Are You Empowering People?
A coaching client asked, “If I’m always providing answers to people, how is that developing them?” My response was easy, “It’s not. They’re not thinking, they’re just robots.”
If I’m strategic, looking forward way into the future as a leader, then the questions I ask will develop and hold people accountable. In order to do that, I’ve got to listen..
I think you can start seeing a connection here. Lead, don’t manage. Manage things, lead people. Same sort of thing with developing your people.
Your people aren’t robots. Good leaders know how to bring out the best in their people. They do that by listening and asking the right questions at the right time.
Just because somebody walks into your office and says they need an answer on something doesn’t mean you have to respond to it unless the building’s on fire. That’s part of the beauty of asking questions.
What if, very soon, you start training your employees that as a leader, when they come to you, you’re not going to give them an answer on everything? You’re going to manage your time and you’re going to kick it back with another question to make them think.
Soon, you’ll make them figure out that they’d better do the thinking before they come to you. And likely, for the thing they’re coming to you for, they’ll already have an answer by the time you find out about it.
That’s how you develop your people. You set expectations that they will be accountable. Let them decide how. Don’t give them all the answers. That’s what makes a good leader.
Some people — most people — rarely or never get to leadership. They’re too busy telling people what to do, directing them on what to do.
If you go back to the old management books that were published up to and including into the 90s, management was taught from a Plan, Organize, Direct and Control mentality. That’s the way the Management textbooks were organized, that the role of managers is to plan the work, organize the work, direct the work, control the work.
Just listen to those four words: plan, organize, direct, control. They’re all active from the manager position, not involving everyone else in the organization. Management’s role is to plan, organize, direct, and control
But later, management theory has been taught from a behavioral aspect. While managers may have an obligation to look for better ways to do something, they’re not taught or encouraged to strip their ego and the answers they think they have. Therefore, we as managers or we as employees don’t learn.
Even a manager can ask a simple question like, “Is there a better way to do this?” I don’t hear that a lot. From managers, it’s do this, do that, fix this, finish this report. That’s not leadership. You manage things, lead people
Most managers don’t know how to get into someone else’s head and help them extract what’s good. Managers simply make an assumption about the action or make an assumption from their own framework.
Different organizational folks have different assumptions. Based on their assumptions of what their roles are, sometimes it gets into loggerheads, nothing happens. You have to ask the right questions to bring them together to produce change.
I’ll challenge leaders to find five good questions, ten good questions. Memorize them, learn to use them. You’ll surprise yourself. There’s the first step.
