The Hudson Institute of Coaching, my coaching certification alma mater’s director, Pam McLean, Ph.D., recently wrote about, ‘ASK MORE, TELL LESS’, giving insights into Coaching Skills for leaders.
Skills of a great coach include using – emotional intelligence, able to provide feedback, capable of creating strong working relationships, comfortable challenging the thinking of another, willing to ‘speak the truth’ when it’s most important, and the list goes on. The question is which coaching skills might a leader adopt to get the best results in these all-important human interactions.
A good starting point is in the fundamentals of inquiry – the questions we ask and the way we ask these questions, along with the timing and the setting. We often encourage leaders to adopt the mantra of: “Ask more and tell less.” Sounds simple enough, right?
The refrain of most leaders when asked about their tell-ask ratio goes something like this:
- “people expect me to have the answers”, or
- “It takes too much time to coach, so instead I find myself often telling my people what to do”, or
- “I’ve been in this organization for a long while and there is very little I haven’t seen – so sharing my perspective often seems like the most efficient approach to take”.
What research tells us though, is that the ‘telling’ approach often leads to repeat telling and ultimately renders us much less effective in engaging in meaningful coach-like conversations that promote change.
Pam continues to explain, that leadership guru, Jim Collins says it well when he writes in Good to Great:
- “The great leaders in our studies all asked lots of questions. They were Socratic.
- By asking questions, they got the brutal facts, as well as lots of insights and ideas.”
- Collins reminds us that if a leader wants to create a climate of trust in which truth is heard it requires a leader to ‘increase one’s ‘questions-to-statements ratio’.
Leaders who increase their questions-to-statements ratio are doing several things at once:
- Empowering their people to come up with their own solutions to problems; increasing a collaborative environment; encouraging innovative thinking;
- And very likely, creating the sort of environment where people want to work at their best.
- Remembering that the quality of questions matters (we all know well what a ‘leading question’ sounds like).
Big Hint / Idea from Alysia:
Use some of Pam’s questions / ideas, when asking questions:
SIMPLE HIGH QUALITY ASKS
- What is your perspective?
- Before I tell you what I might do, how about your own thoughts on this?
- Have you encountered this problem before? What did you do that worked?
- Any other ways of approaching this situation?
- What would be the best possible outcome for you?
- Any sense of what you could change in your approach that would get you better results?