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Coaching Corner
The importance of asking questions
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Leaders are human beings. As a leader of other human beings, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times, pinpointing and articulating these challenges can be difficult. However, until you can thoroughly address and resolve them, they have the potential to hinder your personal growth and your team’s success. This is where expert coaching can come in.
The Challenge
Ruben is a VP with a multinational pharmaceutical organization. He has a large and diverse team of direct reports who are geographically dispersed. While performance has remained strong over the last few quarters, there is a growing sense in the organization that Ruben’s team has plateaued in some way, and individual feedback suggests that under his stewardship, team members have become less motivated to take risks, to spearhead new projects or initiatives, or to grow their part of the business as dynamically as before.
The organization routinely invites senior leaders to participate in a two-day coaching retreat to regroup, surface challenges or issues, and collectively work on forging solutions through collaboration. Ruben’s boss suggests he attend a retreat led by an IMD executive coach. Invited to share his concerns with the group, Ruben describes the dynamic with his team: the gradual loss of momentum that has characterized performance over time. It is clear Ruben is solution-focused as a leader and is anxious to help and support his reports in any way. When the coach asks him to elucidate what this involves – what he typically does to support team members – Ruben replies that a good deal of his management time is spent sharing advice, offering pointers, suggesting different approaches, and making recommendations. Ruben’s modus operandi as a leader is to ask: “Why not try this?” or “Why not do that?”
The problem with this, as the coach explains, is that these are not real questions. By framing advice as questions, Ruben effectively is telling his reports what to do. He is not proactively inviting their input or seeking out their perspective; rather, this habit of advice-giving is a form of helicoptering – controlling or micro-managing that has the (unintended) effect of stifling autonomy, decision-making, and creative thinking.
The coaching journey
Coming into the second day of the coaching retreat, the coach invites Ruben to observe how she (the coach) asks questions – keeping them short and leaving a little silence after a reply to allow others to process, think, and respond. The coach then invites Ruben to try something bold and new. The coach asks him to take part in a role-play with his peers and to frame all his interactions with his partner as questions. The key here is to formulate open questions, explains the coach; questions that seek to understand what the other person thinks or feels. These are questions that integrate words like “how,” “why,” or “tell me about this,” says the coach, and that are geared to learning instead of directing. Ruben is anxious at first. Encouraged and supported by the coach and his peers, he reveals that his understanding of leadership is essentially grounded in problem-solving and caretaking: that as a leader, it falls to him to find solutions and to illuminate the path to those solutions for others. Talking to the group, it becomes clear that this is a common and shared understanding among other leaders; so too is a feeling of vulnerability around question-asking – leaders should be providing more answers than questions. The coach now encourages Ruben and his peers to reflect on the validity of this belief, and together they explore the need to understand other people to lead them: the need to elicit information and knowledge is just as critical as the need to share these things. Armed with these insights and with the full support of the group, Ruben throws himself into role-play – addressing his partner exclusively via open questions. Asking and not telling is hard at first, but Ruben persists, and the effect is revelatory. In asking questions, he also discovers he must leave room for response to truly learn from other people and discover what they are thinking. Encouraged by the coach and his peers, Ruben begins to see question-asking as an important and powerful skill that he can add to his leadership toolkit – one that will help ensure his team members feel heard, and empowered to think, decide, and act with greater agency and autonomy.
The impact
Ruben leaves the coaching retreat with a new understanding of leadership: that giving answers is not the same as giving direction. And that giving direction hinges on a deeper understanding of the needs and objectives of the other person. To get to this understanding, as a leader, it will fall to him to ask the right questions. But changing habits and behaviors is hard.
To help him recalibrate, Ruben’s coach suggests three simple but effective mechanisms.
- Attach a sticky note to his PC with three words written on it. Those words are: tell me more.
- Make space every day for 15 minutes of journaling to capture thoughts and feelings. This is an exercise that will fuel curiosity and the desire to find out more.
- Make a habit of asking trusted people for feedback.
Asking for feedback from two or three highly trusted colleagues, Ruben learns that his leadership style can be overbearing and at times, doesn’t leave space for those in his team to contribute. It’s hard for Ruben to hear this – for the first time, he can see the gap between his intentions as a leader and the outcome of his behavior. But instead of defending himself, he opts to sit with the feedback and reflect on it. Doing this, he decides to stage a team retreat with his direct reports and to talk about the need to ask questions and build multi-directional flows of information. The team is warm and receptive to the invitation. For the first time, they appreciate the tie between Ruben’s leadership approach and the positive aspirations he has for them as team members.
Questions to ask yourself
- How much do you know about your team’s needs and perspectives – and how much of that comes from individual members?
- Do you see questions as an admission of weakness or a sign of vulnerability?
- If you asked one or two trusted colleagues for feedback, would they describe you as curious?
Trial our Leader’s Question Mix for more insights on the art of asking smarter questions.
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