Want to Be a Good Leader? Learn to Ask Great Questions
Today’s business leaders share one key goal: increasing the speed at which they deliver value to customers. And many leaders realise that the pathway to this involves empowering their teams to identify and solve valuable customer problems by focusing on outcomes rather than outputs.
Most of us can easily agree that it makes sense to prioritise these objectives. But actually changing your leadership style to get there? That’s easier said than done.
If you’ve been in a leadership role for a while, you’ve probably gotten used to people looking to you for answers. It can feel uncomfortable to turn over the responsibility of “making the calls” to your teams. But if you don’t make this change and you rely on the traditional hierarchical style of management, you’ll be getting in the way of your own goals.
So where do you start? How can you shift away from telling your teams what to do and give them the power to make their own decisions?
One critical part of this mindset shift involves asking good questions. When you learn to do this, you help teams frame the problem space they are working in and make sure they validate the problem before jumping to a solution. Instead of telling your team which solution to implement, this approach trains them to gather data and evidence through user research, analytics, and experimentation to support their decisions. As teams build the muscle to approach work in this way, the speed at which they iterate through problems and solutions and ultimately get things in the hands of customers increases exponentially.
Behaviour change is hard for everyone—team leaders and team members alike. By asking good questions, you can nudge and reinforce these new behaviours, cultivate a learning culture, and create the psychological safety that allows your team to experiment, learn faster, and get to better outcomes sooner.
A few questions to add to your repertoire
Here are a few questions to help get you started.
What problem are you trying to solve? How do you know that’s a valuable problem for our customers and our business?
What impact is the team trying to drive for the customer and for the business? What are your target outcomes and how are you measuring those?
What assumptions have you made and how might those impact our target outcome? Which assumption are you working on validating next?
What progress have you made toward your target outcomes? (Keep in mind this is not the same as asking, “What activities have you completed this week?”!)
How to get started
For many leaders, asking these questions represents a significant change in how you’ve been interacting with your team members. If that’s the case, you may need to do some additional work to increase your chances of success. Here’s the approach we recommend.
Step 1: Set context
Make sure your teams know how their work relates to corporate strategies and goals.
Step 2: Ask the team to articulate their target outcomes
How are they planning to measure success? Are the metrics they’re planning to measure aligned with top-level strategies and goals? Work with them to ensure the metrics they’ve outlined are actually measurable.
Step 3: Ask the team for their problem statements
A big part of this transformation involves placing the customers at the centre of your work and starting with problems rather than solutions. Can your team define which opportunities they are looking to solve?
Step 4: Identify risk
Ask your team to identify the largest risk related to their identified problem space and their riskiest assumptions related to getting to their target outcomes.
Ready to take the next steps?
At Northshore, we regularly work with leaders and teams to drive true transformation. If you’d like to learn more about how you can empower your teams to work in the way we’ve outlined here, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
