16. Coaching Questions That Elevate Your Team’s Thinking

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Welcome to the August series! This month we’re focusing on improving your leadership communication.

For the last 3 months, I’ve had the pleasure of coaching some strong women on their communication and leadership skills. Some of these women are leaders managing teams of various sizes, and others have the goal of becoming leaders within the next 6-12 months.

We work on various skills regarding how they come across as leaders and how they communicate and lead their teams to grow and thrive in seemingly challenging situations.

Today we’re talking about a question one of my group coaching clients asked recently. Her question was:

• How can I ensure that I coach my new team instead of constantly solving their problems or always telling them what they need to do?

We had a rich group conversation on what coaching is and what it is NOT. Often people use coaching and mentoring interchangeably, but they are different. 

While mentorship describes a relationship in which a more knowledgeable or experienced person guides and cultivates the professional development or growth of another, coaching focuses on helping the coachee unlock their own potential. The coach doesn’t typically provide answers but coaxes and supports the coachee to solve their own problems.

Mentorship plays an essential role in the growth of team members, but it typically falls outside the purview of the manager/subordinate role. I believe informal coaching is the way to go if you manage a team and want to help them grow and thrive.

Sometimes, simply asking someone a few questions can help them get unstuck and find a solution to a particular problem or how to approach a seemingly daunting task or project. 

In this episode of the Communicate to Lead podcast, I’m offering you some dynamic coaching questions that you can use to help your team improve their performance, solve problems and make better decisions. You can also use these questions to help them learn a new skill or achieve their career goals.

Some things to keep in mind before we get into the coaching questions are:

• Coaching is not about telling your team what to do.
• Focus on solutions, not problems, when coaching one of your team members.
• Keep in mind that when coaching someone, it’s about them, not you. 
• Before the coaching conversation, ask yourself what you need to do to have a productive session.
• Don’t be afraid of silences.
• Don’t be afraid to encourage your coachee to delve deeper into their thoughts.
• Help them deepen their thinking with a few simple questions.

In the rest of the episode, we dive into 20 different coaching questions that you can use any time you want to help someone get unstuck or elevate their thinking. 

Grab pen and paper and prepare to jot down helpful questions you can implement immediately. I know because I’ve offered these same questions to my coaching clients, and I always get feedback that the questions worked!

If you found this episode helpful, email me at [email protected] and let me know what you found most beneficial or how your coaching conversations are going.

Connect with Kele:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetailoredapproach/ 

Website: https://thetailoredapproach.com