Ask don’t tell
When you ask instead of tell you open up a world for creative thinking. As Barbara Januszkiewicz said “Creative thinking inspires ideas. Ideas inspire change”
Coaching conversations play a critical role in creative thinking, innovation and performance. Growing coaching cultures in organisations takes time, resilience, and perseverance to develop and embed. It starts with a growth mindset and a strong sense of performance opportunity in those leaders who are willing to coach.
Leaders often cite time as being their scarcest commodity. For leaders to build their capacity to work on strategic challenges one of the things they can do to use time differently is redirect their energy and focus by building responsibility and accountability in others.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, leaders who step-in at the first instance to solve problems are sending a signal to those they lead that the individual is not capable of solving them and the leader is the one who knows best. Instead of empowering a team it unintentionally disempowers them, shatters confidence, and sets a tone that suggests the leader has the right answer in all scenarios. Leaders who ask more, tell less and take a coaching approach, build responsibility in individuals. They encourage them to lean on their unique experience and strengths, explore beliefs, act on ideas, and hold them accountable for doing so. They start to create an environment where brave and bold action can exist.
There are some situations where authority and a more directive approach are needed, however, where the focus is on a coaching mindset, instead of asserting authority, leaders would do well to pause, ask, and listen. Instead of leaders telling team members how to get where they need to, leaders who take more of a coaching approach partner with the individual to set and agree direction and then support and challenge the individual through creating a space for reflection, awareness, and ownership.
Not only does this inspire and motivate team members toward action and build confidence, it also prepares and fosters an environment for innovation, experimentation, failure and growth. In a high performance and innovative environment, failure is inevitable. Whilst some find the concept of failure as one to avoid at all costs, leaders who take a coaching approach use failure, including their own, as opportunities for exploration and learning and they normalise vulnerability and imperfection in the pursuit of growth and high performance. They make space on meeting agendas to discuss and reflect together on the things that didn’t go to plan and what learning the team have taken from that. Where it’s resulted in a better outcome, they take time to raise awareness to that and acknowledge what it’s enabled.
Being curious about what people need to succeed as opposed to telling them what they need to succeed, changes the performance landscape and re-directs all responsibility for performance away from the leader and into a shared space of ownership with individual accountability.
When someone approaches you with a challenge or a problem to solve, how often do you find yourself telling as opposed to asking what they think the solution could be?