It’s time to channel your inner Fiona Bruce

Ever come out of a meeting and feel like you’ve just not got the answers you’ve wanted.

Ever considered you’re asking the wrong questions?

Ever considered that if you change your approach, you may get the outcomes you require?

Questioning is a powerful tool for unlocking value not just in your company, in your business, but in your relationships too whether personal or professional.

Questions spur learning, they inspire the exchange of ideas, increase effective dialogue and help you understand better so that you get the outcome you need.

Questions fuel better performance. And with consideration, reflection and the right questions you can mitigate risk by unpicking possible outcomes, potential pitfalls and probable barriers.

Yes dear reader, it’s time to channel your inner Fiona Bruce and master the art of questions.

Questions are also the foundations of coaching. And of coaching-led leadership.

I ask my clients questions and their responses, what they unearth and how they can then unlock their ability, progress and performance is more powerful than Mistress Polly McPowerful (and she is really blinking powerful).

In coaching-led leadership programmes, it unlocks collaboration, communication, builds trust, supercharging productivity and performance.

So much of our working lives are spent asking others for information, sending emails asking for this, that, the other; requesting updates or, my personal favourite, those passive aggressive questions so thinly veiled.

There’s the professions who are taught to ask questions; journalists, lawyers, rozzas, doctors (if you can actually get an appointment) - it’s an essential part of their learning.

As part of certified coaching frameworks, we learn how to ask powerful questions to gain insight and understanding - and it’s a skill that can be developed so that everyone can have the right conversations.

So my questions for you today?

• Are you asking enough questions?

• Are you asking the right questions?

• Are you asking yourself the right questions?

• What questions are you asking?

• Are you asking questions with the outcome in mind?

Research reveals that strategic questions can be grouped into five domains:

1. Investigative: What’s known?

2. Speculative: What if?

3. Productive: Now what?

4. Interpretive: So what?

5. Subjective: What’s the perspective? The difference between what has been said, heard and meant? (Perhaps one of the most powerful questions).

So, dear reader, what’s the next question you should be asking; of others to get the outcomes you need.

And really what IS the next question you really should ask yourself?

Let me suggest…

“How you can help me, Sarah?”

Here when you’re ready. ; )