RW8 Asking good questions, empowering good people

This short related-work podcast follows up on the last conversation with Michael Bungay-Stanier, to present the seven coach-like questions from his book ‘The Coaching Habit’ for helping us to stay curious longer, jump to advice a little more slowly. I also reflect on my experiences trying to apply this in my academic life where I see it as one of our most powerful tools to help empower and develop good people.

Related links:

Previous podcast conversation: Michael Bungay-Stanier on the power of curiosity and taming your advice monster

Michael’s link: https://boxofcrayons.com and https://www.mbs.works

Book: The Coaching Habit

TRANSCRIPT

(00:27):

I'd like to follow up here on my conversation with Michael Bungay Stanier, where he talked about the power of staying curious a little bit longer and being slower to jump into advice so that we make sure that when we are giving advice, we're giving advice to the right problem. And I think that as academics or people working in industry, working with people in our supervisory or our management roles, this can be one of the most powerful tools that we have at our disposal for developing the potential in others. And that's what we're all about in the people side of academia. I think in our teaching and in our supervision, and I don't know about you, but I was never trained to take on these sorts of more human aspects of a role we're taught how to do research, how to write papers.

(01:23):

And if we're lucky, we may have had a good role model or a good mentor, or some people may have more natural skills in this regard. But I know for me that when I moved into my first academic position where I was managing people and projects and PhD students, I just felt totally overwhelmed. I felt like I needed to have all the answers, even though I was totally out of my depth and to cover up for that. I know, and, and to sort of put forward the persona that I did know what I was doing. I know that I play out many of Michael's advice monsters - the tell-it, the save-it the control-it. I don't know how I came across this, but in 2007, I happened to see an advertisement for a training course for personal coaches, for development coaches. And I really liked that the language that they used and the emphasis on development, and it just felt like that could be something useful to do.

(02:23):

So I went and did this. It was over a number of months at weekends and online sessions in between sessions and the impact bringing that coaching like mindset back to my job was absolutely transformative. I no longer felt like I had to have all the answers. And there was literally a weight taken off my shoulders and allowed me to be much more authentic and genuine in saying when I didn't have the answers, but I could ask, I was better at asking questions and helping people find their own solutions and collaboratively exploring the solution space. And it was so much more powerful, I think for me and for them.

(03:10):

And I liked the way this sort of bringing a coaching mindset to our supervision