Coach, Consultant, Facilitator and Researcher
What's going on here?
Ask yourself this question. Don't walk into a coaching session with your great question. Just tune into what’s happening just let yourself really experience what’s going on, just let the questions emerge. The best question the one that emerges at the time
Coaching and Developing Others
Leadership Coach and Counselling Psychologist
What do you sense is the emerging future?
It's actually quite a profound question because you're not able to access data that can help you answer that. You're not accessing your feelings as in system1 thinking. You're not accessing system 2 in terms of data. You're actually accessing system 3. What is my deepest sense of what is the emerging future? It's a question to ponder over. I've asked that question of many executives and after the first off the cuff answer the conversation often goes a lot deeper.
Coaching and Developing Others
Professional Presenter and Author
If everything were perfect, what would you have a go at?
If every cell in your body believed that you were courageous or tenacious or that you had great self-love or that you were empowered, what would you attempt?
Because everyone’s got an excuse and what I do know is that you all have an excuse so you'll have a reason. Then you start to peel away all the apprehension and all the beliefs that you're not worthy, deserving, capable. And that's how you put your best foot forward
Self Reflection
Teacher | Speaker | Author | Coach - Return to BETTER
What's the real problem?
“Is that the real problem?”
“Is that really the problem?”
“Can you prove that's a problem?”
Now, if we can focus on understanding that you don’t have a problem. If you don’t have some expectation or some standard, you don’t have a problem. So, you got to be able to be clear about your expectations and then you got to know when you're not getting those expectations, but you got to be able to see that problem.
Self Reflection
Coaching Author and Speaker
Who do you serve?
If you show up in this world with the servant-leadership mindset that says that by serving others, you build a better world, it’s really helpful for you to get clear on who you serve.
Self Reflection
Executive Coach and Host of the Executive Breakthroughs Podcast
Self Reflection
Senior Client Service Manager at Austbrokers ABS and Chairperson at NIBA NSW Young Professionals Committee
Who's your best friend and why?
To understand the relationships someone has and why, giving an insight to their leadership style.
Self Reflection
Systemic Coach and Leadership Consultant To Top Teams
It allows people to go and search their minds and their hearts, even if there may be nothing else, but very often what is actually going on for the person suddenly unfolds.
Especially when you want a long term relationship with the individual, it is critically important to make space up front for that person to share his or her story and then you can sit in silence and just listen.
Building Connection and Understanding
Non Executive Director, Committee Chair, Executive Coach
It really is about checking in with others and getting some points along the way to sort of see how others are experiencing things and how your actions and behaviours are affecting them
Then she described some of her behaviours and how it was her reaction to what she thought was going on and so the question of how others were impacting her.
It's not what I think I need to do, it's what the people around me need me to do. Take a moment to consider that and just shape what you do.
Everyone is different. Everyone’s got a different style, so you might be doing something with one person and they're perfectly happy and comfortable with it and someone else might find it difficult. So, it's being aware of that so you can adjust.
Building Connection and Understanding
Coaching and Developing Others
Self Reflection
Founder Max Potential & Team Leader, Results by Design
You ask the first question because you want to access the coachees senses to help them see in their head what success looks like for them.
Often the answer to that question invokes an action or activity and therefore the second question is asked.
Goal setting is not a simple thing and extracting the right goal, the true goal is the challenge. The 7 F's are very helpful: Family, Friendship, Faith, Finances, Fitness, Firm (career) and Fun. Create goals across all these areas with your coachee in order to shape out a holistic picture of success, pick out the most important and why and focus on achieving it.
Strategy
Self Reflection
CEO | Women's Safety Services | Alice Springs
During times of reflection about your leadership and about things in life, these questions provide guidance and direction.
The answers will provide clarity and truth and help us make good decisions.
Without that feeling that we have purpose and meaning in our lives and that we are making a difference, our lives can become very stale and without passion.
Self Reflection
Leadership and Change Consultant Coach and Facilitator of Equine Assisted Leadership Development Programs
What are you experiencing right now?
When you ask that question it brings people right into the present.
We are so often in our heads planning and thinking in the past or in the future. This question helps in supporting people to just step into the present moment so that they notice what's going on around them.
Self Reflection
Principal Murray Wright & Associates
It's not just accountability to ourselves and to our current job and what we've got to deliver, but we need to to go beyond that and think about our stakeholders, our stakeholders in the wider community, wider business not only now but in the future.
So take a moment in your own mind’s eye, be with your prospective grandchildren in this future world. See them there and visualize their faces and think of the future world around them that they're sitting in, what will they say to you as you go about your business today? What is it they need you to understand now? What do they need for you to do now? What is the message they give you? And again, it's not about what you want to do. It's about what you need to do.
Building Connection and Understanding
Self Reflection
Actor, Teacher, Writer, Director and Executive Coach
“What is that a solution for?”
“What is the hidden benefit of that?”
When people come to you with negative things that they want to get rid of, one of the first questions is, “If that was gone, what would you be able to do?” Because that can help you get clear on, “What is the actual goal here,” and reframe it in terms of a positive opportunity rather than a negative. The next question is, “If that didn’t go away, what is that a good solution for or what is the hidden benefit of that?”
Coaching and Developing Others
Self Reflection
Co-Author Core Confidence, Founder at Pearman & Partners
If you could change one thing right now to create the outcome you were looking for, what would that be?
There's something about the one thing, just narrowing that right down to a focal point that gets people able to say something. It does seem to really yield some thoughts, they're right there but they're just out of reach, out of consciousness and it also allows people to focus.
Strategy
Self Reflection
Psychologist, Business Leader, Wellbeing Expert and Co-Creator of the Global Leadership Wellbeing Survey
If nothing changes, how will your life be in 12 months from now?
I ask people to think about how they're leading their life now? How they show up at work now? How they look after themselves now? How they look after their families now? How they manage their time now? And get a clear picture of how they're going about their daily habits and routines and then I say, “If nothing changes, how will your life be in 12 months from now?
Self Reflection
Group CEO and Co-founder of the Big Red Group
In the context of my team, I often would take them back to personal connection. So I think in the event where I want to create change it's about, How do they feel about that?
Building Connection and Understanding
Coaching and Developing Others
Educator, Consultant and Award-Winning Author
Asking "What else could be true" opens up the possibility that we might be wrong. It challenges our cognitive biases and invites new perspectives. It helps us seek other people’s views rather than just take the position or 'my way or the highway’.
It challenges that narrow settling on the first thing that comes to mind, which again as human beings we do. Our brains take shortcuts, heuristics. There's been a lot written about heuristics. They're useful until again they're not because those shortcuts can get in the way of us making good decisions and seeing more than otherwise we would.
Self Reflection
Author, Consultant and Researcher
Team development is based on the erroneous belief that it is enough that we have good relationships and we trust each other for us to have an effective leadership team. The research, however, does not support that. The research tells us that the most important thing to be successful is having a very clear collective purpose and every member of the team recognizing they can only achieve it through collaboration.
We should not just coach on how the team relates to itself but on how the team relates to its investors, its customers, suppliers, its employees, it's wider community and increasingly, the ecology and that this should be more focal in team coaching.
The unrecognized stakeholder refers not only to the unrecognized human stakeholder. Often the stakeholder we are ignoring at our peril is the more than human ones - our environment, ecology and climate change among others.
Part of leading beyond the heroic leader to collective leadership is also each of us learning to work from collective and renewable energy rather than from determination and effort because otherwise we won't grow in individual and collective capacity to step up to the challenges that are now facing us. We should realize that 99% of what keeps us alive isn't done by us. It's the sun. it's the rain. It's the wind. It's the earth. We can also use that for our psychological energy and mental energy, not just for food and air and water.
Coaching and Developing Others
Self Reflection
Career Coach
1. What would I do if I could?
It's balancing the art of possibility with the reality of life. keeping that open mind as to future possibilities, keeping your learning going and having conversations and checking back to what matters to your values, the things you enjoy in work so that you can think about what's possible in the future.
2. What would you do if you had to?
Someone turns up at work that changes the whole place and you don't want to be there or you get fired or made redundant, at the very least you want your résumé and profiles to be up-to-date and you want to have kept connected with the industry, the sector, the people who are in your network so that you're in a position to move if you had to.
3. Identify five questions that you want to ask yourself that you must answer every three or two months?
It might be something like, “How do I feel on a Sunday night?” “What have I learned lately?” “Am I happy?” Program them in your phone and have them pop up every three months. So come up with your own questions, check in and answer those same questions every three months and then ask yourself, “What do I need to do as a result of those?”
Coaching and Developing Others
Self Reflection
Getting under the skin of what an individual's ‘why’ is, not why they're in this particular job but why are they alive? What is it they're looking to achieve with their life and ultimately helping to give them some clarity around that which then helps them work out whether they're in the right job and in the right environment to do that. It's having the opportunity to explore someone’s ‘why’.
Self Reflection
Digital Consultant and Strategist
Asking 'What if it works?' opens up people’s thinking beyond the problems of getting there and the challenges of getting there to thinking forward and figuring out what have to be in place to manage it when it does work. The planning doesn't stop with achieving the goal. One must move further on for when this goal is actually achieved because you will need the logistics to handle the success.
Self Reflection
Strategy
Partner, Contentious Character
It needs to be a ‘how’ question around:
How did you arrive at the conclusion which you are currently putting forward?
How did you arrive at the position that you are currently putting forward?
How did you arrive at that?
This encourages people to think about their process and their rationale and whether or not they are bringing their personality into the process and for better or for worse.
This also then gives you some understanding of the position being proposed and how they got there and may in fact alter your next step as a result of that.
It becomes a two-way interaction where both people are continuing to open up and expose the relevant information that will bring greater understanding and hopefully a better position out of the discussion.
Building Connection and Understanding
Self Reflection
Economist, Commentator and Executive in Residence at the University of Technology Sydney Business School
It is one thing, particularly in a business or organizational setting, to ask about the technical issue at hand but when it comes to issues of people, issues of leadership, you cannot try and escape from an emotional setting even if it's only to bring yourself back to some neutral emotion.
Building Connection and Understanding
Self Reflection
No favourite question
Michael does not have a favorite question because according to him the connection he seeks to establish involves a conversation that has to be unique to the circumstance in which he finds himself with the indiviual he seeks to connect with. He offers the example of a scenario where he is sitting at an airport next to somebody who is reading a paper. He says that you can start a conversation by saying, “That’s an interesting article.” And you can go on from there and find out who they are, where they work, where they're going, if they're going on a holiday, if they're going on business. Each question is unique and tailored according to the circumstances of the setting.
Building Connection and Understanding
Leadership Coach, Mentor & Author
The question Oscar always asks is how do you explore the unsaid? He likes getting people to think about what is going on further than just today.
Coaching and Developing Others
Strategy
Professional Director
A leader must have an agenda, a strategy, a vision and understand that everyone has his own lens that he applies and that if a leader doesn't understand that lens, the perspective of the person he is trying to influence, he is less likely to get them on board.
A leader has to be attuned to that cultural pre-setting that each person has that come from where they've been, how they look at things and in that way he can work through the different views around the table for the right outcome.
Leaders have to have fun and fun is a word that's not a corporate word. You can have a light-hearted chat or have a bit of laughter sometimes, be relaxed enough to be yourself because quite often you feel you have to be, look and behave like some sort of mythical perfect creature.
Coaching and Developing Others
Strategy
Principal, Murray Wright & Associates
These two questions presented by Pia Lee in Episode 19 are thought-provoking and although it may take some time to answer, they are a fundamentally important and powerful leadership practice because you're putting the answer back into the person that you are talking to and you're getting them to think and search for the answer. Telling them things is the short cut. Asking a good quality question like that is much more empowering and much more useful to them.
Self Reflection
Collaborative Advantage
In talking to different stakeholders who come from different sectors, it is more effective not to challenge them on things they say and believe but instead to ask this question. It is better just to ask them to think and it gets better results.
Building Connection and Understanding
My favourite two questions - perhaps with the same intention:
Self Reflection
Building Connection and Understanding
Director, Create Wellbeing Group
Question number one gives you an insight as to what drives that person? What their values are?
The second and third questions give you an insight on how committed they are today to make those changes and what is the history behind getting them to where they are today that they are seeking help and support.
Self Reflection
Building Connection and Understanding
Director & Founder, ThinkTime
This is an important question to ask because we have a tendency for our thinking to be insular and to think about things from only our perspective. We need to expand context so that we reach more enlightened conclusions.
Self Reflection
Building Connection and Understanding
Director of Sales, NEXT Hotels
A great question for people who want to make a difference, do a good job and take accountability.
Self Reflection
Building Connection and Understanding
The Potential Project
Hans Melo usually asks this question and admits that it is deep and that he wants to provokes thought.
For his first question Jason Melo has taken an idea from Tim Ferriss that instead of taking a tally of one's goals one should take a tally of one's fears. For his second question he believes that if you start at an experiential level, as a leader you can draw so many golden nuggets about your followers. Find out what are this person’s strengths. What makes him come alive?
Self Reflection
National Director, People, Quality & Communications at Autism Spectrum (or Aspect)
Questions are great because they open up space. They get you information. If someone is grappling with, 'What do I do?' 'Should I do this?' 'Should I not do this?'
These four questions will help you cover all the options.
Self Reflection
Building Connection and Understanding
VP Human Resources Pandora Australia & NZ
Always expect the unexpected and never assume how somebody else feels about a situation. Ask the questions and be better informed.
Building Connection and Understanding
GM QT Melbourne
Make decisions and calculate the decisions depending on potential outcomes of both the positives and negatives of the decision and then reflect on that and go, I got the right outcome, but was that the best outcome for the customer? Possibly you’ll find agreement, but again the next time, you could handle it differently.
Self Reflection
Manager Local Government Woerden
Leaders especially must ask themselves about self improvement and their impact of that on the organization.
Have a strong belief that everybody in the team has talent and you have to make time to discover that talent especially when they don't see it themselves.
Self Reflection
Coaching and Developing Others
CEO Potential Project
When things do not go according to plan, overreacting is just a waste of energy that takes you away from creative thinking and the capacity to connect and engage in what actually needs to be done next.
Taking perspectives from different people may give you clarity because there may be many better answers when you use and trust the people around you.
Coaching and Developing Others
Director Succeedo Global
If you understand the reason 'why', you can always find your own way to 'how', but if you don’t understand 'why', the 'how' you come up with may be irrelevant to what the overall intention is.
Using the three questions associated with the leadership mindset to clear the thinking, will enable better decisions.
Strategy
Self Reflection
Coaching and Developing Others
Organisation Transformation
Leadership requires you to have the courage to do what you know is right even though it scares the pants off you because you're doing it for the greater good and you've done all your due diligence to make sure that as best as you can work out, this is the right way to go as you know.
Avoid huge judgements against people. When you get under and you get close to people and you seek to understand their perspective and their point of view and you genuinely walk in their shoes, you realize from their perspective what they're doing makes complete sense.
Building Connection and Understanding
Self Reflection
CEO LIW
The 3Cs - Clarity, Climate and Competence - the three conditions that leaders need to create for themselves and for others for their team or organization to be successful.
The quality of your questions creates the quality of outcomes. Quite often we feel we have to tell people the answers. The question, 'What are you actually trying to achieve and why?' is the most powerful leadership practice because you're putting the answer back into the person that you are talking to and you're getting them to think and search for the answer. Telling them things is the short cut. Asking a good quality question like that is much more empowering and much more useful to them.
Coaching and Developing Others
Strategy
Director, Infinity Leadership
Looking backwards, reflecting on people, events, times in your life and answering these questions:
The first step is to look backwards, to reflect on people, events, times in your life and map that out and then to zoom out and look at that life history. A combination of strengths and impact is a good way to think about purpose as you move forward.
Director, Clearpoint Communications
Holistic leadership is about the doing and the being of leadership. Doing leadership on a day to day basis, we have KPIs, quotas and budgets that we have to hit and therefore we do a lot to achieve that. That’s valuable from a outward perspective, but the risk is we do that at the cost of not focusing on or engaging with the being of leadership. The being of leadership is that emotional connection whether it's introspective around your own emotions or whether that’s the emotional connection between two people or the group. It's really important to create that balance.
Building Connection and Understanding
Principal, Institute of Executive Coaching & Leadership
You can never know the impact you're having on another person fully unless you have a conversation about it with them. That requires having trust there in order to have the conversation. Regularly check in and ask the questions. It's understanding that even with the best intention the impact can be quite the opposite. You'll only know that if they tell you.
Building Connection and Understanding
Director, Waterfield Consulting & Strategy Facilitator.
The leader’s role is to continually ask that question about how changes impact us and how we can continue to deliver value to our customers in the changes that we are all experiencing. It is that future focus. We contend that if you do a proper analysis of the future and adjust your business model to accommodate these changes your organization has the best chances of staying in business.
Strategy
