Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM  

Asking rather than telling has become the key to leadership success!  Too few leaders lead with questions.  They tend to dictate or debate rather than inquire and discuss.  The late Peter Drucker noted that the leader of the past may have been a person who knew how to tell, but the leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask. 

You can develop your ability to lead and grow a team that can work efficiently and effectively without constant supervision.  You can do this with the staff you already have.  And the path to get there may be simpler than you imagined.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

Develop Others By Asking the Right Questions
by Chris Musselwhite, Ed.D.

From - Inc.com's Leadership Resource Center, 2006

Highlights from the article:

• Excellent leadership isn’t about having all the answers.  That’s just ego and habit.  As you’re looking into the future, the time has come to switch gears from managing to leading.  To get to the next level, you’ll need to step outside of your comfortable position as head problem-solver and start developing your people to pick up where you left off.
    

• The most underused, undervalued and most effective technique for encouraging initiative and independent decision-making is the skill of asking effective questions.  You can use questions to encourage employees to stretch themselves and take ownership of their responsibilities.  Asking questions inspires people to think and act independently, building their confidence in the process.
    

• It may be simple, but it’s often not easy.  Many successful people find it very difficult to ask questions before jumping in and offering solutions and advice.
    

• Guidelines for asking the right questions at the right time with the right intent:

1. Be sure you’re ready to delegate downward, to let go of your need for control.  If you’re not ready to take that step, your questions will probably take the form of leading questions that have an assumed right answer.

2. Ask only sincere clarifying questions (“What have you considered so far?”).  Avoid challenging questions (“Have you even thought about this particular solution?”) or your opinion disguised as a question (“Don’t you think that this approach is best?”)

3. Start with this goal: Each time an employee asks you a question that is a request to solve a problem or take on unwelcome responsibility, ask at least three questions before venturing an opinion.

• Remember, changing things is going to take a little time.  However, a culture will begin to develop where individuals are expected to actively take responsibility, seek solutions and take action.  You’ll gain the freedom to lead and to focus on strategy and development.

  
For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.inc.com/resources/leadership/articles/20061001/musselwhite.html

The article also outlines three reasons why employees may not rise to the occasion and respond to your questioning approach and what you can do in each situation.

Ask Learning Questions

Western culture has conditioned most of us to use telling style in our communications.  This style is appropriate at times but often overused.  Telling tends to control conversations, shuts off the flow of ideas, and may trigger combativeness or other forms of self-protection.  Telling techniques may create stability, predictability, and uniformity, but they do not bring about deeper commitment and creative problem solving.

Questioning tends to open people up.  It stimulates learning, creativity, and understanding.  It requires a conscious effort to reprogram our autopilot responses by paying attention to our conditioned urge to tell and control others.

Learning questions:

• Demonstrate respect for the individual.

• Help people discover their own answers, rather than waiting for an expert (e.g. The Boss) to tell them .

• Solicit people’s ideas, input, and recommendations, which creates a significantly higher level of participation and involvement.

• Help people understand the roles they play in the problems that exist and in achieving improved results.

• Focus people’s attention on the future, not on the past, and on discovering solutions, not on staying stuck in problems.

Effective learning questions are:

• Open-ended rather than closed-ended.

• Placed appropriately in the dialogue to clarify, illuminate, and draw out.

• Authentic, coming from a sincere desire to learn (i.e. not leading or manipulative).

• Phrased in such a way to genuinely invite the other person to offer his/her personal response.

• Followed by silence, to demonstrate the coach’s sincere intention to listen.

• Supportive in tone, to minimize the possibility of triggering defensiveness.

Examples of learning questions:

• What do you think is important?

• How would you solve this?

• What other factors should we be considering?

• What do you see as the obstacles we face?

• What are you trying to accomplish?

• Where are you stuck?

• Do you want input from me?

• What is your “go forward” plan?

• What can I do to better support you?

“The coach is not the problem solver.  In sports, I had to learn how to teach less, so that more could be learned.  The same holds true for a coach in business.” - Timothy Gallwey

Next Month

Frances Hesselbein, chairman of the Board of Governors of the Leader to Leader Institute and former chief executive of the Girl Scouts of the USA, poses the question, “What kind of leaders do people deserve and require?”  We’ll review her checklist of qualities required in leaders of the future.

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