Kenneth Berger
Coaching Unlocks Hidden Potential
Inspired by Kenneth Berger episode
Kenneth Berger on asking better questions: Good coaches don't give answers—they ask questions that help people find their own.
Kenneth learned this at Slack: when you're attached to being right, you can't have a real conversation. You've already decided you're right and they're wrong, which is fundamentally disrespectful because you can't actually know that for sure.
Here's the thing about coaching toddlers through questions instead of directives: it's slower than death. "What do you think will happen if we stack this block on top?" takes approximately seventeen years longer than "No, not like that, like this." Your way is faster. Your way is correct. Your way doesn't result in a tower collapse and subsequent meltdown.
But their way is how they learn. And the truly maddening part is that sometimes—not always, God no, not even most of the time—but sometimes they come up with something better than what you had in mind. They stack the block sideways and suddenly you've got an arch instead of a tower.
That's when you realize the coaching worked, and also that you've been doing blocks wrong for thirty years.
