Review: The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier

One of those business books that would’ve been better as a blog post. The core ideas here are valuable, and definitely worth reading, but they are padded out with cheesy business writing, and include too many prompts to go to their website (ostensibly to watch videos, but in reality, to upsell you some consulting).

Here are the ideas I found useful:

Ask more questions.

The goal of this book is to help you become a better manager by borrowing techniques from coaching. In particular, the key idea is that sometimes, as a manager, you get far better results from asking questions than from providing answers or advice.

“This is why, in a nutshell, advice is overrated. I can tell you something, and it’s got a limited chance of making its way into your brain’s hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds increase substantially.”

The book recommends 7 questions that most managers will find useful in a variety of situations.

Question 1: The Kickstart Question – What’s on your mind?

This is a good way to start any conversation. The goal with this question is to strike a balance between being open and being focused: you don’t want to be so open as to meander into pointless small talk, but you also don’t want to lead the conversation so much that you totally miss the real reason your colleague came to talk to you. “What’s on your mind” typically gets to the heart of the issue quickly.

Question 2: The AWE Question – And what else?

When you ask someone a question, the first answer you get often isn’t right or isn’t the best that person can do. Asking the AWE question is a way to get the person to consider other options and often leads to better results. For example, if someone describes a problem to you, and they have only come up with a single solution to it, ask them, “and what else can you think of?” The book quotes some research that found that ~71% of business decisions were made from between just two choices; adding just a single extra choice cut the failure rate in half.

It’s important to let people fully speak their minds and not assume you know the right answer before they are done talking. Don’t jump in right away and start providing advice. Instead, ask AWE and wait. Often, the person you’re talking to will have already thought of the answer you had in mind, and there are reasons it won’t work.

Question 3: The Focus Question – What’s the real challenge here for you?

The first thing someone tells you about may not be the real problem: it might be a symptom or a side effect or a total distraction. Asking “what’s the real challenge here for you” helps to ensure that you’re actually solving the right problem. This is especially useful if someone is listing dozens of problems or speaking in abstractions and generalizations. Say something like, “you listed a number of challenges, but if you had to pick one to solve, which one would be the key challenge for you?”

Question 4: The Foundation Question – What do you want?

This question helps focus the conversation on what really matters and the outcome the other person may want. In a sense, you are prompting them to make a request.

Question 5: The Lazy Question – How can I help?

As a manager, you you don’t need to solve every problem yourself or even know how to solve every problem yourself. If you’re always the rescuer, your team members become victims, always relying on you to do everything.

This question allows you to be lazy. Or, even more accurately, it allows you to understand what role the other person wants you to play: do they just need someone to listen? Are they looking for support or encouragement? Do they need guidance? Are they seeking permission?

The idea is to ask the other person what they want you to do. You can soften it a bit, too: e.g., “out of curiosity, what did you want me to do here?” Note that you don’t have to say yes to their request!

Also, watch out for responses that try to draw you in to do the work. For example, if someone says, “How do I XXX?” instead of jumping into advice mode, you could respond with, “I have some thoughts on this, but what sort of help are you looking for?”

Question 6: The Strategic Question – If you are saying Yes to this, what are you saying No to?

You need to fully to understand what you’re being asked to commit to before committing. Be curious. Don’t just say “yes” to please someone; be slow and deliberate with your yesses. What does being fully committed to this look like? If you say yes to this project, what other projects don’t get done? What people need to be diverted? What patterns or habits do you have to change? Why are you asking me? Who else have you asked? What does urgent mean? If I could only do one of these N things on my plate, which ones should I say no to?

Question 7: The Learning Question – What was most useful for you?

People don’t learn by listening, or even doing. They learn by reflecting. So it’s important to close the loop and force this sort of reflection.

The science on learning shows that people remember advice very poorly. However, you can vastly improve retention by having someone recall the answer themselves.

This question gets people to reflect and recall, significantly improving learning, and helping to improve your conversations over time.

Example script

• What’s on your mind?
• Is there anything else on your mind?
• What’s the real challenge here for you?
• Is there anything else?
• Ah, OK, so then what’s the real challenge here for you?
• How can I help with this?
• If say yes to this, what are you saying no to?
• What was most useful to you about this conversation?

Use what more than why

In a coaching conversation, if you ask someone why they did something, that can often be interpreted as a judgmental question along the lines of, “what on earth were you thinking?” Therefore, try to find a way to use what to get at that person’s motivation instead. Examples:

• Instead of “why did you do that?” ask “what were you hoping to achieve?”
• Instead of “why did you think this was a good idea?” ask “what made you choose this course of action?”
• Instead of “why are you bothering with this?” ask “what’s important for you here?”

Coaching for performance vs coaching for development

“Coaching for performance is about addressing and fixing a specific problem or challenge. It’s putting out the fire or building up the fire or banking the fire. It’s everyday stuff, and it’s important and necessary. Coaching for development is about turning the focus from the issue to the person dealing with the issue, the person who’s managing the fire. This conversation is more rare and significantly more powerful.”

Rating: 4 stars