How to Coach Your Employees to Solve Their Own Problems

How do I coach my employees?

If you like improv comedy shows, you already know how.

Just follow one rule: Don’t ask any yes or no questions.

Improv comedy is based on little rules, like the yes game.

In the yes game, you have to say “yes, and” to everything, or react positively to it.

For instance:?

“Doctor, my baby has two heads!”

“Yes, and that’s because two heads are better than one.”

Coaching your employees is like that.

But instead of a “yes, and” rule, there’s the “don’t ask any yes or no questions” rule.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

You see, coaching’s about asking open-ended questions.

Any question’s fair game, so long as it can’t be answered yes or no.

Let me give you some examples.

Say you’re coaching a team member having trouble getting cooperation from an outside vendor on a project.

You’d ask some open-ended questions like these:

• What’s going on?
• How is this affecting the project?
• How is this affecting you personally?
• What have you tried?
• What happened?
• What other ideas do you have?
• What will you do to fix the problem?
• How can I play a supporting role? (Don’t get stuck solving problems for your team!)

Increase Their Self-Reliance

There are a ton of good reasons to ask open-ended questions like these, but let me just give you three. Open-ended questions:

• Get you more, and better, information.
• Make your team members feel valued and appreciated.
• (Here’s the gold mine!) Make your team members more self-reliant so you’re freed up to grow the business.

Ask Permission

One last thing: Ask permission.

To understand why, think how you’d feel if someone all of a sudden completely changed how he relates to you.

No warning—yesterday your boss interrogated you with rapid-fire yes/no questions, and today they’re taking their time, asking you all these open-ended questions.

You’d be taken aback.

You’d be wary.

You’d wonder if this is a new “lay ‘em off easy” style he learned from The Bobs. (“What would you say you do here?”)

You’d feel bad.

You don’t want your team members to feel bad.

So ask permission to try coaching conversations with them.

Here’s what you say:

“I want to help, and I’d like to try a new technique I learned.

"It’s called active inquiry, and it involves me asking a bunch of open-ended questions so we can figure out what’s going on and figure out how I can support you in figuring out your own solution and acting on it.

"What would you think of trying that?”

Notice that’s not a yes/no question.

Next-Level Questions

1. The Kickstart Question: What’s on your mind?
2. The AWE Question: And what else?
3. The Focus Question: What’s the real challenge here for you?
4. The Foundation Question: What do you want?
5. The Lazy Question: How can I help?
6. The Strategic Question: If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?
7. The Learning Question: What was most useful for you?

These questions come from the best coaching skills manual out there, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by ?? Michael Bungay Stanier .?