Burger Bites: Powerful Questions

The Burger Bites Series Is Designed To Bring You A Taste Of Coaching.

Coaches rarely tell their clients what to do. Good coaches make suggestions, but only when asked. Really good coaches will respond to a request for suggestions by shifting as quickly as possible back to the client’s own ideas and reasons. Really good coaches are more interested in helping clients establish new habits of creative thinking and self-trust than in solving one dilemma. One of the most important skills coaches use to help clients learn to hear their own ideas and begin to trust themselves is asking powerful questions.

Powerful questions are questions that help a client move forward in understanding, deciding, or acting. They are keys to the door of possibility.

In Co-Active Coaching, the hallmark textbook for coach training, the founders of the Co-Active Coaching model explain powerful questions in this way:

Think of questions as points of a compass. Asking a powerful question is like sending the client not to a specific destination but in a direction filled with possible discoveries and mysteries. Powerful questions invite introspection, present additional solutions, and lead to greater creativity and insight. They invite clients to look inside (“What do you really want?”) or into the future (“Look ahead six months. Standing there, what decisions would you make today?”). A powerful question is expansive and opens up further vistas for the client. (p. 77)

Take a supervisor frustrated with one of her employees as an example. She says, “I don’t know what I’m going to about Ed. He comes in late, he irritates people, and I think he’s getting credit for other people’s work. But there’s not enough to fire him.”

A consultant, thinking as a problem-solver, might ask, “What options do you have in your policies?” and then recommend the one that helps start the ball rolling to get rid of Ed. A therapist, interested in psychological dynamics, might ask, “What do you feel when you have to deal with Ed? Any idea where that’s coming from?” or even, “Does he remind you of someone else in your life who has been frustrating?” The therapist wants to illuminate emotions and automatic ways of responding based on past relationships to increase the supervisor’s insight.

But the client just wants to quit being frustrated and feeling stuck. A coach, hearing her comments, would use a powerful question. “What’s your ideal outcome?” is one such question. “What part of this is in your control?” is another. “What are you learning by supervising Ed?” is another. “What values are in conflict when you deal with him?” is a further example.

The questions are open-ended. They encourage thinking and considering and are not easily answered. The answers help the client gain insight that she can use in how she chooses to respond to Ed.

Powerful questions can be surprisingly simple, such as, “What’s next?” or “What’s most important about this?” or even “What do you need to do?” They aren’t prompts to get a client to say something obvious. They are used when the answer isn’t obvious, when it needs to be discovered.

Powerful questions underscore the coach’s compassionate curiosity and dedication to helping the client become the person she is striving to be, her better self. They are most powerful when used by a coach who doesn’t really know the answer.