Great Manager Questions Guide

Great managers ask great questions. Open-ended questions are the key to getting to know your direct reports and providing support that accelerate their productivity on your team. Not every moment, though, is a coaching moment. Some moments require for us to be directive. It’s not always clear when it’s a coaching moment and when it’s a directive moment, but it’s helpful to think about existential threat. How much risk are you willing to take on regarding a task or outcome? You may want to titrate how much coaching and how much direction you provide based on each situation. It’s really an art more than a science to understhen when to play which role for your team.

As managers, we are like detectives or doctors. We have to ask questions to better understand what’s actually going on before we can brainstorm solutions. Often people present the problem at a superficial level and you have to ask “five levels of why” to really get to the heart of what’s going on. That means saying comments like “say more” and “could you please elaborate” about five times - without judgement - so that you get the the core feeling or challenge.

As you begin your journey as a manager, you may want to review these questions often and practice using them in meetings - and in your 1:1 meetings so that they become ingrained within your long-term memory. Eventually, these kinds of manager questions will feel more authentic and automatic for you.

ALL-TIME FAVORITE MANAGER QUESTIONS:

  • How are you (and really listen)?

  • How can I help you?

  • What kind of support do you need right now?

WEEKLY MEETINGS QUESTIONS:

  • What’s going well for you right now?

  • What’s hard or challenging right now?

  • What’s getting in your way or slowing you down?

  • What do you think you should do?

  • How might you approach this differently?

  • What do you think the impact of that decision might be?

  • What do you anticipate will be a problem if we take that approach?

  • Who else needs to be involved or aware of this?

  • When do you think is a reasonable time frame for this deliverable?

  • What’s your game plan for reaching that deliverable or goal?

  • How much do you think this might cost?

  • How much time do you anticipate this will take you?

  • How does this idea connect to our organizational/departmental goals?

  • How urgent is this?

  • On a scale from 1-10 how worried are you about this?

  • Do you have the bandwidth to take that on right now?

GROWTH QUESTIONS:

  • What are you enjoying most about working here?

  • Are you happy with work right now? What could make it better?

  • What do you want to learn? What interests or excites you?

  • What motivates you?

  • Who or what inspires you? Anyone here?

  • Who do you want to meet? Want me to introduce you?

  • Where do you want to be in your career in 5, 10, 20 years? How can we help you get the experiences here that will help you get there?

SUPPORT QUESTIONS:

  • What’s something fun you did this past week outside of work?

  • What’s something you’re going to do this week to invest in yourself?