Are You Asking the Right Question?

Many participants find this issue the most useful part of

Leading

I’m constantly amazed at how

my audiences’ perspective differs from mine. Things I find profound

sometimes fail to reach them while other issues that do not strike me as

significant create major shifts for them. One of these is the question of

questions.

Frequently when I’m asked to help a client I find that they haven’t

defined the problem. Someone said that half the solution to any problem is

correctly defining it.

As a leader, you need to constantly ask yourself: “

Are we asking the

Once you frame the question correctly, your troops will be

able to come up with the solutions to the problem. Trust me on this one. As

leaders, we should spend most of our time asking ourselves if we’ve defined

the right issue or if we’re asking our people to solve the wrong problem.

This technique is called “reframing.”

1. I was asked by a president of a company to coach his V.P. of

Marketing who had “poor conflict resolution and people skills”–an

interesting way of defining someone who had received

six harassment

complaints. While agreeing to talk to the V.P., I suggested to the president

that the most pressing issue to consider was “

what is it about our culture

2. A CEO. I coach called me to help him prepare for the performance

review of his VP of HR. She thought she should receive a significant raise

because the work she was doing was “strategic.” After explaining the details

of these projects and issuing his own opinion that none of these efforts met

his definition of “strategic” he wanted to know what I thought. I responded

that I agreed with him but that wasn’t the question he should be asking.

Instead, I suggested he focus on making sure he had defined the goals

and objectives he wanted her to be meeting and analyze how well she had

risen to that challenge. Did he even want her to be doing strategic work?

Had he given her enough staff to deal with the day-to-day issues so that she

had time to focus son strategy? (I happened to know that her department was

understaffed) And, perhaps more important, how did he measure his other

VPs (all of whom were male and were paid at least $20,000 more than the

HR VP). Were they required to exhibit strategic thinking in order to receive

raises or were they simply required to be good at what they were doing? He

left our session with an entirely new view of the problem.

3. Another executive I coach was frustrated with her new boss. She

had an ambitious agenda of projects. She was having trouble eliciting his

support. Her question to me was “

How can I persuade him that these

A better question, I responded is “What is his

She was embarrassed to admit

that she did not know, even though she had been working with him for a

year. Once you understand his agenda you can determine how your projects

will meet his needs. (I also advised her that should work need to be a bit of a

detective to find out since he was not a leader who spend time given vision

speeches to his troops.)

Recently, I was interviewing a utility executive who works with many

federal and state regulators, and I asked him what he thought of the question

of questions, he admitted he had been too busy to consider whether his staff

was spending time on the right issues.

“I think we need to push back more. I think we are spending a lot of

time just allowing the regulators to frame the problem and I have my people

frantic trying to meet their needs. We should be more aggressive about

making sure they’re asking the right question. Otherwise, we’re wasting

resources.”

Because we all tend to lack the Eagle Perspective when we’re

stressed, we frequently need an outside ear to hear the Right Question. Pick

someone outside your organization: a coach, therapist, friend, your priest or

even your spouse if they have a business perspective and can stand to hear it

one more time.

Spend time as a leader trying to look at the big picture, what I call the

Eagle Perspective. A significant part of this time should be spent trying to

ask the right questions. Once you can frame the real issue and be patient

with yourself and your staff in “living with the questions,” the answers will

emerge.

Did you know we align with many diverse professionals to meet your

needs for coaching, train-the-trainer programs and certification programs?

Call us if you want your people certified in conflict, negotiation or The

Eagle Perspective.

Copyright ©2003 · Lynne Eisaguirre · Workplaces That Work

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Lynne@WorkplacesThatWork.com · www.WorkplacesThatWork.com