1 Tip to Help You Stay Out of “Solution Mode” During Coaching Conversations
Staying out of “solution mode” is often one of the harder things to master when you’re coaching your team. Using coaching questions can help you resist the urge to inject your own solutions, and help give the other person space to come to the solution on their own.
Good coaching questions have two criteria:
They can’t be answered with “yes” or “no”
They don’t have an answer embedded in the question.
❌ “Have you tried changing your JIRA ticket template?” A simple yes or no would answer this question, so it’s not a coaching question/
❌ “Do you think they are writing unclear tickets because they don’t understand the problem or just because they don’t have time?” This is less obvious, because it feels open-ended. But in the question itself, you’ve limited the conversation to two options: either this or that.
✅ “Why do you think this keeps happening?” This question fulfils both criteria above.
Here’s my tip.
In every conversation, there’s a pivotal moment where you can fall into the trap of solution mode, or stay out if it. It’s usually the first thing out of your mouth when someone brings you a problem.
So, just for that moment, you need to practice what you’ll say instead.
Maybe it’s something like
“What have you tried so far?”
“How are you thinking about solving this?”
“What kind of result are you looking for?”
Practice saying this phrase out loud so you can hear how you sound when it comes out of your mouth. This might feel awkward, but it will increase your likelihood of actually using the phrase.
To get better at coaching conversations, you don’t need to memorise lists of coaching questions. All you need to do is memorise one phrase that you’ll say when someone brings a problem to you, instead of going into solution mode by default.
