Open, Honest, and Direct
Page 7
“Frankly, we could use more time,” he might say. “My team is having trouble keeping up.”
This might trigger a connection in your mind: Your manager’s inability to ask powerful questions of his team may be why they aren’t improving. This leads you to ask, “And how can we make it easier for you to ask critical questions of your team?”
Although this may make sense to you, it will seem to come from nowhere. It’s not part of the current context of your conversation. It also carries your assumption that your direct report’s failure to ask questions is the driver of them missing deadlines. A better follow-up question to ask would be, “What’s holding them back?” The openness of this question will force your leader to explore why his team is having trouble keeping up.
A powerful question is impactful
There are hundreds of questions you’ll ask in a day, and only a handful of them will ever be powerful. Not all questions need to be groundbreaking. Some questions are simple icebreakers, and some stay at the surface. These are not powerful questions, and that’s OK. A powerful question’s purpose is to create insight and allow you to discover or gain clarity as it relates to your evaluation of a person or situation. In a thirty-minute conversation, aim for two to three powerful questions.
It will take some practice. But great leaders ask powerful and impactful questions regularly and intentionally. You’ll know it’s having an impact when the person on the receiving end of your question pauses or even says, “That’s a great question,” as this is filler for them to explore their answer to the question. Powerful questions are impactful because they trigger deeper thought and contemplation from the person on the other end.
A powerful question happens in the moment
Probably the most important point to remember about powerful questioning is that you can’t plan it! Formulaic questions planned before the conversation won’t work, often because when they are asked, they are not in the context of the situation. It’s hard and time consuming to plan for all possible directions a conversation might go. Asking preplanned questions often fails to bring about the potential insights or the clarity that a powerful question delivers.
Instead, get clear on the purpose of the conversation and on what success in the conversation looks like to you, and make sure to share this with the person you’re talking to. Write it down, print it out, do what you need to keep the purpose of the conversation top of mind. When you do, it will allow you to stay in the moment.
A powerful question often takes a moment to sink in
When a powerful question is asked, there is often a pause before a response. The pause happens because the person being asked the question doesn’t have the answer ready to go. They are forced to think about what they want to say as they consider their answer.
I was excited to go through the powerful questions module during my training to become a coach. I’d been anticipating it for a while. My ability to ask those thought-provoking questions was what I felt was holding me back from being a great coach. I came into the training wanting a list: Give me the list of powerful questions, and I’ll ask them. What I found during the training was as disappointing as it was transformative. There is no list of powerful questions and no one-size-fits-all script to follow. Instead, powerful questions must happen in the moment.
For the remainder of this chapter, we will focus on how you can become better at asking powerful questions in the moment. It may seem like a tangential idea, but I promise it’s not. The steps we’ll follow will enable you to not have to think about the below checklist for asking powerful questions. Instead, what I share will allow you to unleash the powerful questions you already have inside you.
ACTIVITY: POWERFUL QUESTIONS CHECKLIST
Is the question
• Open ended?
• Coming from a beginner’s mindset?
• Clear and succinct?
• In context?
• Impactful?
• In the moment?
ACTIVITY: THE HOT SEAT
The goal of this activity is to provide you and your team a platform to practice asking powerful questions. I especially love this because it forces you and your leaders to ask questions of real work scenarios you are facing today. In addition to helping you practice, it will also help you and your team solve key people-issues you’re facing.
Prior to your next team meeting, ask one team member to come prepared to share a challenge they are facing, one to which they don’t know the answer. It usually works best when they type up a few notes and share with the team beforehand. Here are a few tips to guide your team member in their preparations.
• The problem: Use one sentence to describe the problem you are looking for help with.
• What’s at stake: What makes this problem so important to solve?
• The facts: What are crucial facts to know about the problem? Describe these in three to five bullet points.
• The purpose: What’s your desired outcome? What would success look like?
Give the team member two to three minutes to describe the challenge and what success would look like for them in the given situation in the team meeting. Then share the powerful questions checklist so all can see. Go around the room, with each team member firing away a question of the presenter with the goal of learning more about the problem and, ultimately, of helping the presenter achieve their desired outcome. Avoid asking leading questions. Allow around twenty minutes for this.
Close out your questions by asking each person what they learned from this activity.
Hopefully, they—and you—will learn the power of asking questions versus giving advice and the impact it can have on someone’s ability to learn, grow, and make impactful change. You’ll also begin to notice what a powerful question looks like. Powerful questions are not formulaic, even when you have a checklist to follow. You can’t simply write down your powerful questions to use again later. You have to step into the unknown and live in the contextual moment. It can feel uncomfortable, but the results are well worth it.
CURIOSITY AND STEPPING INTO THE UNKNOWN
There’s one surefire way to begin asking powerful questions. There’s one trigger that, when activated, opens up your ability to be a powerful questioner. It’s curiosity.
Do you want to see a master of curiosity in action? Find any three-year-old, and watch them for an hour. They ask what, why, and how to nearly everything they see in the world around them. They want to know more and do not limit themselves by the societal expectations of what’s right or wrong. They just ask.
As we get older, we are trained to lose our curiosity when it becomes clear it’s not acceptable to ask all the questions that come to mind. Instead, we go about our days having surface-level conversations, rarely digging deeper with a coworker, client, or even friend. The secret to asking more powerful questions is digging deeper; it is, to a certain extent, about triggering our three-year-old selves and reconnecting with our curiosity.
I’ve found riddles to be a great tool for bringing our curiosity back. For example, “What has a head, a tail, is brown, and has no legs?”
As you are reading this, trying to figure out the answer, your mind is swirling with questions and possibilities.
• What kind of animal has no legs?
• Is it an animal?
• What else could it be?
What sorts of things have tails? The series of questions running through your head is your curiosity waking up. It’s like the little kid inside you wanting to understand everything about the world.
The answer to the riddle is a penny. Did your curiosity lead you to the right questions to arrive at that answer?
To be able to evaluate people, teams, or situations with greater fidelity — go back to the curious part of you that wants to explore. Instead of restricting yourself, open yourself up and allow your mind to ask any question. More specifically, allow yourself to ask the powerful questions. Sometimes, your ability to do so may take
priming yourself with a riddle to get you there; but believe that you already have the powerful questions in you.
Here’s a set of steps you can use to help you ask powerful questions more frequently.6
See
Remember, your mind is naturally biased. There is nothing to do but notice you are biased. By reminding yourself, you’re creating an awareness of the biases and will be more likely to see them show up in conversations, allowing you to dismiss the biases in the moment.
Think back to the riddle I just shared. That got your mind flowing. All it takes to trigger your curiosity is letting your guard down, changing your state from knowing to wanting to know. I do this by taking a deep breath in and then slowly pushing the air out, letting go of my need to know. I then ask myself, What more can I learn here? What don’t I know?
Hear
To hear the other person, you need to be with them, by listening with intention and attention. To ask a question in the moment, you need to be in the moment, so start by listening!
Speak
Trust your instincts and allow the questions to come to you in the moment. If you are truly curious and listening attentively, you don’t need to worry about finding the right question; it will pop into your head. Trust your instincts and ask away.
WHAT’S THE POINT?
Powerful questions serve as a means to mitigate your biases and start making more logical decisions. By adopting the skills we’ve discussed and putting them into practice, you’ll find they empower you with a magic tool that helps you learn more about people and situations, uncover elements you might not have been aware of, explore different possibilities, and deliver more impactful outcomes. Powerful questions, if they are practiced consistently, can be your key to becoming a more strategic leader.
TOP TAKEAWAYS
• As a leader, you are constantly evaluating people, situations, and teams. Sound evaluation is indispensable to your success as a leader and crucial to your ability to think more critically about your people, team, and business.
• Cognitive biases highlight our brain’s natural tendency to seek efficiency, to cut corners, and in doing so, can cause us to make systematically illogical decisions. These can be disastrous for leaders, limiting their decision-making ability and blindsiding them completely. It’s our blind spot that prevents us from properly evaluating our people, situations, and team.
• Powerful questions are our way around this blind spot. They provide a means to mitigate our biases and assumptions and allow us to take a deeper dive into the evaluation of a situation, a person, or a team as a whole.
• There is no list of powerful questions and no one-size-fitsall script to follow. Instead, powerful questions happen in the moment.
• Curiosity is your surefire way to begin asking powerful questions. The secret to asking more powerful questions is digging deeper; it is, to a certain extent, about triggering our three-year-old selves and reconnecting with our curiosity.
ACTION ITEMS
• Complete the hot seat activity (from page 88) with your team.
• Pick one people challenge you’re facing, walk through the See-Hear-Speak powerful questions framework (from page 91) prior to evaluating the challenge, and then practice asking powerful questions of the person or situation at hand.
REFLECTION
• What did you notice in observing your team during the hot seat activity?
• How can you use this learning to ask more powerful questions yourself?
Chapter 6
ESTABLISH OPEN, HONEST, AND DIRECT COMMUNICATION
“You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
—Steve Jobs, former co-founder and CEO of Apple, Inc.
Intention: When you create the space, you allow open, honest, and direct communication to flow.
In 2012, Google became obsessed with trying to determine the key ingredients of a high-performance team. In a program called Project Aristotle, it brought together psychologists, engineers, and statisticians to figure out what makes the perfect team. They looked at data from employees across more than a hundred different teams at Google while also performing a meta-analysis of studies over several decades on team performance.
To many at Google, the initial hypothesis centered on the individuals on the team, their ability to maximize their performance, or their personalities and working styles. Google surmised that a proper match of behavioral styles (introverts, detail oriented, strategic thinkers, etc.) and abilities would enable teams to better flourish.
But as Google studied the data, it discovered that the people on the team mattered very little; it didn’t matter if a team was full of rock stars, if it was well-balanced with both rock stars and supporting characters, or if it was made up entirely of givers. What mattered consistently from team to team was how the members of the team interacted with one another.1
This insight made me smile because it meant that team performance is more under your control as a leader than you may have previously thought. It’s not simply about who you have on the team; rather, a large role of your team performance is dependent on how the people you do have on your team connect and communicate with each other. What the team at Google learned from Project Aristotle was that teams that lacked clarity and teams that lacked psychological safety consistently underperformed.
Clarity
Teams lacking clarity on their goals and expectations are not likely to consistently reach those goals or meet those expectations. If I hit a ball at you as hard as I can, odds are high that you’re not going to be happy with me. If I now tell you we are playing tennis, you’re likely no longer upset with me. Your perspective immediately changes.
Tennis is a game with rules where it’s acceptable and encouraged to hit a ball at the other person as hard as you can. The rules establish the expectations of the game—the context—clearly and explicitly. As soon as I give you the context—that we’re playing tennis—your expectations change. You understand, at least in concept, the rules of the game we are playing.
In the workplace, we rarely know the rules of the game. One employee thinks we’re playing tennis, another thinks we’re playing football, and someone else thinks we’re playing work. There are no defined rules of the game, because as a team, we’ve never sat down to establish what game we are playing.
When we don’t know what’s acceptable to say or to do with each other, when we are confused about what we are doing or how we are doing it, it brings our actions to a halt and makes it hard to get our work done—let alone to collaborate with each other. Clarity about expectations and goals is essential for a team to perform at the highest level.
Psychological safety
Even with clarity, teams also needed psychological safety to perform at their best. Psychological safety is the belief that you will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. When this factor isn’t present, going to work and communicating with your coworkers can feel as if you are walking through a series of land mines. Instead of giving someone direct and honest feedback, it’s safer to stay quiet and not risk an explosion. The energy we spend trying to tiptoe around one another’s assumed land mines takes away from the common goal we’re trying to achieve as a team. It is what drives ineffectiveness and inefficiency.2
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH-PERFORMANCE TEAM
To create a team that performs, you need people who are willing to be radically transparent with one another and a team that is open, honest, and direct in its communication.
Being open, honest, and direct means that you deliver clear, action-oriented feedback in the moment. This type of live and direct interaction is what allows each individual on your team to operate at their best and to deliver results most effectively for the team. It also means you have a group of people who feel psychologically safe enough to communicate with one another directly. It’s
the creation of a safe space for people to interact in without fear of consequences.
Creating a team with members who are open, honest, and direct with one another is within your control as a leader. Whether you are the CEO of your company or a manager of your team, you don’t need to get your entire company involved to make this happen. You can start today. Open, honest, and direct communication is created when you clearly define the rules of the game, align your team on these rules, and consistently hold yourself and your team accountable to them.
The process starts with identifying your expectations and how you want the team to work together. It seems like a colossal task, but I promise it’s simpler than it sounds. When you clearly define how to work with one another and uphold agreements through your actions, you create the space for open, honest, and direct communication to occur.
If you run your own organization, these rules of the game are your company’s values, although throughout this chapter, I’ll be referring to them as team agreements for reasons you’ll come to see soon. You will likely want to do this activity on your own and then with your executive team, because their input will be instrumental. It’s OK if you already have company values; this activity may enhance what you have or give you new insights to help you redefine your values completely. There is no right or wrong way to go; trust your intuition. Sometimes the values that got you where you are as a business today are not the values you’ll need going forward. Organizations, like humans, grow, adapt, and need to change. Embrace a beginner’s mind as you begin this activity.