20 Questions for Group and Team Coaching - 12 Days of Holidays 2022 - Day 2

 Welcome back to Day 2 of the 12 Days of Holidays where I am sharing 12 core elements you can

integrate as a coach into your work with teams as groups. 

Today's focus brings us to one of the core elements of this work - QUESTIONS!

As coaches we can sometimes find ourselves in a rut around questions, yet they form the backbone to our conversations.

Today I wanted to share with you 20 questions I love to use, borrowed from my work as a Mentor Coach, and Coaching Supervisor. 

Keeping in mind the coaching arc I shared back in From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching, we want to think about the "bookends" of coaching - the start and end, as well as what we do to activate new insights, awareness, accountability and action around results and relationships.

Here are 20 questions you may want to consider:

1.   What’s important right now to explore? (Note this may link to the Six Factors of High Performing Teams, relationships, results etc)

2.   How does this goal connect with others? (other team members, KPIs, organizational goals etc)?

3.   What’s really important about that?

4.   What could get in the way?

5.   What additional support will help you be successful?

6.   What perspective are you in around this?

7.   What’s another perspective around that?

8.   What else?

9.   3 adjectives that describe….

1   If you were to make one change that made the biggest difference, what would it be?

     What is the one action you want to undertake in the next 24 hours?

     What impact would it have?

     What’s aligned?

     What’s not? 

     What would “wild success” look like?

     What will help you focus?

17.What’s your vision?

     What’s at the core?

     What’s the flip side? (or What’s an alternative to that)?

    Who is an ally for you in this?

21 What assumptions are you making?

     Imagine it is now 5 months down the road. How will you know you’ve been successful? 

     A reminder that when coaching teams our conversation is more of a collective one, versus in groups where each group member may reflect on each of these questions as it relates to their own pathway.

      Enjoy the Questions.     Have a great weekend!

       Jennifer

 Jennifer Britton

GroupCoachingEssentials.ca | Potentials Realized

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Expanding Your Group and Team Coaching Toolkit - 30: Questions

Welcome back to the 30th in this series of Expanding your Group and Team Coaching Toolkit. This week we're exploring one of the core coaching skills which is at the heart of any great coaching conversation - Questions.

If you've been a reader here at the Group Coaching Ins and Outs blog for a while, you might be familiar with one of the more popular set of posts around Six Questions a Day. Take a look at them here.

Questions are at the heart of coaching conversations - and are a transferable skill we can also pass on to the groups and teams we are working with.There is an important layer of capacity building in the work that we do with many groups and teams, helping to transfer skills in key areas with the entities we work with. For many organizations the additional focus of helping teams and groups build the skills we use, is an important part of culture change.

As you think about the questions which might frame out the coaching conversation, it's likely that they will be:
* Short in length - powerful questions usually are only about 5-7 words in length;
* Mirror the language of the client/team/group - each group or team will have it's own language - is it direct, flowery, detailed, concise? What are key words being used by that group?
* One at a time - Watch for stacking questions! When we ask more than one question, it can confuse people and they may not know what to ask?
* Adjusted for different learning styles - In a group or team coaching context, it's not uncommon to see when questions do not resonate. A blank stare may signal this.  The question - What does that look like? may get reframed to What does that feel like?

A few more tips when thinking about boosting the impact of your coaching conversation:
Leave enough time for discussion around the questions. It's not about quantity, but quality.

Use breakouts if you are working with a group. Rather than always going "Around the room" pair people off so they can have a deeper level of conversation with one or two others. Provide them with a question or two.

Some of my favorite questions which I find are often transferable across conversations are:
What's important about that?
What's the 30,000 foot/meta view of that issue?
What's not being explored?
What's helping? What's hindering?
What's an enabler?
What's going to magnify that for you?
What's the flipside?
What else?
What next?

Just a reminder of the What? So What? and Now What? sequencing of questions - you can read more about that on page 73 of From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching OR take a look at this blog post here.

Enjoy your conversations,
Jennifer


Jennifer Britton - GroupCoachingEssentials | Potentials Realized
Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Author of Effective Group Coaching (2010), Coaching Business Builder (2018), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013). Check out my author page on Amazon for all publications.
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com

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Coaching Toolbox - Powerful Questions

In my book, From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching, I write that "Questions form the backbone of any coaching conversation".

Powerful questions are one of the eleven core coaching competencies with the International Coach Federation (ICF). Whether we coach full-time or incorporate coaching skills into our conversations, having a variety of coaching questions to draw upon create a more powerful conversation.

Today's blog post focuses on five resources you may want to explore as you build your resource base around questions:

1. Coaching Questions  - A Coaches' Guide to Powerful Asking Questions -Tony Stoltzfus
2. Change Your Questions, Change Your Life - Marilee Adams
   
3. Co-Active Coaching Book- Kimsey-House, Kimsey-House
4. Appreciative Coaching - Orem, Binkert and Clancy
5. QBasics - Open Ended Questions from Marcy Nelson-Garrison at CoachingToys.com 

What other resources would you recommend around the art of questioning?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, MES, CPT, PCC
Group Coaching Essentials | Potentials Realized  
Author of Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2010) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2013)
 
Looking to expand your tools for groups and teams? Join us in Toronto the weekend of November 7-8 for the Group and Team Coaching Intensive (19 CCEs). Register with a colleague and each receive a discount on your registration.