Why would you ask questions to kick butt?

Good question. I’m glad you asked.

The results your people deliver for you don’t just happen. Your people have to do something in order for them to be achieved. Sometimes they do the right thing; sometimes they do the wrong thing. And sometimes they just don’t do anything.

Your job as a frontline manager is to manage the behaviour of your team members to ensure they are doing the right things to achieve the results you need. When they’ve done the wrong thing or nothing at all, our inclination can be to tell them. Tell them what they’ve done wrong. Tell them what they haven’t done. And tell them what they need to do differently. However, often there is a better way.

To understand why asking questions will often be a more productive approach, let’s put you in the hot seat. Let’s imagine that your manager confronts you about a piece of work that you’ve just completed which has been done poorly. If your manager simply tells you what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed, what’s your level of motivation to make the improvements? I’m guessing that it’s relatively low. It is likely that you’ll just do what you need to do without any significant sense of commitment.

Imagine the same situation except your manager has chosen to ask you questions rather than simply telling you. He asks you questions such as, “What’s the impact on other people as a result of this work?”, “What pressure do you imagine I’ll come under when I present this to my boss?”, “What could you do differently to improve the quality of this work?”, “What are you willing to commit to in order to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?”

In this second situation you’re going to be doing a lot more reflecting, thinking and talking. Once a decision is made about next steps, to which you voluntarily agree, what’s your level of motivation to taking the action you said you would? It is likely that it is much, much higher than if you had simply been told what was wrong and what you needed to do to fix the problem. Agreed?

Apart from developing a higher level of motivation and commitment to the job, there are a couple of other benefits to asking questions rather than telling people what to do. You’ve probably thought of at least one of them.

Firstly, you probably don’t have all the answers. Frequently your people will know their job better than you do. So by asking questions you also tap into their expertise rather than solely rely on your own. Secondly, they will frequently already know what to do. They don’t need to be told, they need to be motivated to do it. And if they don’t know why they should do something, or how to do it, your questions will uncover that.

So that’s the why. Next week we’ll look at the how.