Manager as Mentor - Ask Better, Lead Better: Powerful Questions Can Unlock Potential

Powerful questions prompt deeper thinking, transforming your mentoring conversations. By asking, rather than telling, you encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own development. Just as importantly, it shows you have real interest, and that you’re invested in their growth.

Instead of offering immediate solutions, your use of questions means the mentee needs to reflect and sows the seeds to becoming more self-reliant.

Open-ended questions stimulate deeper thought, encouraging the team member to elaborate and consider multiple aspects. ‘What’ and ‘How’ are non-judgmental. They allow for exploration of ideas, whereas ‘Why’ can come across as confrontational. For example, ‘Why did you do that?’ could be replaced with ‘What was your thinking here?’ or ‘How did you make that decision?’

Allowing space for silence shows you are comfortable listening and fully present and focused on the mentee. It encourages a sense of trust and openness in the mentoring relationship and allows the mentee to process information, consider other ideas and avoids easy fixes. This helps the mentee to build confidence in their ability to find their own solutions and have the courage to be more creative in their thinking.

You can show genuine curiosity by asking thoughtful questions and listening fully to the responses given, without interruption. This makes people feel valued and leads to richer, more honest conversation.

Probing questions encourage the mentee to think deeper or wider. For example ‘Can you expand on that?’ or ‘What makes this particularly important to you?’ or simply ‘What else’ are all easy ways to get the cogs turning.

Michael Bungay Stanier’s book ‘The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever’,  encourages a shift from “advice-giving” to “curious questioning,”. We’ve outlined a few of Stanier’s key questions below:

‘What’s the real challenge here for you?’ Often an individual will offload a whole host of issues. Use this question to pinpoint the core. What do we need to focus on here?

‘What do you want?’ Asking this seemingly simple question, provides the opportunity for the mentee to gain clarity by formulating and articulating their goal. They can start to see the wood from the trees.

‘If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?’ Use this strategic question to really hit home by emphasising the importance of making a commitment and what trade-offs they may need to consider. It forces the mentee to think about their priorities and the choices they’re making.

Mastering the art of asking powerful questions requires patience, practice and an inquisitive mindset, but it’s a skill worth mastering.  You have the potential to create an environment where people feel empowered to think critically, develop their own solutions, growing into effective leaders who can pass these skills on to their own teams. You can learn all about this on our management apprenticeships.

To dive deeper, Michael Stanier has a TEDx talk ‘How to Tame Your Advice Monster’ which introduces concepts from his book and provides a relatable, practical look at how powerful questions lead to meaningful conversations.