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B2B Sales Best Practices

The Coaching Habit (Book Summary)

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier

Overarching message: A little less advice; a little more curiosity

Seven Essential Coaching Questions

  1. Kickstart Question: What’s on Your Mind?
  2. AWE Question: And what else?
  3. Remember to acknowledge the person’s answers before you leap to the next “And what else?”
  4. When you use “And what else?” you’ll get more options and often better options. Better options lead to better decisions. Better decisions lead to greater success.
  5. Focus Question: What’s the Real Challenge Here for You?
  6. Foundation Question: What do you want?
  7. The Lazy Question: How can I help?
  8. Strategic Question: If You’re Saying Yes to This, What Are You Saying No To?
  9. Learning Question: What Was Most Useful for You?
  10. “What’s essential is to interrupt the process of forgetting.”

Building habits

  1. To build an effective new habit, you need five essential components: a reason, a trigger, a micro-habit, effective practice, and a plan.
  2. think less about what your habit can do for you, and more about how this new habit will help a person or people you care about.
  3. Plan How to Get Back on Track. Resilient systems build in fail-safes so that when something breaks down, the next step to recover is obvious. Make your habit a resilient system.
  4. Charles Duhigg says that there are just five types of triggers: location, time, emotional state, other people, and the immediately preceding action.
  5. Define the new behavior, one that will take sixty seconds or less to do.

Other coaching insights & tips:

  1. Only 23 percent of people being coached—yes, fewer than one in four—thought that the coaching had a significant impact on their performance or job satisfaction.
  2. Coaching should be a daily, informal act, not an occasional, formal “It’s Coaching Time!” event.
  3. The 3P model is a framework for choosing what to focus on in a coaching: project, a person, or a pattern of behavior.
  4. Stop offering advice with a question mark attached to break the habit of slipping into the advice-giver/expert/answer-it/solve-it/fix-it mode
  5. Slow down your rush to action.
  6. Coaching for performance is the label typically applied to everyday solving-the-problem management. Coaching for development goes beyond just solving the problem and shifts the focus to the person who’s trying to solve the problem.
  7. Don’t coach the ghost – Talking on and on about another person (complaining about the boss, going on about a customer interaction, worrying about someone on the team)
  8. The simple act of adding “for you” to the end of as many questions as possible is an everyday technique for making conversations more development- than performance-oriented.
  9. Books the author recommends:
  10. Flawless Consulting
  11. Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley’s Playing to Win which posits 5 questions
    1. What is our winning aspiration?
    1. Where will we play?
    1. How will we win?
    1. What capabilities must be in place?
    1. What management systems are required? It’s easy enough to measure stuff. It’s much harder to figure out what you want to measure that actually matters.
  12. Give people the responsibility for their own freedom
  13. Rosenberg says that there are nine self-explanatory universal needs. AFFECTION CREATION RECREATION FREEDOM IDENTITY UNDERSTANDING PARTICIPATION PROTECTION SUBSISTENCE
  14. Be a genuine, active listener; embrace salience
  15. One way to soften questions is to use the phrase “Out of curiosity.”
  16. Michael Porter’s best, when he said, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
  17. Saying Yes more slowly means being willing to stay curious before committing. Which means asking more questions: Why are you asking me? Whom else have you asked? When you say this is urgent, what do you mean? According to what standard does this need to be completed? By when? If I couldn’t do all of this, but could do just a part, what part would you have me do? What do you want me to take off my plate so I can do this?
  18. Less, rather than more, is often better when you’re giving feedback.
  19. Questions work just as well typed as they do when spoken

One Quibble

The author writes: “[When coaching others], Stick to questions starting with “What” and avoid questions starting with ‘Why.’” While this is generally good advice, I vigilantly look out for absolutes and false dichotomies. In my experience, you need to ask a person you are coaching “Why” when (a) their will on a project or task is low, or (b) they are seeking help and have not considered whether what they are asking for is worth pursuing.

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