The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

Bungay Stanier believes helping people learn is a difficult task, as they do not always learn when taught. He claims true learning takes place when a person must use recall. The question “What was most useful to you?” stimulates this recall and helps employees further embed their manager’s lessons. Recall is an example of double loop learning (a term coined by academic Chris Argyris) in which “the first loop is trying to fix a problem, [and] the second loop is creating a learning moment about the issue at hand” (188). Bungay Stanier claims most people tend to forget everything as soon as they leave a corporate meeting. Considering this, the manager’s job is to create spaces and opportunities for real learning and memory retention. Bungay Stanier discusses a model of long-term memory retention created by researcher Josh Davis, called AGES: Attention, Generation, Emotion and Spacing (188). This model aligns with the question “What was most useful to you?”—embedding information in a person’s memory more effectively than simply giving advice.

“What was most useful to you?” also preempts the forgetting process, an idea that Bungay Stanier borrows from the book, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (2014) written by eminent psychologists Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel. These experts suggest that for learning to take place, “information retrieval” is essential. Bungay Stanier recommends using recall questions to begin meetings as a scaffolding exercise, which helps learners retrieve prior information and connect it to the current situation. He argues for focusing on big takeaways, which he refers to as “The One Big Thing.” Asking “What was most useful to you?” is also useful for coaches because it can provide feedback on their own performance. If an employee is able to answer the question and it matches their coach’s goal, this means the coach succeeded. This is also true in the case of a mismatch, as the coach simply needs to reevaluate their method of delivery. “What was most useful to you?” bookends the opening question, “What’s on your mind?” In order for managers and employees to build rapport, managers should offer their own answers to the book’s seven key questions.

In the workbook section, Bungay Stanier proposes that instead of rushing to finish a conversation, a manager should replace this behavior with “What was most useful to you?” In the “From the Box of Crayons Lab” section, he alludes to the peak-end rule which states performances are evaluated by their highest moments and the way they end. He illustrates this rule using colonoscopies: “Patients whose colonoscopies were extended by approximately one minute but who experienced less pain in the final moments report remembering 10 percent less pain overall” (199), which frames endings as leaving more of an impact.