The best managers ask more questions.

The Leader Lab cites a study which found that great managers ask five times more questions than average ones: 10 questions in a 15 minute conversation. You might know the benefit of questions from your own experience. Managers who default to asking questions rather than telling you what to do help you unlock your best thinking.

Why coaching is better for managers

Hopefully by now, you are convinced that coaching is good for the coachee. It gives them space to think more deeply, using the knowledge and context they have from being closest to the problem. It also stretches their skills and thinking in a way that is great for their development. And most people find it really motivating to have their own perspectives and insights taken more seriously.

A coaching approach to management also benefits the manager directly. It’s a huge relief not to need all the answers all the time.

The more people you manage, the more true this is, especially if your team represents a wide range of disciplines. Early on in management, you might just be able to get away with knowing enough about your report’s roles to have an opinion on any question they might bring to you. But the more senior you are, the more likely it is that their problems will be out of your range of expertise.

Your team should also have a broader set of relationships than any one person, even you. And frankly, your organisation probably has a whole range of systems that it’s not worth your time learning. Let each of your team be an expert in their own individual area. You don’t need to be an expert in it all!

Taking more of a coaching approach equips your team to act without as much input from you, freeing you up to concentrate on other things.

Using coaching skills in one-to-ones

You might feel a little weird changing your approach to your conversations with your line reports. If so, tell them! Managers who demonstrate that they are continuing to learn and take risks make it easier for their teams to do the same. Explicitly saying that you are learning about coaching and you will be trying to ask more questions will make it easier for both of you to act differently.

You also might find you need to slow down a bit in order to not immediately jump in with the answers. I find it helpful to have some go-to questions ready to draw on if someone comes to me with a problem – the questions I wrote about in my last blog work great for this.

Occasionally you’ll find that your reports come up with an answer that you disagree with. This really will be occasional – it’s happened maybe once for me in many years of coaching teams. Even then, once I asked more questions I understood where my report was coming from better and could see some merits in her approach.

If this happens to you, resist the urge to immediately bat the idea down. Ask more questions, making sure your report has a clear idea of their goal and the options before them. If you still disagree and it’s important, ask if you can give your own perspective. Getting permission before giving your own answer signals that you still value the other person’s thinking, you just have some additional insights to consider.

One of the biggest benefits of coaching is that saying our thoughts out loud makes them more concrete. This allows us to make connections and find unexpected insights. The manager as coach can help with this by summarising where it seems useful:

• ‘To recap, such and such has happened and you need to decide what to do next.’
• ‘It sounds like you’re torn between x and y, is that right?’
• ‘You’ve spoken about a, b and c – what’s the biggest problem here?’

Often when we’re facing a problem, our thoughts about it can be quite muddled. If you notice someone going off in lots of different directions, getting distracted by less relevant points, summarising can be really helpful. It’s particularly useful when someone’s talked about several options they could consider but not looked at them side by side yet. Recapping that they’ve mentioned a, b and c makes it much easier for them to choose between them, or to realise they need to look at other approaches.

One of the advantages you have as a manager is that you have an ongoing relationship with your reports. This means you can help them make connections with things they’ve said previously, in a way that a more formal, less frequent coach might not be able to do. So if you’ve noticed they keep bringing the same problem to your 121s, or they keep wishing they had learned a particular skill, share what you have observed.

Do you take a coaching approach to management? What works for you?

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