You can’t walk somebody else’s body through a door, any more than you can experience insights on their behalf. Mindset shifts and new perspectives don’t happen by transplantation from one mind to another. All individuals need to home grow and cultivate their own wisdom trees. But a coach can help, and great coaches know the best way to seed such self-discovery is a well timed, powerful question. On this page, we curate, grow and prune a collection of high grade power questions.
Coaching people in your team is not that hard, but it’s misunderstood.
Coaching is not training, which is about transferring skills and knowledge – while coaching is about nurturing self-discovery.
Coaching is not managing, which is about pushing people to deliver results and outcomes – while coaching focuses on developing those people.
Coaching is not mentoring, where the mentor shares resources such as advice, support and a network – while in coaching the tapped resources are the coachee’s.
The purpose of coaching is to promote self-discovery. It’s about helping people go a little further along the path they are already traveling, overcoming an obstacle they currently face, using the knowledge and resources they already have.
A simple put powerful framework to structure a coaching discussion is GROW. You start by having the coachee describe the Goal they want to achieve – ideally not big and lofty, but pretty bite-size. Then you zoom in on their Reality, the thing they are wrestling with and want to get answers or advice on. Subsequently you work with them on the Options: what can or could they do? Sometimes this is a matter of making them see an invisible truth right in front of them, or challenge a limiting belief that only exists in their head. Finally W is for “Will” – if Options are what they could try, a successful coaching session ends with a statement of what they will do.
There’s plenty of questions. Many are obvious and will suggest themselves. Plus if you google around a bit, you can find many more. But to save you the trouble finding the crème-de-la-crème, the greatest hits – we’re collecting them for you in this Power Questions Hall of Fame.
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You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within.
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Power questions for the Goal (G) part of the GROW model
> If everything aligned perfectly and you got to where you want to be, what would you see, what would it look and feel like around you?
> If you succeeded beyond your wildest dreams, what is the single defining awesome thing for you that would characterize it a standout outcome?
> For you personally, what is the deeper meaning behind this goal?
Power questions for the Reality (R) part of the GROW model
> Can you describe more precisely what problem you are trying to solve?
> What have you learnt from the things you already tried?
> Of all the obstacles that you see, can we discuss which are external and which ones internal to you?
> What about the current situation is outside of your control, and what can you control? Of the things outside of your control, are there subparts that you can influence after all?
> Do you know other people who have been in the same situation? What did they do and how did it end?
Power questions for the Options (O) part of the GROW model
> If a team of Disney Imagineers workd on this, what might be some of the things they would experiment with? [a Navy SEALs team – Zen buddhist nuns in a monastery – a group of girl scouts with 1 million dollars]
> What would you do if failure was impossible?
> What would you secretly try if nobody ever knew about it?
> If you wanted to make this fail as badly as possible, what would you do?
> If you had to advise your own ten year younger self on this, what would be some tips you would give?
> How would Darth Vader do in this situation? [somebody on death row, the Dalai Lama…
> If you could call anybody in the world right now to help you with this or advise you, who could you call?
> if you had to solve the problem by taking things away instead of adding, where would you start?
> if you weren’t allowed to complain about this thing anymore, what action would you have to take?
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A great coach is not a guru. It’s simply someone who enables you to think, explore and discover what or where you currently are, what or where you want to be and how to get there.
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― Manie Bosma
Power questions for the Will (W) part of the GROW model
> Can you lay out for me what the sequence of next steps looks like to successful completion?
> On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to do this? What would it take to move it higher? And what to move it all the way to 10?
> Which three small things can you do within the next 1, 6 and 24 hours after this talk?
> If you email me a short update end of this week, what will you write to me?
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Well, I’m holding the match and I’m watching the flameMaking romance is a dangerous gameI have studied your signalsAnd I’m hip to your cuesWhich is why I’ve decided to use a slow fuse
There’s a smoldering explosionThat’s almost set to blowAnd I’ve got the plan here in my handAnd I thought you ought to know
That I’m holding the match and I’m watching the flameMaking romance is a dangerous gameI’ve studied your signalsAnd I’m hip to your cuesWhich is why I’ve decided to use a slow fuse
I won’t throw the match and run awayOr try to force the sparkI am perfectly content to waitAs this fuse burns toward your heart
……….bang
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Slow Fuse
Credits
Words
> Stefan Verstraeten
Ideas
> I learned the GROW framework while working at Procter & Gamble. According to Wikipedia, the term was coined by Max Landsberg and John Whitmore wrote about it in the 1992 book Coaching for Performance.
> Questions like “What would Darth Vader do?” heavily borrow from Edward de Bonbo’s Six Thinking Hats. In fact, using the thinking hats idea may be useful for coaching in its own right, but it’s probably more useful in a group setting as opposed to 1:1 coaching.
Photo
> Header – Cover photo of Heather Rigdon’s album Young & Naïve (2007)
> Burning Man 2013, by Julia Wolf, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
> Ed Stafford making a fire in the challenging reality of the Norwegian Arctic circle. From “Marooned with Ed Stafford” (Discovery Channel), Season 3 Episode 6
> Burning fuse from “How to tell if your fuse is blown”, by 4-star electric
Video
> Heather Rigdon, Slow Fuse.
