Book SummaryThe Coaching Habit, by Michael Bungay Stanier

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Coaching Habit

A good sports coach can inspire and motivate their players and lead a team to victory. In much the same way, coaches in the workplace can bring out the best in their employees and increase productivity. However, many managers and leaders avoid coaching, thinking that it’s too complicated, too awkward, or too impractical. Others believe they’re already coaching when all they’re really doing is giving advice.

Whatever it is that’s keeping you from coaching, there are three reasons why you should put in the time and effort to make it a daily habit:

1. It empowers your team members. If most of your team’s responsibilities need your input and approval, then that means you’ve trained your team, perhaps inadvertently, to become overly reliant on you. This not only increases your workload but also makes you a potential bottleneck. By coaching your team, you train them to become more self-sufficient, effective, and efficient, all while lightening your load.
2. It allows you to refocus. You can lose sight of your goals when you keep getting pulled in several directions at once. Coaching can help you and your team remember what’s important.
3. It clarifies your purpose. Having coaching sessions can help both you and your direct reports see the meaning behind the work you’re doing, motivating you to perform at your best.

In short, coaching helps your team members grow and develop while making your work easier, more focused, more meaningful, and more enjoyable—in other words, coaching is imperative to being a good manager. In The Coaching Habit, you’ll learn how to turn coaching into an informal, effective daily habit.

How to Build a Habit

The Coaching Habit aims to help you get rid of bad coaching habits and replace them with a new coaching habit that you can practice every day: Talk less; listen more.

Building any habit can be challenging. Simply declaring that you’ll exercise more, that you’ll stop spending and start investing, or that you’ll start coaching isn’t enough to form a new habit. Approach it systematically with the following steps:

1) Pinpoint Your Old Habit

You can’t get rid of an old habit if you don’t know what it is in the first place, so be clear and specific about the habit you’re trying to change.

• For example, you may have the bad habit of frequently stepping in and making decisions for your team members without letting them work through problems themselves.

2) Determine Your Triggers

Once you have your old habit in mind, figure out what triggers it. There are five common types of triggers: location, time, emotional state, other people, and the immediately preceding action. Thinking in terms of these five categories may help you determine your triggers—once you realize what they are, you can more consciously stop yourself from engaging with them and performing your bad habits.

For example, you may be triggered to make decisions when you feel impatient (emotional state), when you’re trying to get out of the office at the end of the day (time), or whenever you deal with a team member who has a reputation for being indecisive (other people).

3) Specify Your New Habit

Just as you’re clear and specific about the old habit you want to change, you need to identify the new habit that you want to form. In this case, you want to form the new habit of asking your team members one of the seven essential questions.

• For example, instead of stepping in to rescue an indecisive team member, your new habit might be to step back and ask her what’s on her mind or why making a decision is a challenge for her.

Your New Coaching Habit: Ask the Seven Essential Questions

Evaluate your current behavior and determine “coaching” habits that you might have. Maybe you jump in too quickly to give advice or try to solve team members’ problems as soon as they knock on your door or send you an email. Replace these old habits with the new habit of listening more by asking one of the seven essential questions.

(Shortform note: You should view these seven questions as individual tools rather than as a system—you don’t need to use all the questions one after the other. In any coaching situation, choose whichever questions feel most natural, applicable, and useful.)

Question 1—The Conversation Starter Question: What’s on Your Mind?

The goal of coaching is to unlock a person’s potential, and small talk about the weather, sports teams, or weekend plans rarely leads to something that can help your direct reports grow. On the other hand, questions that seem like they come from a coaching manual may be difficult to bring up and may feel too formal and uncomfortable. What you need, then, is a question that hits just the right balance, one that’s casual and non-threatening while being direct and meaningful. The first essential question, “What’s on your mind?” is informal enough to encourage openness but focused enough to draw out the exciting or worrying things that have been occupying your team members’ thoughts.

When you ask a team member about something that’s been taking up space in his mind, you allow him to bring those thoughts to the surface and release them—therefore ensuring that they don’t get in the way of his work.

Get the Conversation Rolling

First, recognize your bad habit—when someone comes to talk to you, do you get caught in small talk, jump to giving advice right away, or talk about some other work topic that isn’t really the issue?

Then, determine what usually prompts you to jump into these bad habits. Often, this trigger looks like a team member or colleague popping in to ask if you’ve “got a minute” or instant messaging you to ask if you’re busy—in other words, when someone approaches you with an issue, you react by doing what feels the most helpful or least awkward.

**Once you’re aware of the different ways team members approach you, you can consciously respond by...

The Coaching Habit Summary Introduction: Why You Need a Coaching Habit

Most companies recognize that yesterday’s leadership tactics are becoming less and less applicable in today’s increasingly fast-paced business environment. They’re thus shifting towards a coaching model, where managers empower their employees to find solutions and take action, instead of dictating what their employees should do. This landscape has led to the birth of a multitude of coaching seminars and programs, where managers spend the day trying to learn to be more effective coaches. But few go back to their workplace and apply what they’ve learned. In fact, out of the 73 percent of managers who’ve received coaching training, only 23 percent say that the training has been helpful.

We’ve seen what good coaches can do in sports—they inspire and motivate their players and lead a team to victory. In much the same way, coaches in the workplace can bring out the best in their employees and increase productivity. However, many managers and leaders avoid coaching, thinking that it’s too complicated, too awkward, or too impractical. Others believe they’re already coaching, when all they’re really doing is giving advice.

As we’ll see,...

Shortform Exercise: Identify a Bad Coaching Habit

One of the keys to becoming a better coach to your team members is to recognize when you’re prone to a bad habit and visualize a good coaching habit to take its place.

Describe your bad habit. Remember that it’s key to be specific about what your habit is, so use the clearest terms possible.

The Coaching Habit Summary Chapter 1: The Conversation Starter Question: “What’s on Your Mind?”

For some managers, the spirit may be willing but the conversation skills may be weak. You may have all the best intentions to coach your team members, but you just can’t seem to find a way to start a conversation without any awkwardness. So, you fall back on small talk, mere troubleshooting, or weekly meetings with the same old agenda, leading to meandering, time-consuming, and unproductive conversations.

Questions about the weather, sports teams, or weekend plans rarely lead to something that can help your direct reports grow. However, questions that seem like they come from a coaching manual may feel too formal or uncomfortable to address.

What you need, then, is a question that hits just the right balance, one that’s casual and non-threatening while being direct and meaningful. The first essential question, “What’s on your mind?” is informal enough to encourage openness but focused enough to draw out the exciting or worrying things that have been occupying your team members’ thoughts.

Why This Question Is a Good Coaching Habit

Asking, “What’s on your mind?” not only starts a productive conversation and coaching session but also helps relieve cluttered...

The Coaching Habit Summary Chapter 2: The Follow-Through Question: “Anything Else?”

In a relationship, there might be times when your partner asks you if something is wrong, to which you reply that everything is “fine.” Your partner, sensing that this is a loaded reply, may try to prod you a bit more. After being asked for the third or fourth time, you finally open up and tell your partner what’s bothering you. There are many reasons you may haven’t answered directly at first—maybe the issue seemed too trivial to mention, or maybe you wanted to keep the peace. But doesn’t it feel amazing when you’re finally able to confront and resolve whatever it is? It might even lead to a deeper level of intimacy and understanding.

Similarly, in the workplace, there are many important things left unsaid. The second essential question, “Anything else?” reveals these hidden issues and helps team members dig down to continue unearthing solutions and possibilities. It’s a question that encourages deeper thinking and greater participation and shows how the first answer isn’t necessarily the best answer.

Why This Question Is a Good Coaching Habit

There are three benefits to asking your team members, “Anything else?”

1) Better Decision-Making

The more you ask,...

The Coaching Habit Summary Chapter 3: The Laser Beam Question: “What’s the Central Challenge for You?”

As a manager, you’re trained to be the chief troubleshooter in a fast-paced environment. When someone comes to you with a problem, you might come charging in to put out a fire without stopping to figure out what caused it. This then leads to three problems:

1. You might have to deal with the same fire over and over again, or have other flames crop up from the same source.
2. You prevent your direct reports from learning how to deal with the fire themselves.
3. You’re so busy putting out fires, you’re not able to take care of your other responsibilities. This creates a bottleneck and causes work to come to a halt.

The third essential question, “What’s the central challenge for you?” allows you to weed through several issues to find and solve the real issue at hand.

Why This Question Is a Good Coaching Habit

When a direct report comes to you with an issue or several issues, stopping to ask a question forces you to slow down and get to the heart of the matter. The phrasing of this question is important to getting useful information: Asking, “What’s the challenge?” invites vague, abstract answers that may not address the source of the problem. Asking, “What’s the...

Shortform Exercise: Put the First Three Questions into Practice

You can use the conversation starter, the follow-through question, and the laser beam question in one session to have an insightful conversation. But first, you have to be aware of your triggers and articulate both your old and new habits.

Describe a time you tried to open a conversation with a question such as, “What’s on your mind?” How did your team member respond? (For example, they acted closed-off or talked about vague, big-picture issues or dumped information on you.)

The Coaching Habit Summary Chapter 4: The Empowerment Question: “What Do You Want?”

Sometimes, you may be working with a team member who seems to have trouble articulating what they’d like to happen in a certain situation—they may not know, or they may feel afraid to directly ask.

In these cases, you can use the fourth essential question: “What do you want?” This question helps your employees operate at their best, creates a sense of trust, and makes your employees feel valued.

Why This Question Is a Good Coaching Habit

There are three ways that this question strengthens your coaching skills and your relationships with your team members.

1) You Address Psychological Needs

According to Marshall Rosenberg, psychologist and author of Nonviolent Communication, there are nine universal needs: affection, creation, recreation, freedom, identity, understanding, participation, protection, and subsistence.

Most of the time, the wants that people express are grounded in one of these needs. When you get someone to talk about what they want, you can use that information to figure out what they actually need—and then provide the most suitable solution possible....

Shortform Exercise: Uncover the Needs Hidden By Wants

Sometimes, good coaching depends on seeing a team member’s needs underneath their expressed wants. Practice responding to wants with solutions to needs.

Describe a time an employee expressed a want to you. What was the want? How did you respond?

The Coaching Habit Summary Chapter 5: The Heavy Lifter: “How Can I Support You?”

It’s not unusual for managers to have some sort of rescuer complex—that is, when someone comes to you with a question or a problem, you may feel like it’s your duty to rescue him by finding solutions yourself. This may seem like the most efficient way to address a problem, but your good intentions may create a toxic environment: You breed resentment among team members when you step in instead of trusting them to find solutions, prevent team members from learning and growing, and needlessly add more to your workload.

Break this unhealthy cycle with the next essential question: “How can I support you?”

Why This Question Is a Good Coaching Habit

This question is effective in two ways:

• It helps you exercise self-control by keeping you from jumping into rescue mode.
• It compels the other person to be clear and direct about what he wants from you....

The Coaching Habit Summary Chapter 6: The Commitment Question: “What’s The Cost of Saying ‘Yes’?”

In a fast-moving, highly competitive work environment, employees are often asked to take on more and more tasks, even when their plates are already overflowing. For example, they’re asked to sit in at a meeting, to join a committee, or to take part in out-of-office activities on top of their existing responsibilities. Despite being overloaded, they tend to say “yes” to more tasks because they associate being busy with being successful, and it’s often hard or awkward to say “no.”

When you see team members contemplating an opportunity or additional responsibilities, you can help them make the best decision by asking them the sixth essential question: “What’s the cost of saying ‘yes’?”

Why This Question Is a Good Coaching Habit

According to psychologists, two factors lead to poor choices when it comes to deciding whether or not to take on new tasks. First, people believe they can do more than is actually possible. Second, people tend to overvalue what they have.

In the workplace, these two factors show up as team members who are overwhelmed...

The Coaching Habit Summary Chapter 7: The Insight Question: “What Insights Did You Gain?”

As a manager, it’s part of your job to help your direct reports learn new skills and become better, more successful workers. Projects and problems present many teaching moments, but the lessons from those experiences may not always stick. The best way to help your team members absorb new information is by asking the last essential question, “What insights did you gain?”

Why This Question Is a Good Coaching Habit

“What insights did you gain?” not only encourages your team members to identify and retain a concrete lesson they learned, but also makes them feel like you care about them. As a bonus, their answers can clue you in on how to better coach them in the future.

There are three science-backed reasons why asking, “What insights did you gain?” leads to increased learning:

1) Double-Loop Learning

Single-loop learning is solving a problem outright. Double-loop learning, according to business theorist Chris Argyris, is where we learn best—this involves questioning the procedure and goals underlying issues you’re trying to...

Shortform Exercise: Build Your Coaching Habit

Now that you know the seven essential questions, it’s time to put them into practice.

To keep from getting overwhelmed, try practicing and mastering one new habit at a time. Which of the seven essential questions will you practice this week?

The Coaching Habit Summary Chapter 8: Refine Your Coaching Skills

It’s not enough to just know and robotically ask the seven essential questions. Take your coaching skills a step further by knowing the most effective way to ask them. There are four elements of “effective asking”: pacing, straightforwardness, engagement, and consistency.

Element 1: Pacing

As you start your new coaching habit, you may feel unsure of yourself or wonder if your team members will be receptive to your new way of doing things—you may rush through your coaching to “get it over with.”

Mind Your Pace

With this book’s set of coaching prompts in your toolbox, you might be tempted to fire them off one after the other. However, your direct report may feel overwhelmed if you ask them too many questions at once.

It’s most effective to launch your questions one at a time. Wait for your team member’s response, really listen to it, and consider the best response before launching into your next question.

Embrace Silence

Be comfortable with silence, and allow the conversation some breathing room. You don’t have to fill every second with conversation, nor do you have to keep prodding the other person to say something—sometimes they may need time...