Top Questions Every Manager Should Know

One of the questions I hear all the time is, “So what are the best coaching questions for me as a manager and a leader?”

Tune into this podcast as I make the case for giving a little less advice and having a little more curiosity. I share:

• The three different types of questions and when they’re most powerful
• The importance of environment on focus
• Why mindfulness may be your best move

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Full Transcript

So, look, I get asked all the time, “So what are the best coaching questions for me as a manager and a leader?” And I’ve got some pretty strong opinions on that. But before I go and share with you what I think are some of the key coaching questions, let me pull you back to why you would even care about that. And one of the most influential articles I’ve read is by a guy called Daniel Goleman. You may know him. He’s most famously connected to the whole idea of emotional intelligence. He didn’t come up with that idea but he certainly popularized that idea. And he’s still an influential writer and thinker.

But way back when, in the year 2000, he wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review. It’s called “Leadership That Gets Results.” And this is based on research, and he came to find that there were six different leadership styles that tended to show up in organizations. And what was interesting is that each one of those leadership styles was useful, important and had an impact. The styles were things like visionary or democratic or pace-setting or commanding. And one of them was coaching.

Now, not only did they define the different leadership styles but they looked at the impact these different leadership styles had, and one of the interesting things I found about coaching, because, you know, at Box of Crayons we’re all about the coaching, they found that coaching was the least utilized of all leadership styles, even though it would have the most impact on employee engagement, an impact on culture and actually has a pretty significant impact on the bottom line as well.

Now, that was 15 years ago. Has anything changed? I’m going to say probably not a whole lot. Coaching is still a massively underutilized approach to leadership and management.

Now, part of what Goleman found is that good leadership, great leaders, know how to use all six leadership styles at the appropriate time. More typical leadership, more average leaders, use two, maybe three, different approaches. So here’s my wish for you, because my guess is you’re probably a manager or a leader and if you’re not now, maybe you’ll become that, I would love you to have more of the coaching mix in the way that you work. In other words, and this is kind of the fundamental behaviour shift that we stand for at Box of Crayons, I’d like you to give a little less advice, you know, be a little less the expert, and have a little more curiosity. Ask some more questions.

So that sets up nicely, doesn’t it, for you to ask me, say, “Michael, okay, if that’s the case, what are the questions I should be asking?” Well, there’s actually lots and lots of great questions out there and in fact, one of the things I’m going to direct you to right now is actually a series, a video series, we’ve been doing at Box of Crayons separate to this one called My One Best Question. And rather than me just going, “Oh, what do I think are the best questions?”, I’ve asked thought leaders and executive coaches and managers and leaders, probably just like you, what are their one best question.

So one of the things that you can do is go to the Box of Crayons website, boxofcrayons.biz, B-I-Z, or B-I-Z [pronounced like zee], and actually look for the one best question series under the Resources tab. And there’s going to be at least—I’m going to say at least 80 questions there that you can tap into and make the most of. So go there first of all and see which questions other people like so you can pull the ones you like the best.

The second thing I want to do is just talk about three different types of questions, the what, the how and the why, and when they’re most powerful. ***5.11 left. not what I’m saying at all. I’m just really trying to emphasize the fact that multitasking is a distraction and you’re kidding yourself if you think you’re being effective and efficient when you multitask.

The second thing I would say to you is this: If you want to not multitask, if you want to maintain your focus, stop relying on willpower to do that, but use your environment to make it easy for you. So when you sit down to do a task, how will you arrange your environment so that you are not distracted? What will you put away? What will you put in a drawer? What doors will you shut? How will you remove yourself from the pathway of people of people stopping in to talk to you, and hide yourself in a corner?

I remember reading Chip and Dan Heath when they were writing one of their books. They went out and bought a laptop that had no WiFi, so they couldn’t actually access the internet, so that they could stay focused on writing their books. It’s one of those just key insights about change and self-management that if you want to do things differently, if you’re trying to rely on your willpower, you’ll almost certainly fail. You need to align your environment so that it encourages you to behave the way that you want. If you want more focus, arrange your environment so that it is less distracting for you.

The third deal I’d offer up here is just to get clear around your great work and what your great work project is. When you’re connected to great work, the work that has more meaning, the work that has more impact, you got more of a drive to actually focus on the thing that matters, and that’s going to work. But I’m not going to linger on this because the truth is it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing great work or good work, you still need to be able to bring a focus to it.

And that brings me to my fourth and final point around here, which you’ve heard me say perhaps in other podcasts, which is the power of a mindfulness practice. That could be meditation; it could be something else. But there’s so much science now that says those people with a mindfulness practice are better able to focus, have high emotional intelligence, they like themselves more, they like other people more. It really is a silver-bullet practice. So if you want to build your focus muscle, a mindfulness practice, that’s 5 or 10 minutes every morning, get an app, there’s tons of them out there, download one that you like—will actually help bring a sense of focus.

You know, when we talk about great work we actually say there are three core attributes you need to do more great work. There’s focus, there’s courage and there’s resilience. Resilience is to keep going when things get tough. Courage is a willingness to start the great work. But focus, focus is the starting point. And if you can’t bring focus to the work that you do, you’re never going to truly flourish in this chaotic and complicated world.

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ABOUT MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER & BOX OF CRAYONS

Michael Bungay Stanier is the Senior Partner and Founder of Box of Crayons, a company that helps people and organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. They're best know from their coaching programs that give busy managers the tools to coach in 10 minutes or less.

Download free chapters of Michael's latest book The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever here.

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