🎙️ EP 45 : Great Question – What’s better?

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(Note: This article is a slightly edited transcript. It is an experiment and I am curious about your feedback! Let me know if you like this kind of format!)

I have mentioned before that coaching is really about powerful questionING, instead of powerful questions. Powerful questioning means that you listen to your coachee, so that your question builds on what they just said. However, there are cases where certain questions are, of course useful. And any coach (and that includes me) has a certain repertoire of question components or simple questions that we simply rely on that build a basic structure.

In this article and podcast, I will introduce one question that I’ve come across only this year 2020. And this question is meant to help you as a Leader to set your meetings right away on the right track in a positive and useful way.

Today we are running what I call a great questions episode. And these are episodes where I pick just one question. And I’m diving a bit deeper and exploring what its positive impact could be.

Today’s question is a very simple one. And when I say simple, it’s simple at the surface, but powerful in its impact. The question is: ‘What’s better’?

Now the question is simply what’s better. Just two words. Now, this question has a very specific impact. Let’s take it apart a bit and ask a few question here.

Who would ask the question?
When would you ask the question?
What’s the purpose of it?
And how would you know the question was actually useful?

And in the spirit of our podcast here, I will answer that from the angle of people leader. I imagine this question being asked by a people leader, who at the beginning of a meeting with their team member is absolutely curious and intentional in setting their meeting off on a positive note, and making sure that whatever happened before doesn’t impact the meeting itself and that the meeting stays productive.

Well, I mentioned in the beginning, you would ask this question, ideally at the very start. And Dave Hogan went as far as saying that it’s the beginning of the small talk with a client. That means you meet with a coaching client. In his case, as an executive coach, he met with a coaching client and he would simply say what’s better, and right away that would impact the conversation.

In the case of a leader, and your team members, the simple approach would be that your team member and you sit down in your meeting room, or you show up to get on a zoom meeting. One of the first things you ask them after saying hello is so what’s has been better since last time?

You can also take a non cookie-cutter approach. If you think about the podcast that I ran a few weeks ago…You can ask them, for example, what’s better in terms of working with x? Or what’s better in terms of the project so and so?

Now, why would you actually do that? And that’s the third question.

Well, it automatically and right away frames the conversation in a positive manner. Positive not in a sense of good or bad, but positive in the sense of what’s possible, and what’s working. And that is a solution focused approach. By the way, you might wonder what is solution focused approach?

Well, the wise words of Debbie and Dave Hogan are quoted here. It is a ‘future oriented and competency based approach that has a solid evidence based practice’. And what solution focus wants to do is it ‘helps people adopt an alternative perspective to a desired future’. And it ‘takes people away from the dreaded past’.

And that is exactly what this question does. It helps people move forward. And imagine, first of all, what has worked. And that is powerful, especially in the case of a team member who might join the meeting with you, just to blame someone or just to whine, just to complain. And we know people like this, who join in just to offload their baggage.

Now, as a leader, you have a choice here, you can create the space to let them offload their baggage. And that is a very fair thing to do. Because coaching often just means being there and listening. And that is useful, especially if your team member wants to share about something emotional, something that has been weighing on them.

That means that’s maybe a limitation of this question. If you ask that question, knowing that your team member has gone through some traumatic crisis, asking what’s better is probably just insensitive, but that is where your good judgement obviously comes in.

I’m talking about the case where we have a normal, regular interaction with a team member about projects about updates. And you want to set off this meeting on the right tone. You ask them right away in the beginning about what improved.

Ideally, it sets off a cascade of some positive sharing. It’s important for you as a leader to not let the other person wriggle away from that. Many people might say just one thing. Yeah, I think with James, I had a good meeting. But then he again talked badly about Jane and the discussed about how the project fell apart and blah, blah.

And then as a Leader, you have a choice..you can ask, sorry, what, what again, was better? I didn’t hear that. In that moment, you have a choice on what your follow-up question zooms in to, because you want to set up a cascade of positive interactions.

The purpose of this question is absolutely to help the other person build a resource and help them realise that things did improve however small it might be. It is also a smart technique that relates to something in sales that is called thinking past the sale. Because you’re not asking your team member is something better? You’re asking them what is better. So you almost make the decision for them, you tell them. So given that something is better, what is better?

You’re not here to be just a complainer soundboard. You’re here to help people move on and discover resources for a better desired future. You help people to justify themselves, that things have improved, however small. It is a useful technique if you are persistent, that can lead to defusing complainers, and it sets the positive tone. Now, the last question.

Well, you know when your team member, despite being grumpy in the beginning and negative, has indeed something positive to share. You will notice that it works if it sets the meeting on positive or at least a neutral tone, something that you can build on. Something that I have done in coaching sessions or meetings is that I keep drawing back on what the team member said in the beginning. Let’s say there was a lot of negative things that happened.

In some way you would connect to improvement and you want to help people to think forward. You can also ask them questions that build on this…build on what they just shared. That is a powerful solution focused approach, something that in my honest experience and feedback from people, mostly team members, or direct reports of managers have not experienced in their work life.

It is way too easy for us as leaders to focus specifically on the negative on the things that don’t work… because, let’s be honest, we are very good problem solvers. We are very good fixers. We asked people for what’s wrong and then we’ll join in and help them by advising and by fixing it for them. But here is a very different approach when we ask people right away from the start what has improved since our last interaction.

Furthermore, we can customise it, or contextualising it and refer to the action items that you both have agreed on in the last meeting in your last 1-1. If you can do that you are gold because you are showing your team member that you notice details..that you remember them. So you mentioned in our 1-1 two weeks ago that you wanted to sign up for that course, and that you wanted to take one or two lessons with a trainer…so what kind of improvement do you see since that? Or you might ask another example. You meet your team member over the water cooler and you ask them Hey, I just remembered last week you told me you wanted to talk to Jane about about including those KPI points in the finance report… those points that are very important to you. What kind of good progress have you made since then?

And when you ask them with a smile, and with sincere interest, your team members knows, well, he or she knows and remembers this detail. And they are really curious about my positive progress. They’ve want to see me improve.

I hope this was a useful little tidbit. And you can see by the length of this podcast and article, that even a small question like what’s better, can have a profound depth and impact. And that’s really the power of great coaching. Because the fewer questions or the fewer words we use in questions, the more powerful these questions often are.

So to summarise, what’s better is a powerful question that I learned in the context of solution focused coaching. It is useful to ask at the very beginning of an interaction that builds on previous interaction. As a team leader, you might just do it at the beginning of a 1-1, or casual interaction. Or simply when you go out for drinks with a team member, you just want to get to know them. And you set the tone, because that’s the purpose of the question, you set a positive tone. It helps the other person articulate and justify themselves that things do improve. Because often we don’t see it.

We are so focused on things that go bad that we forget the things that have actually improved. I hope you can already see the many, many possible opportunities in your upcoming meetings when you can use a variant of this question. And I’m saying variant because (please) don’t just ask what’s better every single time you’re encountering a team member or or colleague. You’ll become the what’s better person very quickly. Just build it in in a very casual, natural way, customise it, make it in reference to things that were said before. And right away your team members and the people around you will notice that you have a serious interest.

Well, that is it for today and for this week. This is Maik from intellicoach.com.

(How did this transcript version of an article work for you? Let me know in the comments! Cheers! Maik)