no one has ever modeled it for us.

Michael Bungay Stanier lays out a framework for how to have coaching conversations in his book, The Coaching Habit. In the book, he lays out 7 coaching questions designed to help leaders intentionally stay curious longer. Today we’re going to explore the first 3 questions.

Why? Because in his words, “the first 3 questions can combine to become a robust script for any coaching conversation.”

Here are the questions and how to use them.

The kickstart question

“What’s on your mind?”

Just like every story needs an introduction, every conversation needs an opening line or ice-breaker. But, asking an employee, “what’s on your mind?” is not just any question. It is slyly strategic.

This question is open enough that it grants your team member autonomy to guide the conversation whichever way they’d like, while also being focused on cutting right to the chase and getting after what matters most to them. Because it’s not about you, remember?

From there, Stanier recommends using the 3P model to focus in on the particular coaching conversation you’re about to have and clarify exactly which element of the problem is in question.

Once they’ve shared what’s on their mind, simply say, “So, there are three sides of [insert problem] that we can look at here — people, project, or patterns. Where do you want to start?”

• The project side is anything to do with the work itself.
• The people side is anything involving other humans. This could be colleagues, clients, vendors, etc.
• The patterns side is anything the team member might be doing to get in their own way and sabotage their success.

“It doesn’t matter which one they pick,” Stanier says. Each of the three (3) will lead to a robust conversation that gets to the heart of what’s on the employee’s mind.

Once they pick, let them talk.

The AWE question

“And what else?”

Eventually, your employee will run out of things to say about the problem. Once they do, simply ask, “And what else?” In fact, ask it more than once.

Stanier says he typically asks it at least three times, and rarely more than 5 times. “As a general rule, people ask this question too few times rather than too many,” he says.

This question slows you down and holds you back from giving advice too soon. That’s important because too many leaders are too quick to jump into advice-giving and problem-solving mode.

While advice-giving might feel good and helpful to you in the moment, it doesn’t teach your team members how to solve problems for themselves. In fact, all it really does is ensure that they will forever come to you with problems rather than solutions. And, frankly, that doesn’t serve you or them.

Once your team member says, “there is nothing else,” then it’s time to move on to our third and final coaching question.

The focus question

“What’s the real challenge here for you?”

Notice that we’re not just asking what the challenge is. The focus question helps us further hone in on the exact reason why this is a problem for them. It pinpoints the specific struggle the employee is having and challenges them to self-reflect and put that struggle into words.

When we jump into problem-solving before we have a complete understanding of the issue from the employee’s point of view, we tend to solve the part of the problem that we assume they are struggling with which may or may not be accurate.

I did this more times than I care to admit early in my leadership career. And you and I both know what they say about making assumptions…

At this point, you’ll have a pretty clear picture of the situation at hand and the precise element that your team member is struggling with. You’ve met them where they are and have taken the time to see things from their perspective.

Now, you’re ready to help them figure out how to explore their options and adjust what they’re doing to achieve better outcomes.

To do this, you might try using variations of the AWE question to guide the employee through the problem-solving process in real-time but without giving them the answers.

When you’re coaching someone through choosing their next step in a project, you can try asking “and what else could you try doing?”

When you’re preparing someone to have a difficult conversation, you could try asking, “and how else might the recipient interpret that feedback?”

The possibilities are endless.

In haiku form, Stanier urges leaders to:

Talk less and ask more.

Your advice is not as good

As you think it is.

In the end, the best bosses will always ask more questions and give fewer answers.

Are you interested in becoming a stronger leader?

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