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Yeah ; I'm super open to coaching as opposed to mentoring, but last few years, when my managers tried to employ the coaching / questions methodology, it was obv

Yeah ; I'm super open to coaching as opposed to mentoring, but last few years, when my managers tried to employ the coaching / questions methodology, it was obvious and painful : they did not feel like open questions to discover something together ; they felt like fake questions that had a "right" or rather "expected" answer, so it did not feel at all like "me figuring things out for myself " but rather"me trying to guess what I'm expected to say". Typically after a few frustrating minutes I just ask for straight feedback - I am happy and excited to receive constructive feedback and lecturing. My boss and I had an open discussion and it may be they just need more practice - coaching is a skill like any other and just because you took a two day class doesn't mean you're an expert yet. So we accepted that while he's more experienced than I am and my mentor in many things, he's junior in "coaching" so we sure working on it together :-)

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
I had some college professors who used Socratic style in class and I enjoyed it. However, that was literally a teacher/student relationship that I signed up for. Furthermore, the professors were usually genuinely curious about my responses and wanted to explore them when they didn't necessarily agree with the expected answers. In the workplace, Socratic method just feels like an unnecessary power move. Someone is trying to cement their role as teacher and the other person as student. I had a manager who liked to use the Socratic method for everything. He communicated everything in the form of questions. If you gave the "wrong" answer, he'd give a sharp sigh and then rephrase the question, giving you another change to give a "better" answer. This method was mildly annoying when he was right, but it was completely disastrous when he was wrong. He'd often arrive late to a situation that people had been dealing with for months and assume he knew exactly what was going on, better so than the people involved. He'd start his Socratic questioning, but you weren't allowed to explain the context or how you arrived at a solution. Your only option was to navigate his Socratic questioning until you could gingerly explain that he was missing a key constraint, or that we had already tried that, or that he had received bad information, and so on. It became a tool for him to control the conversation and put you in your place at the same time. It was a very sad time in my career. I'd arrive to every meeting feeling like I was about to play a psychological game of "guess the right answer" as I navigated the Socratic questions until we could get him to reveal what he was really thinking, or why he was so frustrated, or why he thought we were wrong, or any other number of issues that he just wouldn't tell us.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

I had some college professors who used Socratic style in class and I enjoyed it. However, that was literally a teacher/student relationship that I signed up for. Furthermore, the professors were usually genuinely curious about my responses and wanted to explore them when they didn't necessarily agree with the expected answers. In the workplace, Socratic method just feels like an unnecessary power move. Someone is trying to cement their role as teacher and the other person as student. I had a manager who liked to use the Socratic method for everything. He communicated everything in the form of questions. If you gave the "wrong" answer, he'd give a sharp sigh and then rephrase the question, giving you another change to give a "better" answer. This method was mildly annoying when he was right, but it was completely disastrous when he was wrong. He'd often arrive late to a situation that people had been dealing with for months and assume he knew exactly what was going on, better so than the people involved. He'd start his Socratic questioning, but you weren't allowed to explain the context or how you arrived at a solution. Your only option was to navigate his Socratic questioning until you could gingerly explain that he was missing a key constraint, or that we had already tried that, or that he had received bad information, and so on. It became a tool for him to control the conversation and put you in your place at the same time. It was a very sad time in my career. I'd arrive to every meeting feeling like I was about to play a psychological game of "guess the right answer" as I navigated the Socratic questions until we could get him to reveal what he was really thinking, or why he was so frustrated, or why he thought we were wrong, or any other number of issues that he just wouldn't tell us.