People who run businesses are not machines, and often need emotional support and guidance to keep themselves focused, motivated and productive. For that, they seek competent business coaches who can help to eliminate obstacles and provide clarity on the path.
Every successful coach will agree, that effective coaching hides in asking questions. We as coaches have to understand, that just like all of us, every business is unique, therefore the client has all the answers to why when, and how he should run his particular business.
For this reason, we should avoid infusing emotions, expressing opinions, and giving advice while coaching. Instead, we should be curious and fully engaged with clients while asking questions and letting them guide themselves toward the right answers. The client has all the answers and solutions to his business-related issues, and with the help of powerful questions we can bring it all up.
Here we will share 101 coaching questions that will help current and upcoming executives, entrepreneurs, coaches, and leaders to increase personal and business performance. Those questions wIll help to:
- Increase self-awareness
- Solve inner conflicts and limiting beliefs
- Define the business approach
- Determine goals and objectives
- Gain clarity and create the action plan
- Maximize the business output
- Evaluate the leadership skills
- and much more…
So, let’s get into the list of best open-ended questions to ask your business coaching clients:
Self-Discovery Questions:
1. What is your life’s purpose, and how are you fulfilling it?
2. What are your most important values?
3. How do you define success?
4. How did you get where you are now?
5. What are your short-term and long-term goals?
6. How committed you are?
7. What is your work attitude, how worky do you consider yourself to be?
8. What is a perfect work-life balance, and how do you maintain yours?
9. How many hours you can manage to work while maintaining a healthy work-life balance?
10. What’s your approach to working hard versus working smart?
11. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
12. What makes you feel proud of yourself?
13. What are your fears? How do you deal with them?
14. How do you deal with stress?
15. How escaping your comfort zone can benefit you?
16. What you genuinely are good or bad at?
17. What are your healthy and unhealthy habits?
18. How do your habits affect your business performance?
19. How much time do you dedicate toward self-development?
20. What does your social environment look like? How does it allow you to grow?
21. How do you improve yourself? What methods and resources do you use?
22. How open you are to new ideas?
23. How often do you meet new people and listen to new ideas?
24. What are the most important decisions you had to make in your life?
25. What you have learned from making these decisions?
26. What were the biggest risks that you have taken?
27. What have you learned from taking the risks?
28. How do you react to failures and successes?
Questions to Define Business Approach:
29. What is your dream business?
30. Who is your most inspirational businessman and why?
31. What was your first business idea, and how do you approach it now?
32. What is your experience managing small or big businesses? What did you take away from it?
33. What were your biggest successes and failures in business? What did you learn from them?
34. What new business skills do you need to learn?
35. Why have you started your business? What do you want to achieve with it?
36. How your business career is in line with your purpose and values?
37. What positive and negative emotions does your business bring to you?
38. Why you haven’t achieved your business goals yet?
39. When do you expect it will happen?
40. How could you speed up your business development?
41. Are you prepared to invest the necessary time, money, and resources to succeed?
42. Are you in a good state of mind, body, and spirit to invest a lot of time and effort in launching or maintaining a business?
43. What do you have to sacrifice to make this business successful?
44. How is taking risks essential for business?
45. How are failures essential for a successful business?
46. How patience and delayed gratification is important in business?
47. How many times you are willing to fail to achieve your business goals?
48. What tasks in your business do you enjoy most? How can you do more of them?
49. What tasks in your business do you hate most? How could you delegate these tasks?
50. How do you prioritize and keep your tasks organized?
51. If you lose your business overnight how you would start over?
RELATED: 10 BEST BUSINESS COACHING BOOKS FOR COACHES TO READ
Business Evaluation Questions:
52. What are the vision and core values of your business?
53. What value does your business create?
54. What problem does your business solve?
55. What is your target customer?
56. How does your business manage to get new customers and retain old ones?
57. Would your customers recommend your service or product to others?
58. How people can benefit from using your product or service?
59. What are the expectations of your target customers and how do you meet their needs?
60. Would you be a consumer of your business product?
61. What is a competitive advantage of your business?
62. What are your competitors in this business? What do they have that you don’t?
63. What will it take to beat your competitors?
64. What is working for you in your business?
65. What is not working for you in your business?
66. How sustainable is your business?
67. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your business?
68. What aspects of your business are not profitable? Why?
69. How can you improve your product or service?
70. How you could maximize your business output?
71. What marketing methods do you use to promote your business?
72. How effective is your marketing strategy?
73. How do you allocate your business budget?
74. What are the possible ways to reduce your business expenses?
75. How does your business generate income?
76. What could be alternative ways for your business to generate income?
77. What skills do team members of your business contribute?
78. How aligned is your team with your business values and goals?
Business Leadership Questions:
79. How do you inspire your team?
80. What is your leadership style?
81. Who is your favorite leader, and why?
82. What distinguishes the manager from the leader?
83. What qualities are required for effective leadership?
84. What aspect of leadership is the most challenging?
85. What example do you demonstrate when leading your team?
86. What example would your team like to see?
87. How do you criticize and praise others?
88. How do you provide feedback?
89. How do you bring bad news to the team?
90. How often do you organize team meetings?
91. How would you rate your team’s productivity and performance in your business?
92. How could you maximize the performance of your team?
93. How is the atmosphere in the workplace of your business?
94. What atmosphere do you think you bring to your team?
95. How do you contribute to the positive work environment?
96. What kind of criticism or praise do you most get? How do you respond to that?
97. What qualities do you look for when hiring or promoting someone?
98. How do you settle conflicts among the members of your team?
99. Should there be a competition among your team members, and why?
100. How do you encourage innovation in your organization?
101. How would you motivate someone who doesn’t perform well?
Check out more leadership coaching questions
Final Words:
Here we have covered the best business coaching questions for current and upcoming executives, entrepreneurs, leaders, and other businessmen. Feel free to use these questions as references in your coaching sessions. They don’t have to follow a specific order, and you can ask them whenever you feel it’s right. These questions will help your clients to gain clarity and motivation to perform better in their businesses and organizations.