In the Beginning…Ask Questions

A friend and colleague, Mike S, recently wrote to me, “I enjoy reading your thoughts on leadership and know you have dealt in the past with how a leader sets an example, acts and lives, but I was wondering if you have considered the topic I will call ‘how a leader starts’. This topic intrigues me because I am about to start something new and the timing is appropriate.”

I am starting a new role as well so this is a great moment to explore the subject of ‘In the Beginning’. In a series of posts I will outline some of my thoughts as I start this new role. The last blog was about “listen” this one is about “ask questions”.

Before you can listen, you sometimes have to ask questions. There are all sorts of techniques to asking questions:

• Open and closed ended questions
• Using a funnel
• Probing questions
• Leading the witness
• Rhetorical questions

While these are useful, they are merely the manner in which you try to elicit input from an individual or group. No matter what technique you use, your posture becomes the most important attribute when you “ask questions”

I want to be clear about the use of the term posture. I do not mean the position of your limbs or the carriage of your body as a whole. In this context I am talking about the definition whereby posture is a mental or spiritual attitude. Your internal attitude as you ask question, no matter what technique you use, will have profound impact on the way the organization operates.

It is human nature to be fault finders. In our natural state we run around, seek out imperfections and crush them. Think about almost every strategy or planning meeting you have been in. It usually has this question somewhere in it, “All right folks, let’s figure out what is broken and let’s go fix it!” I am at the front of the parade, completely guilty of this approach. Of course, this is sometimes necessary in every business or endeavor, so I am not advocating that we never look at what is going wrong and put plans in place to recover, fix, turn around or eliminate the brokenness of an organization.

That said, we have to be careful that we do not fall in a trap where all of our questioning comes from a posture of, “what’s wrong?” Why not? There is an important principal at work here; human systems grow in the direction of what they persistently ask questions about. If I continue to ask questions from a “what’s wrong” posture, the organization will focus its time, energy and ultimately its attitude around broken things. It will grow towards what is wrong. We need to invert this outcome, instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, we must send our organization in the direction of discovery, dream, and design.

How do we do this? How can we send our organization in the direction of what works? There is a fairly significant body of work around the field of Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry joins two powerful words.

Ap-pre’ci-ate, v. valuing; the act of recognizing the best in people or the world around us; affirming past and present strengths, successes, and potentials; to perceive those things that give life (health, vitality, excellence) to living systems

In-quire’, v., 1. the act of exploration and discovery. 2. To ask questions; to be open to seeing new potentials and possibilities.

How does appreciative inquiry manifest itself as you ‘ask questions’? Think of these two questions; “We are trying to grow this business, what is wrong? What is broken? Why can we not seem to grow the business?” Or; “We are trying to grow this business; can you tell me some examples of where growth has worked? How do we replicate those examples?”

You can picture the difference in my posture as I ask those two questions. You can almost sense the difference in the room during these two very different conversations. This mode of questioning repeated time and again at all levels throughout the organization can have a profound impact on the attitude, energy, initiative and success within a company. In fact, David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney assert in some of their writing on Appreciative Inquiry, “The single most prolific thing a group can do if its aims are to liberate the human spirit and consciously construct a better future is to make positive change the common and explicit property of all.”

In the beginning…ask questions. But check your posture. Beyond your questioning techniques, what is the core of what you are trying to find out? Are you trying to discover all that is broken or examples of where success is occurring?

Winston Churchill said, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” We have to ‘ask questions’ in such a manner that we give our folks the chance to see the opportunity in the difficulty.

Passion Part V - Style

In this series of posts, I write about passion as a force multiplier in an organization and the creation of passion through individuals who know their role, are convinced their role matters and see the good of their work.  I argue that leaders must focus on five elements to create this level of passion; vision, culture, principles, style and sacrifice.  The previous posts discussed vision, culture and principles, this post is about style and it starts with a question for you - are you an inspector or a coach?

Dr. Rob McKenna is a good friend of mine and Rob has a passion for studying leadership under pressure.  This passion led him to work with the Boeing Company on a project where they followed the careers of 120 executives to explore factors and experiences that had the greatest impact on leadership development (you can read about Rob's work in an excellent article titled "The Differentiated Leader - Specific Strategies for Handling Today's Adverse Situations" - Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp 292-306, 2004).

Through many conversations with Rob, I interpret his definition of pressure to include any or all of these factors; 

1. Driving change and dealing with the associated anxieties in an organization
2. Being on the edge of your performance or capability envelope in a public 
3. Having the possibility of a highly visible failure
4. Operating with other's outspoken disagreement of your decisions and/or direction
5. Assuming responsibility for the direction, success and well-being of other people

Close your eyes and imagine you have all of these factors working against you in a situation.  You are driving change, you do not know what you are doing, your position is visible, factions within the organization are disagreeing with you and many are dependent upon you for their livelihood.  Within the lovely confines of this imagined scenario, one of your folks pulls you aside and unloads a major mistake, issue, decision or option on you. This is not minor; this could significantly divert you and the rest of the team from your mission.

What is your reaction to this person? If you are like me, your antenna tingles; looking for every bit and piece of data about the situation and your brain starts formulating options.  You then proceed to lay out to your young Padawan in a high degree of detail exactly what must get done to accomplish the task.  If you are like me, you become intensely concerned with what they are doing.

It is in these moments that our style becomes evident.  The style we must have to create and sustain passion is coaching not inspection.  You usually get in a leadership role because you have a history of getting stuff done and you are highly motivated.  These two combinations cause collateral fear in others, fear that as soon as the goal is accomplished you will toss them aside.  You probably do not feel that way, but how do they know?  How do they know they are not just a means to an end for you?  Remember passion requires people to believe that their role really matters.  Their role matters when they matter.  You can show them that they matter by coaching, not inspecting.

I have come to realize that the only way to shift from inspection to coaching is to look at someone and genuinely be more concerned about who they are becoming vs. what they are doing.  There is a great story about a promising young executive at IBM in the 1960's.  He had just led IBM into a risky venture that lost $10 million for the company.  When Tom Watson Sr., the founder and CEO of IBM called the executive into his office, the executive arrived with his resignation letter already written.  Watson is reported to have said, "You cannot be serious, we have just spent $10 million dollars educating you!"  Tom Watson was clearly focused on who this executive was becoming.

We do need to get stuff done within our organizations, so this focus on who they are becoming vs. what they are doing cannot be an either/or activity.  We cannot solely focus on who they are becoming.  Instead, I would ask you to think of it as a numerical scale going from -10 to +10.  The -10 end-point is fully concerned with what they are doing and not concerned at all about who they are becoming.  The + 10 end-point is fully concerned with who they are becoming and not concerned at all about what they are doing.  For us to have an effective style of coaching vs. inspection we merely need to spend the majority of our time on the + side of the scale.  We need to have the self-awareness to drag ourselves just barely into the positive side when under duress and it will speak volumes to our team.  When people deeply believe you care about who they are becoming their work will have meaning and through that meaning their passion will increase.

In the late 60's and early 70's the UCLA men's basketball team won ten national championships, seven in consecutive years, back to back undefeated seasons, an 88 game winning streak and 38 straight NCAA tournament victories.  By the standards of this world, UCLA was clearly a winner.  John Wooden was their coach and when asked what was the highest compliment he could receive he said, "The finest thing a player could say about me after he left the team was that I cared every bit as much about him as an individual as I cared about him as an athlete.  It was important to me because I really did care about them.  I often told the player that, next to my own flesh and blood, they were the closest to me.  They were my extended family and I got wrapped up in them, their lives.  Their problems.  There was a great deal of love involved in my coaching.  That is what a team should be to a coach."

Do you care about who your people are becoming or what they are doing?