Klaus Breyer
Move Fast And Break Silos Product & Tech Leadership

ChatGPT as Coach for Coaching

I know how important solid coaching skills are for any leader. Honestly, though, I’m still learning—and always looking to improve. I think we all do, and I had an epiphany today.

Sometimes, it’s tough to translate my intentions into practical coaching questions, especially when I’m in the thick of team challenges, maybe even frustrated or emotionally attached.

So, I decided to try something new: I turned to ChatGPT for support in refining my coaching approach, which I mostly learned from Michael Bungay Stanier’s books The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap.

My Prompt:

I work with these coaching principles from The Advice Trap by Michael Bungay Stanier, 2020
>
What questions to ask:

  • Kickstart: What’s on your mind?
  • AWE: And What else?
  • Focus: What’s the real challenge here for you?
  • Foundation: What do you want?
  • Strategy: If you’re saying yes to this, what must you say no to?
  • Lazy: How can I help?
  • Learning: What was most useful or valuable here for you?

Ask Questions well:

  • Ask one question at a time
  • Cut the Interruptions
  • No rhetorical questions / advice as questions
  • Stick to Questions with “What”
  • Get comfortable with silence
  • Actually, listen to the answer
  • Acknowledge the answers you get
  • Use any and every channel to ask a question

Now I have something that frustrates me in my current team. Transform it into questions I can use to coach the team member effectively:
>
> [ Some blurp of complaints .. ]

Then ChatGpt responds with:

  1. What motivated you to adjust the [..] process in this way?
  2. What is the most important goal behind this decision for you?
  3. What would be the most significant benefit to the team if we further develop [..]?"
  4. How could we better assess which steps are necessary within [..] and which should be handled separately?
  5. What might help us make our progress more transparent for everyone involved?
  6. In what ways could we improve communication to [..]?
  7. What could a collaborative approach look like for discussing [..]?
  8. What do we need as structure or format to discuss topics like this in a focused way and make decisions together?

Yes!

This is something I can work with!

I had some ideas on how to approach this specific issue in a coach-y way. I came up with roughly half of it alone, but the others were inspiring and got me unstuck.

I think it is essential to come up with some coaching questions yourself first. Using ChatGPT to fill in the blanks in your mental model is the best way to use language models. (After all, filling in the gaps is how they are trained, though!)

Then, the only challenge left is handling the actual conversation without being too emotional. ;)