Section 14.2: Open-ended Questions
Navy Gill and Sydney Mayer
Some Examples of Open-Ended Questions
- How do you think you’ll overcome these obstacles in our project?
- Tell me about your thought process?
- What would you like to accomplish from this presentation?
- How do you think we can make the product better?
Examples of What NOT to Ask
- Do you think this process is efficient?
- Why didn’t you do this?
- Do you not think we could improve performance by changing this?
- Did you find this meeting helpful?
Asking open-ended questions allows the employee to critically think and share their answer with no assumption that the coach has a preconceived opinion. This gives the impression that the coach is looking down on them, and the employee might get defensive in response (The Non-profit Association of Oregon, 2016).
When asking open-ended questions, a key aspect for coaches to focus on is listening; therefore, it is important that the coach talks minimally to allow the employee to share their thoughts and speak for the majority of the conversation (The Non-profit Association of Ore-gon, 2016). This ensures the employee feels heard and understood while also allowing them to develop their own solutions to the issues they are facing, which will motivate them to change behaviour patterns to reach their goals (Jimenez, 2020).
A benefit of asking the employee open-ended questions is that it encourages critical thinking. It is important to give the employee time to gather their thoughts, which gives the coach time to contemplate the employee’s viewpoint (Schneider, 2018). While an employee is giving their answer, the coach can look for common themes and have some time to develop their response.
Feedforward
The idea of feedforward is that a coaching session focuses on the future performance and pathway of the employee’s career instead of giving feedback on events that happened in the past (Kruse, 2012). This vision dispenses with the idea that an employee has not succeeded and needs to be critiqued and instead emphasizes how they will achieve their goals in the future. This positive approach drives employee engagement as well as growth and development (Kruse, 2012).
According to Kruse, there are four key elements to the Feed Forward Coaching Model:
- Focus on goals, not standards. Instead of explaining the standards and expectations, speak to the goals the employee is seeking and ask them what they think they can do to get there.
- Include career guidance. A coaching session is not just about what is currently happening. The session should include guidance on how the employee can grow and develop in their careers, boosting the employee’s motivation to get there.
- Include data points, not just the manager’s opinion. Feedback may stem from opinions. Feedforward allows you to review data points and identify ways to change them in the future.
- Takes place during the year, not once annually. Feedforward is a continuous process. The discussion follows through, throughout the year.
Giving feedback is said to be an ancient practice, and employers are heavily encouraged to implement feedforward check-ins between managers and employees (C, 2018). Studies show that managers and employees both dread annual performance reviews (C, 2018), which is why the feedforward model is now being used in more and more organizations. The feedforward model encourages positive behavioural change under a specific context that drives an employee to reach personal and organizational goals.
The Value of Coaching
