Are You Asking the Right Questions?

When is the last time you asked probing questions to the group you manage? The team you coach? Your wife and kid’s?

When is the last time you asked this group, and the individuals in it, this simple question? “What can I do to help you be more effective?”

What question could be more central to being a good boss? A great coach? A loving and responsive husband or mother. If you want to manage and lead successfully, you’ve got to know what people doing the work need. So why not ask them? But the truth is, this question is not asked by bosses nearly enough.

You’ll get a range of answers, especially in the beginning—including non-answers, (“Gee, nothing. Keep doing what you’re doing.”) and requests you can’t do much about – personal problems, company policies you can’t change, complaints about colleagues who make this person’s life miserable, as well as personal requests you can’t or won’t address (such as “Raise my pay” from someone whose performance is mediocre). Take everything under advisement, if you can’t respond immediately. Promise to take action when you think it’s warranted but resist efforts to “delegate up”.

Asking “what can I do to help you be more effective” is a dialogue, not a monologue. You’ve got to bring a sense of openness and transparency to this dialogue. Fight the urge to provide quick answers, and work to build trust among those you lead. Beyond such answers, however, you will hear ways you really can make people more effective. Finding that may require discussion, careful listening, and respectful probing, and a willingness on your part to hear hard things and to change. Perhaps you need to step back and let people do their work; or perhaps you should get more involved. Perhaps some work processes need to change. These things are often easy to do and make an immediate difference.

“Always the beautiful answer, who asks a more beautiful question” - E.E.Cumings

“The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me”- Ayn Rand

“Everything in life the true question is not what we gain, but what we do”- Thomas Carlyle

Once you start asking questions and discussions, you’ll find they don’t take much time, and they pay dividends. They build trust, they help people work together better and do better work, they clearly identify and remove obstacles.

They also make you more effective because they reveal what’s on your peoples mind. Like it or not, what people think is what they think, and you need to know what that is. Above all, you need to know what people expect from you, the boss.

In most organizations, expectations are assumed to flow in only one direction—down. In fact, they flow up as well, though few organizations pay much attention. Being a leader is a two-way street. People are more likely to rise to your expectations if you try to understand and rise to what they expect of you.

I challenge you to discover how you can lead the way to turbo-charge your team, by asking “what can I do to help you be more effective?” Listen and take action. Time to step up and take responsibility for your teams performance.