David Dye's Blog, page 51

High ROI Leadership – Schedule the Finish

Schedule the finish to reduce frustration and increase performance

You’ve got more to do than time to do it. Your plan is going to get interrupted, and your interruptions are going to get interrupted. If you don’t have an intentional, focused way to finish what you start, it won’t happen. Effective leaders consistently achieve meaningful results and build a healthy culture–but they don’t leave it to chance or a heroic act of willpower. They schedule the finish.

Why Is This So Difficult?

Imagine I asked you for a report and told you, “I need this information soon.”

What does soon mean?

For fun, go ask your team this same question. In any group of five or more people, you’ll hear answers ranging from “right now” to “next week.” And for some people, when they hear soon, it means “this isn’t really important.”

These different interpretations of just one word can cause massive headaches and frustrations. One mistake that many leaders make is they rely on people’s good intentions, willpower, or even dumb luck to ensure that things get done. But, when you leave the definition of a word like “soon” up to chance, chaos ensues.

If you’re talking to someone who has a high internal sense of urgency, they might get it done right away. They might even neglect something that was actually more important than what you asked them to do. But if they interpret it as “when I have time to get to it,” you might wait for weeks.

The solution to these challenges is called Schedule the Finish.

Scheduling the finish means you create a specific mutual moment where you will follow up, follow through or finish the task. This isn’t a vague intention. It’s an appointment on the calendar of everyone involved.

Schedule the Finish to Remove Ambiguity

For example, let’s say you have that team discussion. And each person’s going to call their three largest clients and ask them how they’re responding to a recent change.

You’ll collect their answers and send them to Joe. Joe and his team will take that data and build a new client intake process. That’s good, but so far, it’s only an intention.

Schedule the finish with clear times and agreements. It would look like this:

We will each call our three largest clients, ask them that question and send the answers to Joe. By Friday at 5:00 PM, Eastern Joe and his team will give us the new intake process by the following Thursday at noon Eastern, everyone can put those two times on their calendars.

Now there’s no question of when the team will finish the task.

Scheduling the finish applies to many daily leadership and management conversations. Here are a few more examples:

When you have a performance conversation using the INSPIRE method, the final step (E) is the Enforce step. Schedule a brief meeting to review their desired behavior. Eg: “Sounds good. Let’s meet at 10 next Tuesday to see how this is going and if you have any questions.”When you delegate, schedule a time where the other person will meet with you in person or by video to return the project to you, answer questions, and discuss next steps.When you lead a meeting, conclude the meeting by asking who will do what, by when, and “How will we know?” The final “How will we know?” is a scheduled commitment to the team. Eg: “We will all have our data to Linda by Friday at 4 pm. Linda will send us the new process by Wednesday at 3 pm.” Everyone puts the times on their calendar. If Friday 4:00 pm comes and Linda doesn’t have data from Bob, she calls him. If 3 pm Wednesday comes and they don’t have the process, they call Linda.Schedule the Finish to Prioritize What Matters Most

In addition to eliminating misunderstandings around vague words like “soon” or “when you have time,” scheduling the finish forces everyone to think about the workload and whether they can do it. When you discuss delivering that data to Joe by Friday at five, everyone must think about whether they can actually do that.

And if they can’t, then you can have a conversation about priorities, what matters most, and adjust as needed.

Your Turn

Good intentions and talented, capable people will only take you so far. High-performing leaders and teams that build performance cultures schedule the finish to ensure they know what done looks like and how this priority fits with others.

We’d love to hear from you: how do you and your team ensure good intentions translate to activity and results?

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Diversity and Inclusion for Leaders with Cynthia Owyoung

Did you know that companies with more diversity are more innovative, expand their markets, and perform better financially? Why then, is progress slow, especially in corporate leadership? Most companies have yet to develop and implement effective diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) initiatives.

In this episode, DEIB expert, Cynthia Owyoung explains what DEIB is, and why it matters. Cynthia delivers the information and insights you need to seize the competitive edge and increase innovation―while doing right by people―with a strong culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

Diversity and Inclusion

12:59
How we can actually motivate people to do something differently, to behave differently than they have before, to change their behaviors?

13:39
Why are companies and leadership teams that have more diversity more creative, more innovative, and drive better decisions?

14:55
What does it mean to be a leader of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging efforts from your perspective for a person leading a five or ten-person team?

19:15
So you talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. D E I B, could you go through and distinguish each of those for us?

22:36
Companies focus mainly on the diversity piece and the representation of what’s coming in the door. And when you don’t also focus on the inclusion equity and belonging pieces that diversity that you’ve spent so much time, money, and effort to bring in walks out at the same rate.

27:17
Get strategic about it by assessing, where we are, where do we want to go, and then figuring out what we’re going to do to get there.

35:51
There’s so much power in being able to have a shared experience and to take that and develop strategies together on, how do I push past what that experience has taught me about how to navigate through the workplace?

40:25
What are two or three examples of small incremental changes?

42:27
It’s not about teaching people who are different, how to conform to the norm. It’s about teaching people who make up the norm to redefine what the norm is.

Connect with Cynthia

LinkedIn

Website

Twitter

Get the Book

 

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Leadership Humility: How Can I Coach Humility in my Team? (Video)

Developing the dance between ambition and humility, especially in your successful team members who may not demonstrate much leadership humility, requires intentional coaching. Amer Kaissi and I discuss this in part 3 (of 3) in our Asking for a Friend series based on concepts from his book, Humbitious: The Power of Low-Ego, High-Drive Leadership.

How Do I Coach and Develop Leadership Humility in a Team Member?

(See also: How to Manage Strong, Arrogant, Slightly Obnoxoius High Performer)

1:00 The challenge of helping high-performers that lack the humility skill set.

How do we help them merge ambition and leadership humility?
Give them a coach (the gift of coaching.)
If you can’t, then YOU start acting as a coach by asking open-ended questions.

4:24 Listening – the value of coming to a coaching session with a plateful of feedback (via Julie Winkle Giulioni)

We all have blind spots, so 360 listening is valuable.
The way others see you tends to be more accurate than how you see yourself- develop leadership humility by sharing more opportunities for feedback

5:30 What other insights does Amer want to leave with us?

What about people who have been successful even though they aren’t humble?

That is more the exception to the rule. They also tend to succeed in the short term. Imagine their success IF they ALSO had humility. If you want to leave a legacy, focus on an intentional merge of humility and ambition.

8:39 How to find more from Amer

Your turn: Have you worked with a successful person who lacked leadership humility? How would you coach them?

Previous Posts/Episodes in this series on with Karin Hurt and Amer Kaissi

Part 1: Can I Be Both Humble AND Ambitious?

Part 2: Leadership Humility: Can I Be Driven and Humble

More on Confident Humility

If you’re interested in this topic, you won’t want to miss our 6 Concepts You Can’t Lead Without

 

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How I Learned the Importance of Being an Authentic Leader

  How I Learned the Powerful Impact of Authenticity (the Hard Way)

Did you ever THINK you show up as an authentic leader, but as it turned out, you were really screwing up?

Yeah, me too. This is how I learned the importance of being an authentic leader the hard way.

I was in my early thirties and had just been promoted to my very first job in human resources and it was concurrent with a merger at Verizon.

All the players were new. I had a new boss. There was a whole new set of executive stakeholders to support. Half my team was new. And, because life is sometimes messy, I was going through a divorce and was working to navigate a new life, in a new role, in a new home, as a single mom.

Now we all know this kind of stuff is illegal, but my mind raced with all the negative assumptions “they” might make:

“How’s she going to manage this big jump in scope and scale with all the stress going on at home?”

“Is she really going to be able to pull off the travel from Baltimore to Manhattan with a little boy at home?

“She’s awfully young, let’s just wait and see how all this plays out. There will be another time to promote her.”

So, I kept very, very quiet.

(If you prefer to hear me tell this story about how I learned about being an authentic leader the hard way, you can do that here).

My very first assignment in this new role …

was to create a diversity strategy for the new, merged organization. So we created a diversity council. The idea was to bring diverse people together from both sides of the two merging companies. We invited employees from all roles: sales, customer service, marketing, IT. And, employees of different races, ages, genders, sexual orientations.

The idea was to really listen to their experience and stories and use them to inform our strategy.

We would figure out what changes we needed to make to our policies. And, what resources we needed to provide.

And it was going so well …

Diversity council members were really opening up and sharing their vulnerable stories.

For example, Juan said, “You know, I was at a management off-site the other day. And, a senior leader (who by the way has met me at least three times) handed me his keys because he thought I was the valet.”

And Sherika confided, “As a black woman, sometimes I speak up and share my ideas, and everyone keeps talking. Then, the white guy sitting right next to me says practically the same thing, and suddenly all eyes are on him talking about what a great idea it is.”

And Susan shared, “I’m a single mom and I work in a 24×7 contact center in the Bronx. Our schedules change every three weeks. I can’t possibly keep reliable daycare in a situation like that. I’m on stage four for attendance, and I’m about to lose my job. And, I really need this job.”

And we listened carefully. The diversity council came up with different policy recommendations, and resources to consider.

It was three weeks before we were ready to present our strategy to senior leadership and …

Sherika walked into my office and picked up a picture of me and my son from my desk. She handed it to me and said, “Karin, YOU ARE A FRAUD.”

I came by your office the other day to drop off some papers. Your assistant let me in. Karin, there are pictures like this all over your desk of you, and a little boy. AND NO MAN. You are single mom!

All this time you had us share our personal experiences to inform our strategy. And not once. Karin, not once, does it occur to you that your experiences are relevant here too. The truth is executives like you are afraid to be who you are at work. And if you’re afraid. We’re afraid.

And Sherika was absolutely right. I was afraid to be who I was at work. And, I was not the only one.

So I got the entire diversity council on an emergency conference call the next day. It was time to come clean and be a more authentic leader. I said, “You guys, I have something to tell you. I’m a single mom.”

And they said…

We know. Sherika already told us.

So we went back and enhanced the strategy to include executive visits where they showed up a bit vulnerable and shared their authentic stories so that employees could look at those leaders and think, “Hey, she looks a lot like me. And, if she can do this, maybe I can too.”

One year later …

The entire diversity council was invited to New York City for a fancy celebration because we had won the Verizon Excellence Award for the impact that strategy had on our employee engagement results.

I looked across the table and there was Sherika, smiling.

She knew I was no longer a fraud because I wasn’t afraid. 

What I Learned About Being an Authentic Leader From Sherika

I’m so grateful for Sherika and her courage to speak up and call me back to the important mission we were doing.

Although, if you had asked me if I believed in authentic leadership at the time, I surely would have said “yes!” After all, our entire strategy was built around the diversity council sharing their authentic stories.

But under stress and pressure, I was afraid to be authentic. I thought no one would want to follow the real me.

I had lost confidence in my strengths. And, I lacked the humility needed to put our mission above my personal needs. The strategy suffered.

That’s when I learned the importance of being an authentic leader. And, never asking my team to do something that I was unwilling to do.

Not only did Sherika’s courage change the success of our strategy, it also changed the way I led and taught leadership from there on out.

I also learned that authenticity and vulnerability build trust.

Teams need a leader they can relate to, not someone trying to show up “perfect,” while suffering on the inside.

I’m no longer a fraud because I’m not afraid.

See Also:

Authentic Leadership: 5 Big Mistakes that Can Derail Your Influence

Managerial Courage: 7 Practical Ways to Be a Bit More Daring

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Leadership and a Culture of Feedback with Neil Khaund

How do you build a culture of feedback? In this episode, Neil Khaund, President and CEO of The National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS), the largest accredited leadership honor society in the United States, explains why creating a culture of feedback is imperative and gives you specific techniques you can use to get all the information you need to build an effective team, department, and organization.

Leadership and a Culture of Feedback

05:07
Many first-time leaders approach leading through I need to direct them, I need to control them. And it takes many leaders some time to understand that’s not really what leadership is.

06:05
Command and control leadership is a thing of the past. Our job as leaders isn’t to be the smartest person in the room, it’s to help others become the best version of themselves.

11:38
What is NSLS, what’s the work you do? Who do you help and how do you do it?

16:09
Leadership has not only an opportunity, but a responsibility to be doing that level of investment in the people around us, whether they are team members, young people in our lives, or whoever that might be.

19:41
What particular strategies or approaches are most effective in helping newer entrants to the workforce develop all that leadership potential that you’re talking about.

26:06
Ask for feedback, and not for the good stuff. Tell me what I can actually work on – focusing on this demonstrates to my team that they should be doing the same.

28:34
What does building a culture around feedback looks like.? Specifically, focusing on the opportunity and then waterfall that through the organization.

33:40
Any specific approaches, suggestions, or ways to respond to feedback that just doesn’t make sense?

36:51
How do you handle receiving contradictory feedback? And you’re really wanting people to feel heard, but at the end of the day, you have to make a decision.

40:51
Shifting the focus from saying the right thing versus the honest thing that could actually make that fundamental impact for the business.

 

Connect with Neil:

LinkedIn

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

Website

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Leadership Humility: How Can I Be Driven and Humble? (Video)

Staying Humble, Yet Also Ambitious

Today, I share part two of my Asking for a Friend interview with Amer Kaissi on the important intersection of humility and ambition.

I was particularly struck by Amer’s practical leadership humility technique of “reflection with purpose” (1:36).

1:35 Cultivate Leadership Humility Through Reflection with Purpose

After a major accomplishment and success, celebrate! But, don’t stop there. Take the time to practice some leadership humility and ask yourself what contributed to that success.

Who mentored me?Who gave me a chance early on in my career?Are there people on my team working really hard to make me look good?What market conditions led to my success?Where did I get lucky?

It’s not about minimizing the success we’ve had,  but about staying grounded and humble.

2:36 Getting Better Feedback

Find your group of “loving critics” (2:59). The people who love us AND will not hesitate to give us candid, specific feedback. Get enough feedback to find the patterns.

6:56 The best way to process the feedback is to not overemphasize one comment here or one comment there, but just to look for themes.

I also appreciated Amer’s insights from page 97 of his book, Humbitious.

Some leaders assume that seeking feedback makes them look weak or needy, but nothing could be further from the truth. It actually takes a lot of courage and strength to ask for feedback. And once you get in the habit of asking, you will continue to receive feedback from others throughout your career becuase people will come to perceive you as open and willing to change.

Don’t miss part one of this Asking For a Friend Interview with Amer about leadership humility.

See also: Leadership Skills: 6 Leadership Competencies You Can’t Lead Without 

Managing Up with Grace: How Do I Give My Boss Better Feedback

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Creating Clarity: Strategic Activities For Human Centered Leaders

Without clear direction, it’s nearly impossible to motivate, accelerate, innovate or even celebrate.

Your team can’t achieve breakthrough results if you don’t have a shared understanding of what success looks like. Creating clarity is one of the most important competencies we teach in our human-centered leadership development programs.

So today, we’ve pulled together some of our foundational clarity tools and techniques to give you four practical, strategic activities you can do with your team right away.

If creating clarity is a challenge for you, we encourage you to use these strategic activities in the order we offer them here.

Or, if there is one aspect of creating clarity that is the biggest challenge for you, start there.

What Does it Mean to Create Clarity?

Creating clarity means that everyone on your team has a solid, shared understanding of what success looks like.

They know what matters most and why.

High-performing teams are not only clear on their strategic direction, but they also know the short and long-term strategic initiatives that will help them get there.

They’ve also spent time identifying the strategic behaviors that lead to success.

Here’s how you know if you have a solid foundation of clarity on your team.

You have defined your 3-4 strategic M.I.T.  (Most Important Thing) leadership priorities.Managers consistently communicate these M.I.T. priorities, and why they are important.Your team initiatives align with these strategic M.I.T. priorities.Employees know the behaviors that directly contribute to these M.I.T. priorities.You regularly track, report, and communicate our progress toward these M.I.T. priorities.

These come from our FREE strategic planning assessment which you can download here. 

Why Creating Clarity is So Important

Creating clarity prevents your team from spinning their wheels and wasting time on less relevant tasks. If you’ve never heard Karin’s “guitar” story (below), it’s a great example of why clear expectations matter.

Creating clarity also means helping your team understand why their work matters and how it fits into the bigger picture.

Clarity is motivating because it helps people to see the bigger impact of their work.

Creating clarity helps accelerate performance because people focus their time and energy on what matters most.

Clarity leads to innovation because it helps team members feel more confident in speaking up and sharing their ideas. 

And, creating clarity makes it easier to celebrate, because it’s easier to spot the win.

Creating Clarity: Four Practical Strategic Activities and Related Resources

In this article, we’ve outlined four of our favorite, practical strategic activities for creating better clarity on your team.

Communicate your M.I.T. Strategic Priorities five times, five different ways.Check for understanding.Identify the strategic activities and behaviors critical to success.Ask clarity-based courageous questions to gain deeper insights.1. Communicate your strategic priorities five times, in five different ways.

Once you’ve identified your strategic priorities, it’s not enough to communicate them once. When creating clarity, you want to be like the drummer of a band. Keep the beat by constantly reinforcing your strategic priorities. In this leadership activity, we encourage you to communicate your MIT five times, five different ways.

Your first strategic leadership activity for creating clarity: (1) Pick one of your most important strategic priorities. (2) build a five-by-five communication plan. You can use the 5×5 Communication Planner to document your plan.

Communicate Your MIT leadership challenge resources

Leadership Skills: 6 Competencies You Can’t Lead WithoutHow to Stay Focused When Everything is Important (this can help if you need to define your MIT)5 x 5 Communication Planner 101 Creative Ideas to include in your 5×5 Communication PlanLeadership Without Losing Your Soul Podcast How to Make Your Leadership Message Stick

2. Check for understanding. Does your team really understand what’s most important and why?

Once you’ve communicated your expectations, be sure your team gets it.  Your next strategic leadership activity: check for understanding. Go ask each member of your team what success looks like for them this year.

Your second, strategic initiative for creating clarity: Have them tell you their strategic priorities and why they matter.

In your 5×5 communication plan, you were telling them. In this leadership activity, you check for understanding and hear it back from them.

Check for understanding resources

Leadership Without Losing Your Soul Podcast: Calm the Chaos: Help Your Team Regain Their FocusAsking for a Friend (Article and Video): Check for Understanding a Leadership Communication Best Practice

3.  Identify the strategic initiatives and behaviors that are critical to success.

Your third strategic activity for creating clarity is to use the MIT planner. Help your team identify the strategic initiatives and behaviors most critical to success. (Click on the planner to get the free tool).

Resources to help you align on strategic initiatives and behaviors 

Tips for aligning on your MIT Strategic Initiatives  How to Stay Focused When Everything is Important

4. Ask clarity-based courageous questions to gain deeper insights.

Your final creating clarity activity is to ask your team a few courageous questions.

What is the biggest obstacle jeopardizing our M.I.T?If you had an extra hour in the day, what could you do that would have the biggest impact on your results?What’s one task you wish you could eliminate that would give you more time to focus on your MIT?We would love to hear from you.

What is your favorite technique for creating clarity?

Which of these creating clarity activities work best for you? Leave a comment, or drop us a note at info@letsgrowleaders.com. 

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Can I Be Both Humble and Ambitious? #Askingforafriend (Video)

Amer Kaissi Shares Insights on the Power of Humbition

If you’ve been following me for a bit you know that I’m all about confident humility. Watching leaders with and without it inspired my first blog posts a decade ago while still working at Verizon. And was a grounding principle of our first book, Winning Well. I’m a HUGE believer in landing in the AND of “humble and ambitious.”

That’s why I was so delighted to learn of Amer Kaissi and his remarkable, practical research about humble ambition, in his book Humbitous. 

This is the first in a three-part Asking For a Friend Interview with Amer on how to be humble and ambitious.

What Does the Research Say About the Power of Humble Ambition?

How Does this Humbitious Approach Relate to Confident Humility?

Karin, I know you talk about confident humility as one of your 6 concepts you can’t lead without. How does this relate?

Amer and I had a great conversation about that as he was writing his book. Here’s an excerpt from page twenty-nine.

Confidence is another key trait that pulls your followers towards you. Employees want to follow confident leaders who are decisive and have a strong sense of direction and vision.

However, as leadership expert Karin Hurt notes, “confidence without humility can be dangerous” because it can significantly limit the effectiveness of a leader.  Confident leaders who lack humility may stay the course, but they don’t seek crucial input from others.

They may get others to follow them, but they don’t get their full support.

In a recent exchange, Hurt, the founder of Let’s Grow Leaders and a former Verizon Wireless executive, explained to me that while sometimes people think of confidence as the opposite of humility, we need to understand that it is an “and proposition.”

When you have the confidence to set an audacious vision coupled with the humility to know your vulnerabilities and surround yourself with people who will chalelnge you, then you have a powerful combination.

When you combine high confidence and high humility, you become an “enabler leader.” You are not worried about being taken advantage of, because you have the confidence to speak up for yourself. You are secure enough in your own abilities that your focus is not directed towards receiving praise for yourelf.

Instead, you focus on the wellbeing of others, and you give them credit for achievements. You lead for the long run and to contribute to the greater good.

True confidence means you become strong in your humility.

Your turn.

Where have you seen humble ambition work well? How do you develop it in yourself and others?

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Human-Centered Communication with Lizabeth Wesely-Casella

Ready for some brilliant approaches to human-centered communication? In this episode, David talks with Lizabeth Wesely-Casella, founder and CEO of L-12 Services; a Washington DC firm focused on internal communications, organizational development, and human-centered leadership. Lizabeth shares her insights on how you can improve workflow, processes, and culture by leveraging communication and the institutional knowledge of existing team members.

Human-Centered Communication

06:18
Sourcing the solutions to companies’ problems from the institutional knowledge of their high functioning teams.

07:04
A huge and common communication breakdown: people doing the jobs don’t understand why leadership wants things done a certain way, and leadership does not understand why the teams couldn’t perform in the way that they wanted.

08:53
Your best leadership solution is human-centered communication. Let’s discuss the steps that we would use to get to an ideal future state, and elevate the people with the institutional knowledge.

11:40
How to help leaders clarify their processes, cut the chaos, and address human-centered communication challenges.

17:12
What do we do with all of this as leaders and what are you seeing that’s working?

23:23
Creating a human-centered environment that helps people bring the best of themselves forward and builds confidence.

37:52
The most important piece that can assure success is listening skills which are deficient in a lot of us, regardless of education or level of executive and leadership experience.

40:42
A three-step approach to ease into human-centered communication and listening.

44:35
Setting the expectation, holding people accountable while listening to what makes it challenging for them, and helping equip them with those same skills.

49:35
Next year’s interview topic that will spike innovation, develop better processes, and help your teams not only retain but attract high-caliber talent.

 

Connect with Lizabeth

Website

Attrition Prevention Quiz

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Courageous Questions: How to Make It Easier to Get Better Insights

If you want better insights, ask clearer questions.

Particularly during times of uncertainty and change, one of the easiest ways to know what’s really going on is to (1) get clarity about what you don’t know and (2) ask your team some courageous questions.

Courageous questions are specific, vulnerable questions that get right to the root of the matter. Courageous questions help eliminate FOSU (fear of speaking up) and create the psychological safety your employees need to speak up and ask for what they need.

In this article, we share insights to help you prepare better courageous questions to gather the insights you need.

Why Courageous Questions MatterWhat is a Courageous Question? (What makes a courageous question useful and how to craft your own)Sample Courageous Questions (Specific courageous questions you can ask your team),How to “Respond With Regard” to what you’ve heardWhy Courageous Questions Matter

Laura, an IT vice president, was excited to spend some time with her teams, hold a few skip-level meetings, and see their new system in action.

Her team had been holding user experience calls each week and the feedback had been great! Psyched to gather a few success stories, she couldn’t wait to tell the CEO how the new system was making things easier for the customer service reps and, ultimately, for their customers.

Before her first skip-level meeting, Laura sat down with a rep and asked, “Can you show me your favorite part of the new system?”

The rep attempted to pull up the first screen. But after five minutes they were both still staring at an hourglass and waiting for the page to load. She looked apologetically at Laura and said, “I’m sorry to waste your time. This usually takes a while.”

Laura’s jaw dropped. The vendor had promised the new system would be seven times faster—not slower.

Wait, What?

“Can you show me another page?” Laura asked.

She sat through another slow load time. Laura turned to the rep. “Is it always like this?”

“Oh, yeah. We’re used to it at this point, but the system has some other nice features.”

Laura thanked her and hurried to a quiet conference room where she could call her team. After ten minutes of testing, they realized that the center’s servers didn’t have the capacity to run the new system. Hundreds of reps had been suffering through a ridiculous wait that wasted their and their customers’ time.

What happened?

The user experience calls had asked lots of questions, but not courageous questions.

Week after week, supervisors had sat in on user-experience calls, fully aware of the issue, and hadn’t said a word. No one had ever raised the issue!

After replacing the server and ensuring everything was back on track, Laura went back to the reps on the user experience team and asked why they had never brought this up.

Well, no one ever asked us about the speed. Our boss told us that we needed to be “change agents” and model excitement for the new system—no matter what. Under no circumstances were we to be negative.

So we just smiled, sucked it up, and dealt with it.

Have you ever felt like Laura?

The “no one asked” reply might be frustrating, but it is one of the biggest reasons employees say they withhold ideas.

What is a courageous question?

A courageous question differs from a generic “How can we be better?” question in that they’re specific and humble (assume that improvement is possible).  You ask courageous questions to get curious about what’s really going on. Not to respond immediately.

When you ask a courageous question, you:

1. Get specific.

A courageous question focuses on a specific activity, behavior, or outcome.

For example, rather than ask “How can we improve?” ask “What is the number one frustration of our largest customer?”

Or, “For the next two quarters, our most important priority is customer retention. We need every idea we can get to help keep our best customers. What is THE NUMBER ONE REASON you see customers leave? What’s THE GREATEST OBSTACLE to keep our best customers? What’s NUMBER ONE LOW-COST ACTION we can take to improve our customer’s experience?”

2. Be humble.

Next, a courageous question creates powerful vulnerability.

When you ask any of these sample questions, you are implicitly saying “I know I’m not perfect. I know I can improve.” This is a strong message—if you sincerely mean it.

You send the message that you are growing and want to improve. This, in turn, gives your team permission to grow and be in the process themselves. It also makes it safe to share real feedback. When you say, “What is the greatest obstacle?” you acknowledge that there is an obstacle, and you want to hear about it.

Humility is at the heart of the question that Don Yager, Chief Operating Officer of Mural Corporation, consistently asks his frontline team: “What are our policies that suck?” That humble question quickly identifies anything that’s getting in the way of a great customer experience.

3. Process before responding.

Finally, courageous questions require the asker to listen without defensiveness. This is where well-intentioned leaders often get into trouble. They ask a good question, but they weren’t prepared to hear feedback that made them uncomfortable or challenged their pet project. They leap to explain or defend.

Asking for feedback and ignoring it is worse than not asking at all. When you ask a courageous question, allow yourself to take in the feedback. Take notes, thank everyone for taking the time and having the confidence to share their perspective. With many courageous questions, you’ll get conflicting perspectives. That’s okay. Describe the next steps.

If you need to process and then respond, tell them when that will happen.

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Sample Courageous Questions

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Courageous Questions to Improve The Customer ExperienceWhat’s one policy that really annoys our customers?If you could make one change to improve the customer experience, what would that be?When customers call, what’s their number one complaint?What is the most important action we take to delight our customers? How would you recommend we do that more consistently?Courageous Questions to Improve ProductivityWhat is the biggest roadblock to your productivity right now?When you think of missed opportunities to be more effective or efficient, what’s the problem no one talks about?If we could do one thing differently next time to help this project (or person) succeed, what would that be?What’s one task or project you’re spending time on that you think is not worth the time? Why?Do you have a best practice that really helps you be more efficient and effective in your work? What is it?Courageous Questions to Improve CultureWhat is the biggest source of conflict you’re having working with X department? (How might we be contributing to the issue?)We’re working to build a courageous culture where everyone speaks up and shares their ideas. As your leader, what’s one area of my leadership I could work on to make that easier?What’s one reason you choose to work here?  How can we build more of that into our culture?What’s one reason people hold back their ideas here?Can you think of one practical idea that would help our team find more joy and meaning in their work?And don’t forget to Respond With Regard.

Once you’ve asked your team courageous questions, gather your themes and be sure you respond with regard.

The first time you ask a courageous question, your team may be skeptical. But when you build a reputation of asking important courageous questions and responding with regard to what you hear, you’ll go a long way in building trust, and innovation on your team.

We would love to hear from you.

Where do you most need a great idea? What is one courageous question that would (or has) encouraged deeper thinking, problem-solving and great ideas?

 

See Also: How to Help Your Team Think Bigger

How to Respond to Employees’ Wacky Ideas

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