What do I mean by 'coaching questions'?

Well, coaching is focused specifically on the needs of the person being coached and often involves the coach asking questions such as:

"What are you trying to achieve? What are your goals?"

"What difference would it make to you if you could achieve those goals?"

"What barriers might there be to you achieving them?"

"What steps do you need to take to start to make those goals a reality?"

"What internal blocks might there be - e.g. lack of confidence, motivation?"

Coaching also aims to get the person being coached to take responsibility for their own actions and development, not to blame others or give excuses for inaction.

 

How would using these sort of questions transform your training?

I've often said that the most effective training is focused on the learner, that it should be interactive and engaging, more facilitation of learning than just presenting information. Using these questions is a great way to do that. It immediately puts the focus on the learners rather on the trainer or on the content. It also challenges them to think about what they want to achieve and how they will apply anything they learn.

This can help in transferring any learning back to the workplace, it can stop any training becoming too theoretical or removed from reality and it makes the learners take responsibility for what they do after the training session.

In this way, it can break down potential resistance or any temptation they may have to blame everyone else for any perceived problems they're having. It makes the participants think more and can be challenging for them, they certainly can't just sit there glazing over.

And it makes YOU, as the person designing the training, think more about how you will focus everything on the learners and how you will structure the event to allow them to ponder on these questions, discuss them and come up with answers. You can build a whole session around these sort of questions and it will be a very different sort of experience for everyone than if you simply focus on content.

In fact, I used to run a course years ago with a colleague on dealing with difficult clients on the phone. There were actually no materials at all. We used to go to an office and ask the participants, "What problems do you have with clients on the phone? What are the outcomes you actually want when you speak to clients? What are the causes of some of the problems you're having? What would it look like if you had the sort of conversations you want with clients?"

Then we would run some role play exercises (which they wrote, based on their own experiences) and everyone would chip in with tips about how to handle the situations. It was a very effective, and popular, course and it involved no preparation on our part other than coming up with good questions to ask at the start. You could run courses on a lot of topics like that, certainly skills-based ones.

 

For more technical training, where there has to be a certain amount of information involved, you can use these sorts of questions to make sure you consider how the information will be used when the session is over so that your planning takes into account the needs of the learners.

Then you can use some of them to set up the session - give an outline of the course, then ask people what they want to achieve, what their goals are, etc. to help them to focus on what they want to get from the session and start them thinking. Then keep asking questions whenever they learn something new to make them think how to use what they have just learned.

Once you start to think from the learners' point of view by going through questions like these, your training will never be just a long, one-way presentation of content and you may find that some common problems, such as people losing interest, not responding or not getting involved, will be much less of an issue.