Since I became a Tech Lead Manager, I have been holding weekly 1:1s with my reports. While I had unofficially acted as a TLM for sometime now, the formality of my new title brought a whole new sense of responsbility. At the beginning, whenever my reports came to me with an issue, I felt an urge to come up with a perfect answer. “What’s the point of me being manager if I could not solve my reports’ issues?” I figured. Sometimes, I knew the answer. Lots of time, however, my limited knowledge left me clueless. A couple weeks ago, a report of mine asked me how to best balance between breadth and depth of knowledge. I had been struggling to answer that same question for a while myself. I ended up giving a variant of TBU (True but useless) answers.

Initially, I blamed my limitation and tried hard to learn as much as I could so I could answer any quesiton coming my way. Nonetheless, any experienced manager would know that that was a losing strategy. A single person could not possibly know everything. Moreover, it is neither the manager’s reponsibility nor good for the report to have a ready answer to every quesiton. When I shared this problem with my mentor, she told me that instead of providing answer everytime, especially if I don’t have a good one, I should guide my reports to reach answer themselves by asking more questions. In other words, I should say less and ask more. She recommended me a book called “The Coaching Habit,” which she said would help me understand this approach.

“The Coaching Habit” is a short book, only slighly more than a hundred pages. What sets it apart from the sea of other leadership books is its focus on practicality. Instead of providing another theoretical, academic approach to coaching, the book offers very concrete, actionable advices. At its core, the book advocates that asking questions is a more effective coaching method than giving advices. One step further, it gives the reader 7 questions to ask to up-level people around.

  • What's on your mind? - The kickstart question. It avoids small talk, ossified agenda. It is open but also focused to what matters most. You can use the 3P framework - project, people, pattern - to focus the answer of the kickstart question.
  • And what else? - invite more options. Be careful not to invite too many options, 3 to 5 is good enough.
  • What's the real challenge here for you? - The focus question. It prevents you from jumping right into the solving mode but for the wrong issue, the secondary, symptom issue. It also makes the issue focused, down-to-earth and personal, avoids the “coaching the ghost” issue of gossiping about a third person.
  • What do you want? - The foundation question.
  • How can I help? - The lazy question. It forces people to make a clear request, and forces you from thinking you know how to best help.
    • Say “That’s a great question. I’ve got some ideas, which I will share with you. But before I do, what are your first thoughts?” to question like “How do I…?, “What do you think I should do about…?” to avoid jumping right into advice monster mode.
  • If you are saying yes to this, what are you saying no to? - The strategic question. Saying yes more slowly means being curious.
  • What was most useful for you - The learning question. It allows the other person to reflect upon the discussion.
    • Other variants include “What have you learned since we last met?,” “What did you learn?,” “What were the key insights?”

The book also offer some other tips to ask question effectively:

  • There are two types of coaching, coaching for performance and coaching for development. Coaching for performance is about addressing a specific challenge while coaching for development is about growing a person.
  • Three archetypal roles - Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer - each one as unhelpful and dysfunctional as the other.
  • Stop offering advice with a question mark attached like “Have you thought of …?,” “What about …?”
  • Start with "What" rather than "Why" question because it puts people in defensive mode.
  • Ask just one question at a time and then be quiet waiting for the answer. Quiet is a sign of success. It means that the other person has to think and ponder.
  • Acknowledge a reply by saying Yes, that's good

One important topic that the book does not cover is how to measure the effectiveness of coaching. What heuristic should a coach rely on to know whether his coaching is effective or not?

Nonetheless, I like the book’s advices. It makes me realize that I fitted the advice monster prototype that the book advices against. Giving advice, even the wrong one, creates a comfortable feeling while asking question invites more ambuguity. A good coach needs to be ok with that ambiguity. In the next few months, my goal will be to try out these coaching questions and see how far it take me.