Michael Bungay Stanier
Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder of Box of Crayons, a company that teaches 10-minute coaching to busy managers. He is the author of the Wall Street Journal’s bestseller The Coaching Habit, the number one coaching book since its release. He is a Rhodes Scholar, and a member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. An Australian, he now lives in Toronto, Canada.
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I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Great tools and models have an elegant simplicity to them. They provoke a paradoxical response at the same time: both, I’ve never seen it like that before and Of course, it has to be like that. The periodic table and Darwin’s theory of natural selection are great examples of this. Marshall Goldsmith’s Feed forward process1 and Peter Drucker’s Five Questions2 are examples in the world of leadership.
My goal is for coaching to be a practical tool for all managers, so I’m seeking the simplicity that lives on the other side of complexity in this discipline.
And there’s a lot of complexity. Many hold the perception that coaching is a confusing, complex, arcane, and slightly touchy feely process that only HR types and people from California can master. It’s frustrating. There’s an increasing amount of evidence from both neuroscience and large-scale leadership studies that points to coaching as one of the essential leadership skills. Yet, progress is slow in having managers and leaders actually get better at coaching.
But it doesn’t have to be so. I’ve seen glimpses of coaching’s fundamental elegance and simplicity. One commitment and a few good questions are often all you need to be an effective coach, not just to people you manage and lead, but to everyone with whom you work.
Let’s start with the definition of coaching. There’s no one clear definition of what we mean by coaching, and that means many different options have sprouted and proliferated over the years. Every expert has theirs. Every niche has theirs. Every coach has theirs. They’re all similar, they’re all a little different, and it all gets confusing.
Let me cut the Gordian knot. The coaching cycle is simple. A good question creates a new insight. That insight sparks action and behavior change. That behavior change leads to increased impact. Learning from that impact takes us back to a new insight. The virtuous cycle repeats.
That’s how coaching works. The behavior that makes coaching coaching is even more straightforward to explain: Stay curious a little longer; rush to action and advice-giving a little more slowly.
It’s as simple and as difficult as that.
To put that theory into action, here are four simple strategies that can help all managers and leaders lift their leadership game and improve the way they work with others.
Peter Block, the celebrated author of The Answer to How Is Yes3 and Flawless Consulting,4 once said, “Coaching is not a profession but a way of being with each other.” The power in that statement is that it makes coaching something that we all can do. It’s not for a few. It’s for everyone.
But the term coaching comes with baggage. Some think about the proliferation of Life Coaching, with the occasional tendency to overdo feelings and pastels. Some go to Executive Coaching and think it’s all about high-powered conversations in the corner office. Others may go to sports coaching, or ADHD coaching, or teen coaching, or mid-life coaching or – the list goes on. Whatever the reason, too many people assume this being a coach lark is not for me.
Reframing can make all the difference. Let’s talk about our goal not as being a coach, but simply as being more coach-like. Now the pressure’s off. This doesn’t require an identity shift, but a behavior change. It’s simply a way of changing what you currently do, not adding on additional burdens and expectations. And what does being more coach-like even mean? As before, simply staying curious a little longer, and rushing to action and advice-giving a little more slowly.
Most of us know that questions are the currency of coaching. Clayton Christensen5 said, “Without a good question, a good answer has nowhere to go.” The best coaching allows those good answers to show up, often, wonderfully enough, to the surprise of the person speaking the answer.
Some of us have already heard of the difference between open and closed questions. Closed questions – those targeted to get an answer of yes or no – are the weapon of every cross-examining lawyer. Open questions, on the other hand, force the person answering to work a little harder and fill in the details. Traditional coaching tends to pooh-pooh the closed question, but the truth is that both can be very useful, although on balance, you want to use open questions more often.
But that’s not what I mean by fake questions.
Fake questions sound like this: “Have you thought of …?” and “Did you consider …?” and “Have you tried …?” or even “What about …?”
These, in fact, are not questions at all. They’re just advice with a question mark attached.
You’ll remember that the goal is to stay curious a little longer and rush to action and advice-giving more slowly. The truth is, most of us are advice-giving machines. We’ve been trained, praised, and rewarded all our lives for having the answer. This is how you add value. Even when you don’t really know what the challenge is, you’ve probably got a solution to suggest anyway.
Some of us have become a little more cunning about the way we offer up our advice, and have learned to package our ideas as seeming questions. But let’s stop kidding ourselves and begin to practice asking real questions. (I’ll tell you the best coaching question in the world in a little bit.)
Those of us who’ve done some sort of training in coaching have most likely run into the concept of active listening. In fact, for many of us, that’s the only remaining residue left over from the training: Nod your head a lot, make small grunt-y noises of encouragement, and look interested.
The shame is, most of us have moved into FAL: Fake Active Listening. Sure, you’ve got the moves down. Nodding, uh-huh-ing, maintaining eye contact. But are you really listening to your client? Not so much. Running through your head is not their words, but yours: “How long are they going to keep talking?” “What’s the next question I should ask?” “When can I interrupt and tell them what my idea is?” “Did I leave the stove on when I left the house this morning?”
It’s difficult and powerful to stay present and hear what they’re actually saying. To listen without feeling the need to interrupt or make your point or add value by telling them what to do.
We talked about asking real questions, not fake questions. Now you might ask me, “Michael, that’s all very well, but what are good coaching questions?”
Well, there are many, and one of the smartest things you can do is to start collecting your favorites. When you hear someone ask a good question to someone they’re coaching – say, “What’s the real challenge here for you?” – you might note how it slowed down the rush to action and dug a little deeper into figuring out what the heart of the issue was. Jot it down! Or when another coach asks, “What do you want?” and you notice how that slows the conversation down and creates a moment of honesty and vulnerability and insight, you make a note to try this technique out for yourself.
But there is one question that rules them all, the best coaching question in the world.
It’s just three words. And it’s literally awe-some.
The question is: “And what else?”
What’s the magic of this question? It’s twofold. To start, the first answer someone gives you is never their only answer and it’s rarely their best answer. “And what else?” helps them keep going and untap all that’s in their head. They’ve got more to tell you. This gives them the chance to do that.
The other reason is that it’s a self-management tool. To repeat myself and drive home the point, we’re trying to stay curious a little longer and rush to action and advice-giving just a little more slowly. For the most part, however, we’re not that good at this form self-control. Having “And what else?” in your repertoire is a tool to help you bite your tongue. Instead of giving them that burning answer you’re desperately keen to tell them, that nugget of gold, that pearl of wisdom – hold off for just a moment. Ask them, “And what else?” instead.
Coaching is simple and it’s elegant.
If you want to, you can spend months and thousands training to be a coach. And no doubt, you’ll pick up some powerful and useful tools when you do. But you don’t have to. Everything you need to be more coach-like is right here on this page:
Do all of that, and you’ll change the way you lead forever.