Advice vs. Questions in Leadership Coaching
In many cases, coaches use questions to probe and make the client think about their situation and how to improve/change it. This is the correct approach, in particular when the client is the “expert” on the subject, their life or health, for example.
However, in many cases we as coaches have much more knowledge about the supporting subject that will help our clients improve. In these cases, coaches provide advice to the client to help them understand the concepts and determine how to improve.
For example, football coaches know a lot more about playing football than the football players. Similarly for baseball coaches such as batting and pitching coaches know tips and tricks on how to bat and pitch better. They usually tell the players what to do, rarely asking what the player thinks (although they do to help confirm understanding). Even life and health coaches have knowledge that their clients can benefit from.
This is also true for leadership coaching. While coaching through questions can lead to the correct behavioral changes, coaching through questions only as we try to explain the subject can be time-consuming, and, in some cases, frustrating for the client. Don’t get me wrong. Questions are essential to the coaching process. But it is not the only approach, in particular when explaining a complicated subject.
For some subjects such as leadership our clients tend to not know much or be confused about the subject and how to proceed. There are many leadership development models (Google just gave me about 723 million results obviously not all unique models). Where does a client start? And how can they learn how to apply the model?
We at Delta Leadership use the Six Domains of Leadership™ (SDL) model and its related 360° survey report to help our clients understand their leadership strengths and areas for improvement. It is a simple yet powerful model. The pyramid structure helps the client visualize how the various domains support each other and what they mean. It also helps understand the leadership effect that each domain elicits. The effects are shown outside the pyramid. For example, the leadership effect of Personal Leadership is Credibility.
We always ask our clients for their impressions from the SDL survey report. What strikes them as insightful? What do they agree with? What do they disagree with? Our leadership planning guide fillable PDF has a section to capture these reflections and insights, and help the client think about the feedback. There are other valuable sections in this PDF. One helps the client develop a Personal Development Plan (PDP) to improve their leadership. The other one helps them plan an Organizational Change Initiative (OCI). We provide this PDF to our clients to help them in their growth.
While simple, it can take time for people to understand and apply the Six Domains of Leadership, in particular when it comes to the interactions among domains/subdomains as well as the leadership effects. One of the most common examples, one that takes time to understand, is the relationship between the Vision (in blue bold below) subdomain in Personal Leadership and the Promotes Innovation subdomain (in blue bold below) in Inspirational leadership. One of the questions used in the SDL Survey in the Vision subdomain is “they think of things in innovative ways”. A leader must be innovative in their approach to situations and opportunities. At the same time, the leader must set up a way, a system if you will, for their team members to be innovative. This is what the Promotes Innovation subdomain focuses on. In this subdomain, the questions are focused on how the leader helps the team members be innovative. For example, a question is “they help others to think in innovative ways.” The relationship between the innovative aspects of the Vision subdomain in Personal Leadership domain and the Promotes Innovation subdomain in the Inspirational Leadership domain are obvious to an experienced person. If a leader wants to promote innovation, they should be innovative (Vision subdomain), even if this innovation is just setting up a way for their team members to be innovative. It can take a while for a client to understand this relationship.
The image below shows the six domains and 18 subdomains in the SDL model:
In the Six Domains of Leadership Survey, the 18 subdomains are force-ranked into 6 High, 6 Medium, and 6 Low subdomains. This ranking is based on everyone’s ratings, not including the Self. In this way the client gets an understanding of how they are viewed and what are their strengths and areas for improvement. We call this ranking the traffic lights chart.
In the chart below, the client’s Vision subdomain in Personal Leadership is ranked as Medium but the Promotes Innovation subdomain in Inspirational Leadership is ranked as Low. The client should leverage their vision strength, even though it is not one of the highest subdomains, to support the Promotes Innovation subdomain. The “Leverage vision” text box and the arrow reflect this view. This highlighting is something the coach does.
Another example, less obvious, is the supporting capabilities of the Concern and Respect (in red bold the above pyramid with subdomains) subdomain and the Understanding (in red bold above) subdomain, both in Relational Leadership, with the Security (in red bold above) subdomain in Supportive Leadership. This interaction is reflected below via the arrows from Concern and Respect and Understanding subdomains to the Security subdomain. Again, this highlighting is something the coach does to help point out the interrelationship. An experienced coach understands these interactions and can highlight them. The coach also can identify other interactions. These are only two examples.
Concern and Respect focuses on the leader seeking the team members’ opinions, respecting everyone regardless of organizational position, and respecting people. Understanding focuses on the leader seeking to understand team members, get to know them, and ask about their interests. These two subdomains are essential for leaders to take care of members, protect them, actively look out for them, and encourage work-life balance, what the Security subdomain in Supportive Leadership looks for. If the leader wants to improve the Security subdomain, they should consider working on the Concern and Respect and Understanding subdomains as well, probably before focusing on Security.
There are other examples. This understanding can take a good amount of time to learn (most SDL coaches will tell you that they learn more about the model every time they coach using it). It can be difficult to help a client understand these insights only through questions. In this situation, the coach should become more of an advisor, explaining the model and what they see, rather than trying to elicit understanding through questions. Coaches use their knowledge to explain what the survey says, then ask questions of the client as to what they would do with this information. That’s the role of the questioning approach to coaching.
Conclusion
Coach through questions but advice by guiding the client in areas where they lack the expertise the coach you have.
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Contact me at jose@coachsolera.com to find out how to improve your leadership.
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