Coaching and Skills Development

Ask, don't tell

Telling your team the answers won't help them learn or grow. Asking them questions will.

When you see someone on your team struggling with something, resist the urge to dive in and tell them what to do. Instead, take a leaf out of Socrates’ book and ask a few good questions. To start with, it’ll help you understand the problem better. It’s easy to make bad assumptions, and trying to “help” without really understanding what’s going on will just wind your team member up. Asking good questions will uncover new information and help overcome biases, including your own.

Asking questions will also help the team member get to the root cause of the problem. This isn’t much help if it’s an obvious problem. But if they’re doing something in an unusual or unhelpful way, asking questions will get them to think about why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Finally, asking questions helps the team member to solve the problem themselves. Not only is that more rewarding, but it’ll reduce the chances of them doing the same thing wrong in future. You won’t just have solved them problem, you’ll have helped them draw their own conclusions and learn from the experience.

Take action

personal-development

Be inquisitive

Asking good questions is a skill. Not everyone is good at it, but you can improve with practice

Channel Socrates

one-to-ones

Ask open questions

Try to learn more about a challenge and help your team member overcome it, instead of trying to solve the problem yourself

Be inquisitive

team-meeting

Help your team help each other

Encourage questions from everyone to build a culture of learning and growth.

Open the floor to questions

with-your-boss

Boss likes to micro-manage?

Use questions to get to the 'why' behind the 'what' and help you both get to a better outcome.

Turn the tables

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