Questioning practices in business coaching – How to investigate their...

Qualitative linguistic analyses of helping professions have revealed discrepancies between the portrayal of interventions in training materials and practice literature and their actual emergence in authentic interactions (Tracy & Robles 2009; Stokoe & Sikveland 2016). Questions represent a striking case in point (Deplazes 2016). Coaching, too, has a myriad of books and manuals advising coaches which question to ask. Questions are portrayed as a guarantor for successful coaching and as central and most powerful intervention to help clients change (Schreyögg 2012; Patrzek 2021). Their description happens in a decontextualized and monological way via idealized examples. Yet, questioning practices have received little attention in coaching process research (cf. Graf et al. 2020). While authors such as Grant & Conner (2010: 102) agree that “effective questioning lies at the very heart of the coaching conversation”, “(w)hat constitutes “effective” questioning in coaching?” (ibid) remains unanswered (cf. Graf et al. 2020).

Our project “Questioning Sequences in Coaching” (QueSCo) builds on the interdisciplinary cooperation of linguistics and psychology, analyzes authentic data (15 coaching processes from AU, GER and CH, video- and audio-recorded and linguistically transcribed) and applies a mixed-methods research design drawing on Conversation Analysis, Qualitative Content Analysis and Descriptive Statistics. We detail how qualitative, inductive linguistic methodology and quantitative, deductive psychological methodology are conjoined to unravel the local and global effectiveness of questions and their sequential organization. A special focus of our talk lies on the benefits of such research for the coaching practice.