Appendix C
QUESTIONS FOR CLIENTS
This Appendix contains examples of questions that you can ask your clients at various stages throughout the coaching process. You will recognize them as the questions that are embedded throughout the chapters and stories of this book. They are not meant as a prescription or recipe for conversations with executives. They are intended as a stimulus to your thinking as you customize your conversations with clients.
All of these questions are intended to inspire ownership and resilience in your client. Use whichever ones you find helpful to get you started in the conversation. Ultimately, you will create your own questions, which will engage both your resourcefulness and the resilience of the leaders with whom you work. You may wish to create your own list of questions that you find useful in coaching sessions.
Contracting
What business challenges do you face?
Have you met this challenge successfully before?*
What is your best thinking about this issue?*
What are the barriers to surmounting the same kind of challenge this time?*
Note: Questions marked with an asterisk are excerpted, adapted, and used with the permission of Rob Schachter, from “Questions When Contracting with Leaders,” unpublished manuscript, 1997.
What is keeping you from getting the results you want?
How do you account for not being able to accomplish this?*
How have you responded to this issue?
Do you have any sense of your part in not meeting the challenge this time?*
How urgent do you feel this issue to be?*
How much time do you have to achieve this?
What do you find personally challenging about leading this effort given the results you have so far?*
How do you think I could be useful to you?
Do you have the authority to sponsor this plan, or do you need a sponsor?
Goals
What do you want to accomplish in this effort?*
What outcomes do you want?*
What would be achievable results and in what specific time frame?*
What would successfully fulfilling those goals look like? How would you measure it?
What team behaviors need to change to accomplish the results?
In your position as leader, what challenges do you personally feel regarding this effort?*
What behaviors will you need to strengthen or change?
How does this challenge fit into goals you have for yourself?*
To what extent do the people who report to you hold the same perspective or urgency that you do?*
Does your team know as much about what you’re thinking as I now know?*
Planning
Have you clearly expressed your commitment to this challenge so that your team knows your level of commitment?
What do you know, and what don’t you know? Can you be clear about both? What information and support do you need, and from whom?
How can you increase participation within the work group?
How clear have you been about your performance expectations?
Are these expectations compromised in some way by the surrounding context?
Are matrixed groups clear about their roles on this issue? Do they know to whom they are accountable and for which items?
Are you the decision maker? Which decisions will you make, and which will you delegate?
What strengths do you have as a leader that you want to preserve and build on?
Patterns
What pattern are you playing out with the other person? Is the pattern effective? If not, how does it detract from your success?
What does the other person do or not do that triggers your response? Does this interaction have a familiar ring to it? Can you count on people (yourself included) to react in familiar ways? Is this so recurring that you can anticipate it? How would it be reframed as a news headline or a two-verb reinforcing circle?
How do you enable others to maintain counterproductive patterns? What is your contribution to this pattern? What do you do that starts them down that path in the first place?
What pulls you off course?
What can you do to stay on course? And then what can you do when that doesn’t work?
Boundaries
Do people know what is expected of them?
What are the boundaries of this system?
How frequently are they compromised so that work is made more difficult?
Does their rigidity make it hard for people to get essential information and resources from other parts of the organization?
Debriefing
How do you think you did?
To what extent did you achieve your goal? What did you do well?
Did you follow the mandate of your role as sponsor, implementer, advocate, or agent?
Did you match your managing style to the developmental needs of the employee?
Did you establish a pattern that enhanced the interaction?
What internal cues can you identify when you get into this pattern (for one that works or one that does not work)?
What loose ends around decision making, participation, and other issues need to be resolved?
What challenges do you continue to face?
What next step do you want to take?
What do you want to strengthen or change as I coach you in the future?
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