The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever

Bungay Stanier insists it's perfectly possible to coach effectively and quickly, and "The Coaching Habit" shows you how. In the book, he distills coaching theory and practice into seven key questions, which you can incorporate into your daily interactions with your team members.

A coaching session doesn't need to take longer than 10 minutes, he says, and it can save you a lot of time in the long run, as your team members will grow in confidence and ability, and need less of your support.

"The Coaching Habit" is an essential read for anyone who wants coaching to be integral to their leadership. It's for leaders who have the courage and generosity to let go of their own desire for control, and want to witness their team members realizing their potential.

It won't necessarily be easy to embrace coaching as a habit. As a leader, you may be used to providing answers, and may wonder how you're adding value when you're mainly asking questions. But, hold tight and remember that developing the coaching habit is a win-win. Your team members benefit through learning and gaining wisdom and confidence, which can free up your time to work toward other goals.

Bungay Stanier is just the person to steer you through the process of forming the coaching habit. He's an Oxford University Rhodes Scholar who comes across as endearingly human. He tells us he once got completely lost on a hike, walking and climbing for hours, only to find he'd barely left the parking lot. It's comforting to know that this keynote speaker and bestselling author is imperfect – just like us. And he uses his less-than-perfect experiences to increase his self- knowledge and change his behavior for the better.

With clients including the United Nations, TD Bank and Kraft, his company, Box of Crayons, has trained more than 10,000 managers in practical coaching skills. So Bungay Stanier has both the insight and the teaching skills to guide us.

"The Coaching Habit" is crammed with tips and tools. In addition to the seven coaching questions, Bungay Stanier provides "question masterclasses," offering essential tips on using the coaching questions to best effect. Throughout the book there are links to further reading, podcasts and videos, so you can see and hear the coaching tools in action.

What the book gives us is a comprehensive learning experience. The text provides core knowledge and the links offer a springboard to further development.

You also get a chance to personalize your learning experience. After each coaching question is explained, you'll find a space called "Build Your New Habit Here," inviting you to reflect and write down your personal plan.

For instance, if you want to curb a tendency to offer advice during coaching sessions, write down what triggers this behavior and what you'd like to do instead. It's almost as if Bungay Stanier is sitting next to you – a reassuring, inspiring, yet persistent teacher.

So, keep listening to find out how you can coach someone in 10 minutes or less, why you should add the word "you" to your coaching questions, and when helping is decidedly unhelpful.

The book devotes one chapter to each of the seven questions. These should be read in sequence, because each one builds on the previous chapter. Once you've read the whole book, though, you can dip in and out in any order.

It's essential to read the introduction first, to understand how to change ingrained habits. As anyone who's ever tried to break a habit knows, this can be very difficult. The more we understand how habits are made and broken, the more likely we are to be able to control our own behavior, so don't skip this section.

The introduction also makes the case for adopting the coaching habit, providing context for the lessons in the rest of the book. For instance, coaching your team to be independent releases you to be more effective and creative – that's a huge motivator to embrace the practice.

So now you're keen to develop your new coaching habit, let's look at Chapter One and the first of the seven questions.

The book promises to show you how to coach in less than 10 minutes, so your opening coaching question needs to get the conversation happening fast. Bungay Stanier's Kickstart Question is: "What's on your mind?"

This question, used by tens of millions of people every day on Facebook, invites people to share what's important to them. It's open, makes no assumptions, and encourages autonomy. It elicits sharing about a project, a person, or even a pattern of behavior that means something to the person you're coaching – positive or negative.

The response may focus on performance, resolving a problem, developing the individual, or something else. However the coachee responds, this is a good place to start your coaching session.

So the Kickstart Question has you off to a flying start. But if you stop there – after this first response – you won't have explored what's troubling or exciting the coachee. You need to delve deeper, and that means employing what Bungay Stanier calls "the best coaching question in the world" – which is?

"And what else?"

At first sight, these three short words don't seem to deserve the accolade "the best coaching question in the world." But "And what else?" can lead directly to wisdom, insight and self-awareness, because answering it opens up more options and broadens the discussion.

Let's imagine you ask a team member the first question: What's on your mind? She tells you about a course of action she's thinking of taking. Don't leave it there. Ask, "What else could you do?"

You're then empowering her to come up with her own ideas, and preventing yourself from offering advice. To get even more options, repeat the question, but not more than five times, Bungay Stanier says, as that would be overkill.

So, you've asked the first two questions and you probably have several issues, problems or exciting challenges vying for attention. Now you need to get the person to identify what's really bothering her. This is where the Focus Question, "What's the real challenge here for you?" comes in. This forces her to be selective.

Note the words "for you" at the end of this question. Adding "you" to a question is powerful, as it forces people to focus on their own thoughts, needs and behavior, and encourages personal growth. A 1997 study found that adding "you" to the description of a math problem helped people figure out the answer more quickly and accurately. It makes people focus.

Chapter Four gives us the Foundation Question: "What do you want?" This may sound a bit blunt and, in context, you'll likely soften it by asking something like, "What do you want to gain from that activity?" Or, "What do you want from me?"

By asking this question, you're forcing your team member to be direct and honest about what she wants. It discourages ambiguity and passive aggressive or manipulative communication. Indirectly, it increases people's autonomy and indicates that you're treating them as equals. It's an honest, upfront question requiring an open, direct answer. In other words, it's adult-to-adult communication, which means you must also be clear and direct about what you want, if the conversation turns that way.

Through "The Coaching Habit," Bungay Stanier aims to help leaders reduce the frustration of overburdening themselves with too much work. This problem often arises when they are just a bit too helpful. He isn't suggesting that you don't ever help your team members, rather that you take a moment to consider the consequences of being helpful as a default response.

When you're overly helpful, you can end up with too much work on your plate. But, just as important, you also disempower the person you're supposed to be "helping." You're rescuing rather than helping. And rescuing creates victims who feel frustrated, and sometimes even persecuted, due to a lack of autonomy. At the same time, the rescuer feels frustrated too, because he's doing more than his fair share of work. It's not exactly a recipe for success.

But, not to worry. Chapter Five has the ultimate weapon to combat the urge to help: what the author calls the Lazy Question: "How Can I Help?" Now, at first glance this sounds like a simple offer to help, and therefore more of the same disempowering behavior we just discussed.

But what it actually does is force your team member to figure out what help she needs, and make a clear and direct request. So, she's doing the thinking, rather than you jumping in with your "help."

But, what if she asks for something impossible, or something you don't want to do? You have several options. You could offer a compromise. Or you could buy yourself some time by saying you'll consider the request and get back to her. Or you could even say "No." "No" is sometimes the perfect response.

Chapter Six deals with saying "No" in some detail. Most of us find it much easier to say "yes" than "no." But, "If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?" This is the strategic question at the heart of this chapter.

Given that we all have a limited amount of time and energy, we're inevitably saying "no" to something when we say "yes" to something else. The trick is to consider this, and ask more questions before committing to "yes" or "no."

So, if a colleague asks for your input on a project, ask for more information: How much input is he expecting? When is the deadline? Who has he already asked? Keep asking questions until you can give a clear "yes" or "no." By saying "yes" or "no" more slowly, you'll be able to identify what really matters for you and your team, and act accordingly.

The seventh and last of the coaching questions helps you end the coaching conversation effectively. You want to leave people knowing they've learned something and feeling pleased that they've had the conversation with you. The seventh question is, "What was most useful for you?"

This gives individuals an opportunity to reflect on their conversation with you and identify the value of what you discussed. Because the coachee is forced to reflect and generate the answer herself, the useful lessons are more likely to stick. As a bonus, she'll likely go away with positive thoughts about her coach too!

Although the questions are presented in the book as spoken prompts, they work just as well in written format. For instance, if you get a wordy email, ask the Focus Question. So, instead of spending ages responding to every point, reply with the short line: "There's a lot going on here. What's the real challenge for you?" This cuts straight to the chase.

Email isn't the usual forum for coaching, of course, and this example shows how Bungay Stanier intends these coaching questions to be used – as an integral part of your daily routine. Once you're familiar with them, you'll be able to figure out which works best in each situation, from regular scheduled coaching sessions to informal chats in the break room.

So, what's our last word on "The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever?"

Bungay Stanier delivers what he promises, with his seven easy-to-remember questions that may well make your coaching more effective. He explains how each question works and provides theory to back them up, further reading, and lots of examples – in written, podcast and video format.

The big idea behind "The Coaching Habit" is to encourage leaders to ask more questions, so that team members find their own solutions and grow through the process. And we feel the book provides useful tools to do just that. But, it may not be all plain sailing.

If coaching is new to your organization, you may meet resistance, because it involves change. As a leader, you may find adopting the coaching habit uncomfortable, since you're handing over power to team members. So we think the coaching habit will work best when leaders are fully committed to coaching and want a user-friendly strategy for developing it.

"The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever," by Michael Bungay Stanier, is published by Box of Crayons Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.