When I was first working through how to bring more coaching opportunities into my normal workday, one thing that I came up with was the Question of the Week. Every week I spend a bit of time researching or just thinking about a question to pose in my weekly one on ones with my direct reports.  I do this because otherwise the meetings are not well structured or they are just filled with status.  We practice SCRUM, so our daily stand-ups give me plenty of status, and meetings without some sort of agenda’s are not a good use of time.  Sometimes team members want to use the one on one time to talk about something that is important to them, sometimes its a technical discussion, maybe a design discussion, something that may be going right or wrong, or something else that they want some help with.  However if they do not have something that they want to talk about, or something that I want to talk to them about, then the question of the week is there to help.

Initially I wanted to call this the Coaching Topic of the week, but that seemed to make people suspicious of the whole thing.  I think that made it seem too formal, or that I was trying to impose some sort of philosophy or agenda on them, or that I had some sort of outcome that I wanted from the question.  None of this is true, so I dropped the coaching moniker and just call it the Question of the Week which seemed to soften the whole tone.

When I started, I would just pose the question in the meeting.  This worked fine for me as the only prep I had to do was to come up with the question, but it didn’t work for my team members.  I quickly got the feedback that they needed more time to ponder the question, and they asked if I would send them out in advance.  So each week, I send out the question usually the evening before the week’s one on ones begin.  In the weekly mail, I clearly state that the question is just one topic, and that our one on ones are their time, and that I don’t expect them to prepare for the question or even that we will talk about the topic.

This has been a meaningful exercise for me.  The feedback that I’ve gotten from my team is that it has changed our one on one discussions for the better. I’ve decided that I will post the question of the week here as well.  Some weeks the questions have some background or back story, and so I will share some of that as well when I can.

If my question of the week inspires you, I would love to know about it.  If you would like to talk with me as a coach about the current weeks topic, a prior weeks topic, or something of your own design, please feel free to reach out so that we can set something up.