Coaching is a skill I wish more leaders understood. Because when you learn to coach, you stop exhausting yourself trying to solve everyone’s problems and start empowering people to solve their own.
A coaching conversation is different from mentoring. Mentoring is advice. Experience. Knowledge transfer. Coaching is inquiry. Questions. Drawing out someone’s own wisdom. Coaching is helping someone access what they already know but can’t yet see.
John Whitmore developed the GROW model specifically for coaching conversations. It’s a simple structure that moves someone from confusion to clarity to commitment. From stuck to moving. From lost to oriented.
The first part is getting clear on the Goal. What does this person want? What outcome are they working toward? Not what you think they should want. But what actually matters to them. A coach spends time getting clear on this before moving forward. Because everything else depends on knowing the actual goal. If the goal is unclear, the conversation will wander. If the goal is clear, everything else aligns.
The second part is understanding the Reality. What’s the actual situation? What’s true about where they are now? What have they already tried? What’s working? What’s not? A coach helps someone see the situation clearly, without judgment. Not through the lens of should or could. But through the lens of what actually is. What’s real. What’s true.
The third part is exploring Options. If anything was possible, what would they try? What choices do they have? A coach helps someone generate possibilities. Many possibilities. Not the one right answer. But multiple paths forward. Multiple ways to move toward the goal from where they actually are.
The final part is establishing Will. What are they actually going to do? What’s the commitment? What’s the first step? A coach helps someone move from thinking to action. From possibility to commitment. From clarity to concrete next steps.
This structure works because it puts the person being coached at the centre. It assumes they’re capable. It draws out their own wisdom instead of imposing the coach’s wisdom.
Marcia Reynolds, who wrote extensively on reflective inquiry in coaching, emphasises that the quality of the coach’s questions determines the quality of the thinking that emerges. A surface question creates surface thinking. A deep question creates deep thinking.
How are you feeling about this is different from What are you learning about yourself in this situation? The second goes deeper. It invites more reflective thinking. It asks for wisdom rather than feelings. It invites the person to be a student of themselves.
Here’s what a real coaching conversation looks like in practice.
Someone comes to you with a problem. Your instinct is to give advice. To fix it. To solve it for them. Instead, you start with curiosity. Help me understand what’s happening. What’s the situation? Listen fully. Don’t plan your response while they’re speaking. Just listen.
Then ask about their goal. What do you want to have happen? What outcome are you working toward? Get clear on this.
Ask about reality. What have you already tried? What worked? What didn’t? What’s true about the situation?
Ask about options. If anything was possible, what would you try? What else is possible? What are you not considering?
Finally, ask about will. What are you going to do? What’s your commitment? When will you take the first step?
Listen throughout. Don’t fix. Don’t direct. Don’t solve it for them. Just create space for someone to think.
The magic happens in that space. When someone thinks through something with you listening without fixing, they come to their own clarity. They find their own answers. And those answers are the ones they’ll follow through on.
I know of a young woman in Lagos who was struggling with a career decision. Her family wanted one thing. She wanted something else. She was paralysed by the conflict between their expectations and her own desires.
Instead of telling her what to do, someone asked her the GROW questions. What do you want? Where are you now? What are your options? What will you do?
As she answered, she found her own clarity. She didn’t choose what her family wanted or what she initially thought she wanted. She found a third option she hadn’t considered. And she committed to it. And she owned it completely because it came from her own thinking.
That’s coaching. That’s the power of questions over advice. (Brooks et al., 2023; Cannon-Bowers et al., 2023; Reynolds, 2020; Whitmore, 2009).
The Coaching Conversation: How to Ask Questions That Create Change
