The most successful managers today don’t really manage. They coach.

Great coaches give people direction, feedback, and ongoing support. Great coaches keep things simple. They keep feedback brief, and they also tend to ask more questions.

Michael Bungay Stanier’s book, “The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever” maintains that you can build a coaching habit, “but only if you understand and use the proven mechanics of building and embedding new habits.”

Stanier frames these 7 essential habits as part question, part solution:

1. The Kickstart Question (discover the power of an opening question – what’s on your mind?)

2. The AWE Question (AWE = and what else … getting people to generate more options)

3. The Focus Question (focus on the real problem, not the first problem)

4. The Foundation Question (what the colleague really wants)

5. The Lazy Question (asking the colleague ‘how can I help’ to move things forward)

6. The Strategic Question (the balance between saying yes and saying no)

7. The Learning Question (what was most useful to you—the colleague—during the coaching exchange)

These questions combine to create a useful, informal, day-to-day coaching model. It’s a simple system for spending less time getting big results.

Have a great week.

Sign up for The Sunday Snippet!

Good ideas to help you prosper delivered fresh each Sunday morning.

Send me the Snippet!

You have Successfully Subscribed!