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May 04, 2009

Ask the right questions

Our client was in a bind. She was expected to communicate the company’s new direction so that employees could understand it and support it, but the senior management team had shared only a sketch of what the new direction was all about—nothing more than a one-liner in a PowerPoint deck.

How was our client supposed to make something out of nothing? Our advice: Arrange individual conversations with members of the senior management team and ask them a series of questions like these:

• Why are we changing direction? What’s going on with the market and our customers that led us to this decision?

• What’s different about our company’s new direction? How will it look/feel different? What will customers notice?

• How will employees experience our new direction? What will they need to do differently? What group/function will need to change first? Who will experience the biggest change?

• How will we know we’ve been successful at heading in our new direction? What milestones will show us we’re making progress?

This may sound like a simple process—even the questions themselves are simple—but I’ve discovered that asking questions is a rare art. Too often we accept information from a senior manager or a subject matter expert and don’t ask the essential questions that would make the content meaningful. Or, we fail to seek answers to the questions most on employees’ minds, and as a result, the communication we do provide isn’t relevant.

This morning I was skimming a book called A New Breed of Leaders by Sheila Murray Bethel, Ph.D. (Berkley 2009) and to my surprise found a passage on the importance of questions in developing leadership skills.

Dr. Bethel writes, “We’re living with the most complex issues since time began. There are no simple answers. It is critical to draw on well-thought-out questions to lay the groundwork for new solutions. Having all the answers is far less important to you than knowing what to ask.”

She advises that we go back to the way we learned how to ask questions in school: Five Ws (who, what, when, where and why) and an H (how). Dr. Bethel believes that of all the questions, “why” is the most powerful. “Many organizations and individuals have gone completely off course because they first asked how to do something instead of first asking why they should do it.”

Any questions?

Posted by Alison Davis at May 4, 2009 05:25 PM