Session Q&A Template

A team leader shows up to weekly sessions responsive and engaged but without a clear sense of what she wants to work on. The coach ends up doing the agenda work in the first 10 minutes of every session. The sessions are useful but not client-led. She's treating coaching like a meeting she attends rather than a process she's driving.

Give the tool with an explicit framing: 'Between now and our next session, I want you to write down four questions you actually want answers to. Write each question in one sentence. Then write your current thinking on each. Don't wait until the day before - do it within 48 hours while this session is still fresh.' Don't soften the expectation. This is not optional pre-work - it's a change in how the engagement operates.

If the questions she writes are logistical - 'How do I get my manager to approve the budget?' - rather than coaching questions - 'What am I afraid of about asking directly?' - she hasn't yet learned to distinguish between coaching and consulting. The quality of the questions is the diagnostic data. If all four are about other people's behavior, the client hasn't yet oriented toward herself as the focus.

Start by asking her to read the question she spent the most time on. Not the most important one - the hardest to write concisely. Then ask: 'What made that one harder to write?' The concision constraint often surfaces complexity that the client hasn't previously noticed. If one of the questions has a very different tone from the others - more personal, more vulnerable - that's the one to start with.

A sales director has been in a coaching engagement for four months. Sessions are good conversations. He leaves with clarity. Two weeks later he arrives and the same issues are present with minimal movement. The coaching relationship is solid but the between-session transfer isn't happening. The issue is likely that he's not taking ownership of the work between sessions.

Present this as a structural shift: 'The pattern I'm noticing is that we're doing good work in the room, but the work isn't sustaining between sessions. I want to try something: after every session, within 24 hours, write down four questions that are live for you and your current thinking on each. Bring those to the next session. That's our agenda.' Frame it as a joint experiment, not a correction.

After the first few sessions using the template, watch whether the questions are getting more specific. Early questions tend to be broad ('What should I do about my underperformer?'). Useful questions are specific ('What am I actually afraid of in the conversation I've been avoiding with Marcus?'). The specificity trajectory tells you whether the between-session work is changing how he's engaging with the coaching.

Go through all four questions in the first five minutes - not to answer them, but to let the client hear them aloud and rank them by urgency. Then: 'Which one, if we worked on it today, would have the most impact on the next two weeks?' This moves ownership of prioritization to the client. The template builds up a longitudinal record of what he keeps coming back to, which is worth reviewing at session 10 or 12.

A newly promoted manager who has never worked with a coach is starting a six-session engagement. She wants to use the coaching well but doesn't know what coaching questions actually look like. The first two sessions have been her reporting on her week and asking advice. The template can teach her what coaching preparation looks like before the engagement gets further off-track.

Introduce it as a tool for learning how to use coaching: 'Most people who are new to coaching aren't sure what to bring. Here's a simple structure: four questions you want to work on, and your current thinking on each. Write the question first - as specifically as you can. The more specific the question, the more useful our time. Try it this week and we'll use what you write as our starting point next session.'

In the first iteration, expect broad questions and thin answers - that's normal for a new coaching client. The improvement to watch for is whether the questions get more specific and the answers more honest over subsequent sessions. If after four sessions the questions are still advice-seeking ('What's the best way to run a team meeting?') rather than self-exploratory, the client may need a direct conversation about what coaching actually is.

In early sessions, spend time on the questions themselves before the answers: 'What made you write this question rather than a different one?' This teaches the client that the question is data, not just a container for the answer. The four-question structure builds habit that will sustain the engagement regardless of what topic is live on any given week.