The PCO - IAPCO Annual Meeting Vancouver

THE FIVE QUESTION LEADER PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHT – MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER

Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder of Box of Crayons, a company known for teaching 10 minute coaching to busy leaders and managers so they can build better teams and more effective organisational cultures.

Michael Bungay Stanier answers some key questions regarding his keynote content

In your very engaging and interactive presentation you touch on the five core questions that managers need so they can focus on the work that matters. What are those questions and how did you come up with them?

The five questions are: • What’s on your mind? • What’s the real challenge here for you? • And what else? • What do you want? • What was most useful here for you?

They’re five of the seven questions in my best-selling book, The Coaching Habit. They come from five years spent playing around with different questions and trying to find the least number of questions that would do the most good. I could have come up with a list of 167 questions and, in fact, one early draft of the book was exactly that. But knowing that less is more, I whittled it down to the questions that each did a specific job and that were useful in most situations.

In your opinion, what are some of the reasons that managers and leaders don’t coach and how can that be changed?

The obvious answer is that we’ve spent our lifetimes being encouraged to be the person with the answer. Lots of us think that this is our role: be the person who provides the solution. A more powerful way to recast that role is to realise that if you can help the other person figure out the real challenge and come up with their own answer, it’s less work for you and a better outcome for them, both in the long term and the short term.

Asking a question well is not always easy. Are you able to share one or two of your favourite and easy to learn techniques?

You’re right: it’s one thing to know the questions, it’s another to ask them well. Two techniques people can immediately use: ask just one question at a time, don’t fire lots of questions at the person and actually listen to the answer.