It’s The Questions You Ask

The feedback I get on these articles is that readers appreciate real-life coaching examples, so I thought I would share a session I had this week with Rebecca, the COO of a mid-sized aerospace design consultancy, who is three months into her role. Rebecca has a team of over 2,000 spread across Europe.

As her team and business grow, it is important to develop the thinking habits of her team. The previous COO was someone who was great at giving clear instructions and had a leadership style based on ‘tell’. As a result, the business is well-structured and disciplined but lacks agility or innovation. Rebecca’s challenge is to develop creativity and problem-solving in the leaders below her so that they can run the operation, and Rebecca can focus on the strategy to move the business forward.

Rebecca’s challenge is to develop creativity and problem-solving in the leaders below her so that they can run the operation

We agreed to develop a habit of ‘asking questions’, encouraging (or in some cases forcing) her reports to think for themselves and figure out solutions. Over the course of our first few months, we have designed a questioning routine. I would describe the evolution of our discussions like this:

Step One: At first, Rebecca would ask a simple question to encourage thinking. When Rebecca was doing this well, she had carefully planned the effect she wanted to achieve and had asked an open ‘why, how, what if, what else’ type of question – something that prompted thinking but allowed for a wide range of potential solutions. In this first period, Rebecca told me about a range of responses: With her star performer, she reported how the question stopped him in his tracks, and the response was ‘wow, I am going to have to really think about that’. For others, the response was to blurt out an unsatisfactory answer. In this circumstance, we had agreed that Rebecca would nod and smile and then repeat the same question in the next interaction hours or days later.

Step Two: After a few weeks of using a few questions with intent and repetition, the penny dropped that Rebecca was asking for a reason, and all but one of her team were now beginning to think.  Some were now anticipating questions, and Rebecca was met with answers such as ‘well, I thought you may ask me that…’.

Step Three: After three months, Rebecca is now finding that she needs to rethink her questions. Her team have developed their thinking to such a point where they problem-solve with minimal prompting from Rebecca. Rebecca is now moving on to encourage reflection and observation in her team, helping them to surface insights that enable them to tackle more complex problems.