Asking quality questions

A lot of coaching — and a lot of life, for that matter — is about asking quality questions.

What is a quality question? It is not the only right question to ask, as many sensible and useful questions can be asked in any given set of circumstances. Rather, it is a top-tier question that has the quality of being spot on, that promotes engagement, and that pulls from your client the information or awareness that he or she really needs.

A doctor informs you that you have a serious illness. What’s the spot-on, top-tier, quality question to ask your doctor? It’s “What’s the prognosis?” We aren’t thrilled to be asking that question, and we may dread her answer. But we know not to ask, “Where did you spend your summer vacation?” That would amount to a stall or a dodge. In this scenario, “What’s the prognosis?” is the quality question to ask, and “Where did you spend your summer vacation?” is not. You get the difference.

A quality question goes wherever it is that you and your client need to go. It doesn’t go elsewhere. It is almost always easier to go elsewhere, often reflexively, as in the therapist’s classic “And how did that make you feel?” That “And how did that make you feel?” is sometimes a quality question, but more often than not it is a rote reply, serving the therapist’s need to say something.

“How did that make you feel?”, “What happened then?”, and “Is that part of the same pattern?” are reasonable questions sometimes. But they aren’t quite as pointed, useful, or engaging as that hard-to-ask but important-to-ask question of the sort you put to your doctor: “What’s the prognosis?”

Where does a quality question come from? It comes from you intuiting the major contours of the situation your client is presenting and asking a question that connects the dots. To be able to do that might sound hard on the face of it, and yet that can become surprisingly easy to do. It can become easier, really, than plucking a more superficial question out of thin air and asking it just for the sake of asking something.

That connecting the dots is like you pulling together the facts that your child is abnormally silent, that he seems hungrier than he ought to be, given the big school lunch that you pack for him every day, and that he is having trouble looking you in the eye, and then surprising yourself by asking, “Are you being bullied at school? Is someone taking your lunch?”

Where did those two quality questions come from? From you noticing, thinking, discerning, and connecting the dots. To have asked, “How was your day?” or “Do you have a lot of homework?” would not have been spot on. A quality question is not the only question that can be asked — there are likely many possible reasonable questions that can be asked in any given moment—but it is often the question to ask. It is one unlike all the others, the one like “And what is the prognosis?” or “Are you being bullied at school?”

How might you define a “quality question” in your own words? Can you recall a quality question that you asked in some situation? What were the results? And … maybe you’d like to get quiet now, slip stealthily under the radar of your own defenses, and try to discern one or two quality questions to ask yourself. Then, answer them. That would be an excellent way to spend a couple of minutes!

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