Sequence questions follow thoughts in such a way that each one follows directly from the answer to the previous question. Here’s an example:
You: What is most important for you to accomplish today?
Your employee: I just want to have a professional working relationship with Angela.
You: Tell me about that. What does a professional working relationship look like to you?
Your employees: I guess I just want the gossip to stop. I’m sick of listening to her talk about everyone else’s business and creating drama.
You: You’d like to limit your conversations to work-related activities. How do you think the two of you can create that?
In addition to being sequenced, questions like these follow a subtle path by moving people from identifying values to describing and defining them to designing a path to achieve them. In this way, you can move employees who are stuck arguing about what has happened and who’s at fault to working together to create a plan for the future.
You can word great sequenced questions any number of ways, but you should often follow a very basic pattern:
What is it that’s most important to you? (Name values)
What does it look like? (Describe values)
How do you get there? (Brainstorm solutions)