Transcript

Questioning is a key coaching skill. Good questioning helps the client to think and to reflect. Poor questioning has the opposite effect, and weak questioning will necessarily produce weak coaching.

Some examples of poor practice in questioning would include the asking of multiple questions, the effect of which is to confuse the client. Or the coach may ask leading questions, which in essence are a version of advice, sometimes referred to as advice in disguise. Some people may be surprised to learn that the question why is a poor question in coaching. The reason being that why tends to provoke a defensive response in the client, and also takes them back into the past, where in coaching we’re really trying to take them to thinking about the future.

So, really, good practice in coaching questioning is about asking a mixture of open and closed questions. The majority of coaching questions need to be open, and an open question is one which is generally very short and normally begins with a what or a how, whereas closed questions provide closure to a particular section of coaching and provide punctuation to the session.

In the video examples on questioning, there’s an example of bad questioning and an example of good questioning.