The Power of Inquiry: Coaching Tips for You! - Part 4

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Tips to Ask Powerful Questions:    Here are some tips to get started and master the art of asking powerful questions.

1. Prepare your questions
2. Eliminate the questions that are less powerful
3. Rehearse
4. Go through the checklist
5. Apply
6. Experience the process of inquiry and improve

The Greatest Enemy:  Many of us conduct our work life (as well as personal life) with ‘I-know-how-to’ attitude. That is good as well as bad. Good when we are ready to learn from multiple sources, inspect and adapt. Bad when we are clouded by illusion. Our greatest enemy is this illusion. When we stop learning our questions can remain damaging. This is when managers become damagers. Their questions are direct, critical, offending, acerbic and vicious. We cannot afford to live with the illusion of knowledge. Don’t you agree?



Conversations and Questions:  Asking and answering questions is a significant part of our daily conversations. We ask questions because of the reasons we discussed in Part-1 of this blog series.

Questions can be of different types. Some questions help us open up or start a conversation. Some questions help us probe. Sometimes we ask hypothetical questions and seek answers. Some of our questions can be reflective in nature. Finally, to end a conversation we ask closing questions. Here are some examples.

Initiate: How have you been? What are we going to discuss today? How was your meeting yesterday with the customer? What are your concerns about our project?

Probe: Can you explain why this tool is important? When did we first observe this? What were the observations?

Create: (Create a hypothetical situation) If we get a database expert, how will that help our project?

Reflect: Would you prioritize the top 3 or 5 issues first so that we make our team involved in finding collective solutions?

Close: What is our action plan? What is our next step? When will you talk to our customer about this?

Do you follow similar models?

PDF version of the presentation file 'The Power of Inquiry: Coaching Tips for You!'

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