Talk to The Coaching Habit like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
The Coaching Habit is Michael Bungay Stanier's practical guide to asking better questions — specifically, seven questions that he argues should become habitual for any manager who wants to coach rather than just direct. The book is deliberately short and direct, designed to be read in an afternoon and applied the next morning.
The premise is that most managers over-advise and under-question. They jump to solutions before fully understanding the problem, and in doing so they rob people of the experience of solving problems themselves. The result is a loop Stanier calls the "advice trap": the leader gives advice, the team member implements it, the team member comes back with the next problem, the leader gives more advice, and slowly the leader becomes the solution engine for everything and the team becomes dependent.
What it gets right
- 1.
The advice trap is the manager's most common failure mode: jumping to solutions before fully understanding the problem, creating dependency rather than capability.
- 2.
Seven questions form the coaching habit: What's on your mind? And what else? What's the real challenge? What do you want? How can I help? If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to? What was most useful about this?
- 3.
The 'And what else?' question is the most powerful of the seven. It creates space for the information that wasn't coming out, surfaces the real issue, and resists the impulse to solve before fully hearing.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Michael Bungay Stanier is a Canadian author and coach who founded Box of Crayons, a company focused on coaching skills development. He spent a decade at the management consulting firm McKinsey before turning to coaching and learning design. The Coaching Habit, published in 2016, has sold over one million copies and is one of the best-selling coaching books in the world. He has also written Do More Great Work and The Advice Trap. He holds a degree from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
