33 Questions to Boost Your Group Coaching Question Bank! | By Jennifer Britton

Boosting your coaching muscle is key to any coach's success. So, here are some coaching questions to help you! These questions will help you work with goals, support prioritization and time management, create focus and build trust and connection within a group you are coaching.

1) Questions to work with clients around goals:

1. What's important about this goal?
2. What's important - In the big picture? Short term? Long term? In the weeds?
3. What will success look like?
4. What outcomes do you want?
5. What might get in the way?
6. What could be a roadblock?
7. What resources do you need to be successful? (OR What will help you be successful?)
8. When you are successful with this, what's possible?

What are some of your favorite goal questions?

2) Questions to work with clients around priorities and time management

1. What's really important for you right now?
2. What are your top 3-5 priorities?
3. What's the low hanging fruit?
4. What, if left unaddressed, could create a significant impact?
5. What's the quickest thing to get off your plate and clear up space?
6. When you clear this issue, what will be available to you?
7. What do you need to say NO to right now?
8. What are your next steps around this issue?

What other questions do you like to ask around prioritization?

3) Questions around focus:

1. What does focus mean around this issue?
2. Who can help you focus on this?
3. What do you need to say NO to in order to be successful?
4. What could get in the way of your focus?
5. If you look at the big picture / 30,000 foot view, what's IN focus?
6. And stay in the big picture / 30,000 foot view for a moment. What's NOT in focus?
7. If there was one thing you could add or take away to help with your focus, what would it be?

How do you work with your clients around focus?

4) Questions to focus connection in teams and groups:

In the group and team coaching context trust and connections amongst all group members are critical for opening up the conversation. Lack of trust can be one of the biggest impediments to the coaching process. Consider these types of questions to help boost connection in groups:

1. What is common to all of us?
2. What does each one of us bring that's unique to this team?
3. What strengths do we bring individually to the group? *
4. What strengths do we have collectively?
5. What do you notice about where our strengths overlap?
6. What gaps exist in our strengths?
7. What is important about our shared values?
8. How do we have each others' backs?
9. What do we each need from each other?
10. What do you expect from our work together?

* Tip: Consider providing the team or group with a strengths based profile as pre-work such as VIA Strengths or StrengthsFinder2.0

So, as we wrap up this article, I'd love to know some of your favorite coaching questions in group and team coaching? Share yours by commenting below!

If you liked this article with coaching questions for group coaching, you may also like:

• Part 1 of this article: How to Grow Your "Coaching Questions" Muscle in Team & Group Coaching
• Coaching Questions in 6 Areas for Highly Effective Teams | By Jennifer Britton
• 10 of My All-Time Best Coaching Questions & Why!

Image of colourful people sitting around a question mark by qimono via Pixabay

Contributing Author:

Jennifer Britton, MES, CHRP, CPT, PCC, is the author of seven books and has influenced a generation of coaches in the realms of team and group coaching. You may have read her writing, including Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2010), the first book in the world to be published on the topic of group coaching; From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching; or her latest, Reconnecting Workspaces: Pathways to Thrive in the Virtual, Remote and Hybrid World (2021).

Since 2006, Jennifer's Group Coaching Essentials and Advanced Group and Team Coaching Practicum programs have become known as the must-do training in the area of group coaching. Focused on providing coaches with best practices in designing, marketing and implementing group coaching, these programs have helped thousands of coaches launch their own group and team coaching programs in a wide variety of settings (public, corporate, non-profit). Together both courses are approved for 18.75 ICF CCEUs. These are the first two of 10 course pathways leading to certificates in Group and Team Coaching.

Potentials Realized's ICF-CCE programs are geared for aspiring group and team coaches, especially those wanting to work toward the New Advanced Credential in Team Coaching (ACTC) with the ICF.

Also check out our neuroscience course for group and team coaches (NLE-A), Team Coaching Essentials  and ACTIVATE Your Team and Group Coaching Superpowers. Prefer podcasts? Listen in to the Remote Pathways podcast, which explores the many different pathways to remote work, business and leadership.

Learn more about Jennifer & see all their articles here >>