Ten Questions that Motivate Engagement and Drive Greater Accountability

Posted on May 21, 2012 by peterlloyd

Do you want to move an important project ahead faster? Would you rather motivate and engage than give orders and ride herd? How about inspiring greater accountability? Why do I ask so many questions? Because questions deliver better results.

As you read the questions above, I have no doubt that you at least began to consider answers. When someone asks questions—especially when you as a manager ask questions of a direct report—the listener can’t help but begin to formulate a response.

Purple Elephant Power

You’ve heard the claim that if I say, “Don’t think about a purple elephant,” you can’t help but picture one. Let me push that a step further. If I ask, “What are you going to do about that purple elephant in your office?” you may think I’ve lost contact with reality, but you can’t ignore my question. You are engaged!

Brains can’t help but respond to questions. For that reason, your questions will engage your team much more than your statements, orders, or opinions. I like to think of questions as a magic tool. They not only elicit new and often unexpected responses, but the responder becomes intimately engaged, because he or she owns the response. That ownership drives greater accountability.

Besides, when you ask questions, you save yourself the trouble of working out all the tactical details. “Do this,” leaves so much room for misinterpretation and often draws questions like, “How do you want me to do it?” But a question like, “How will you do this?” invites engagement, draws out solutions the responder owns and, therefore, is more motivated to deliver.

Start asking more questions and watch your results improve. The more questions you ask, the better you will become at asking the kinds of questions that generate the kinds of answers that will help your team and organization grow.

Here are ten suggestions, but they’re just suggestions. Craft your own questions to address your specific goals.

Ten Power Questions

1. How do you plan to handle this project?
2. What else do you need from me?
3. Whom can I ask to support you?
4. When can we get together to discuss your progress?
5. What can we do to make this project run more smoothly?
6. What additional information can I provide?
7. Why have you chosen this approach?
8. What are you doing to ensure quality completion?
9. How well is your team supporting you?
10. When do you think you can deliver?

Are your asking or telling?

The truly great leaders I work with are highly skilled at asking questions. I call them truly great leaders, because they motivate engagement and drive greater accountability from their teams. If you want to rise to that kind of leadership greatness, start asking power questions.

At our next CoachQuest Leadership Coaching Workshop, groups of leaders like you will practice asking power questions using the most appropriate body language and tone of voice for maximum impact. Join us, and you will move from statements to power questions in no time.

How do you plan to begin asking power questions? When do you think you will get started? Do you need any more help from me?

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Should You Coach Your High Performers Too?

Posted on May 14, 2012 by helanie

The short answer, Yes! They not only must be coached, your top performers will welcome coaching, but not just any kind of coaching.

Sports offers plenty of examples of high performers and athletes at the top of their profession who continue to learn and grow with the help of their coaches. And not just sports. Best Actress Natalie Portman embraces acting coaching. In the video below she talks about her total immersion into the coaching she underwent to convincingly play a ballerina in her spectacular Black Swan role.

In business, when we talk about high performers, we are describing those indispensable employees who consistently go the extra mile, pick up the slack, solve problems proactively, contribute to the organization in extraordinary ways, and always deliver high-impact results.

This fact raises a few questions and concerns around coaching high performers. What do your high performers want to be coached on? How often should you provide feedback? What kind of feedback should you provide during your coaching conversations? And yes, there are many more questions we could ask, but let’s start by answering a few of these questions here.

Your best people, if they intend to stay on top, will not only demand an exceptional level of coaching, they will expect their coaching to address their exceptional needs.

10 things to consider when coaching high performers

1. It’s critical that you apply the same rigor and frequency as you would coaching any other performer.
2. High performers are continuous learners. Your job is to provide the relevant training and on-going education.
3. Watch the double-edged sword—their greatest strength may also be their greatest weakness.
4. Provide experiences and cross-training opportunities.
5. Help them build and expand their networks. Expose them to other executives, and help them build alliances across your organization and in your industry.
6. Focus on how they achieve results and at what costs. What are they neglecting in maintaining work/life balance and in other areas?
7. High performers thrive on reinforcement feedback. Do not neglect to thank them for their contributions and to demonstrate real appreciation for how they add value.
8. Review current performance in two ways: 1) what enables their performance in the current role, and 2) what will raise the bar to keep them improving.
9. Dialog about their career goals and aspirations—the knowledge, skills, and experience they may need to move up to the next level in the organization.
10. Invite them to coach you, and ask them what else they need from you to support their high performance.

Learn more about coaching your high performers at the next CoachQuest Leadership Coaching Workshop. Register here.

Get that Monkey Off Your Back!

Posted on May 7, 2012 by peterlloyd

You’ve heard the expression “monkey on my back.” The idiom refers to an annoying problem that stays with you, continues to nag you, one that you just can’t seem to get rid of. In a word, unlike a barrel of monkeys, it’s not fun.

Your job as Leader-as-Coach is to guide your employees through solving their problems, not to solve their problems for them.

Don’t let their monkeys to take your eye of the coaching ball, distract you, or get involved in the doing of tasks. Doing so will only reduce your effectiveness as a coaching leader.

The Stop-Start-Continue Leadership Lesson

Stop saying, “I’ll look into it and get back to you.” Instead, practice your question-asking skills.

Start asking coaching questions that will help your team keep their problems and ideas where they belong—with the person who owns the problem. Teach them to care about solving their problems. Motivate them to learn how to solve them.

Continue asking until they take ownership. Use questions like these:

“Tell me more about the problem. What’s behind it?”
“Whose problem is this? Who suffers because of it?”
“Who else is affected by this problem? How could you involve them?”
“Do we know what the problem is costing us?”
“What will solving it save? What is the value added?”
“How does this fit with our plans?”
“Are you willing to take this on?”
“What can I do to help you move it along?”

For more about the monkeys in your business, download and read Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey by William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass with a commentary by Stephen R. Covey titled “Making Time for Gorillas.”

When you’re ready to work with other leaders and practice getting monkeys off your back, register here for the next CoachQuest Leadership Coaching Workshop.

6 Coaching Styles to Avoid, 1 to Adopt

Posted on April 30, 2012 by helanie

As anyone who has attended one of my CoachQuest Leadership Coaching Workshops can tell you, 93 percent of what you communicate comes across non-verbally. That is, with your tone of voice, physical posture, voice volume, word inflections, and body language. Let’s look at these non-verbal attitudes in terms of Coaching Style.

I’ve identified at least six you should want to avoid, along with the Emotional Triggers that might kick-in with each style.

The Six Coaching Styles to Avoid

Pontificator You tend to rely on your rules, laws, values, and past experience to influence those around you. People will often hear and see you spouting off your opinions and solutions, usually in a professorial tone of voice. Emotional Trigger: When others disagree with your point of view.

Coercer You tend to engage support from your personal relationships by appealing to loyalty. You may adopt a slightly whining, pleading tone and a hurt-faced expression. Emotional Trigger: When others take you for granted.

Rationalizer To make your case, you tend to shower people with facts, figures, and detailed information. Your tone gets monotonous and you point your finger like a pundit. Emotional Trigger: When others negate or minimize the facts and focus on the softer, emotional, or more subjective aspects of an issue.

Inspirer You tend to engage others with inspirational stories and appeals, hoping to generate excitement and enthusiasm. Your tone is animated, your eyes wide, and you use lofty-sounding phrases. Emotional Trigger: When others focus on the negatives or on why things won’t work.

Consensus Builder You tend to look for compromises, trade-offs, and try reach consensus to satisfy everyone’s needs. You use a conciliatory tone and reassuring touches. Emotional Trigger: When others will not make compromises.

Enforcer You tend to use demands and threats to gain compliance. You get loud and might even pound your fist on your desk. Emotional Trigger: When others don’t seem to get the importance or the urgency.

The One to Adopt

Now take half a minute to watch a group of African children practice Call and Response. As you watch, notice what happens in terms of group cohesion and their focus on purpose.

You surely noticed that the child in the middle could Call out a phrase and confidently predict the group’s Response. Wouldn’t this be nice to do where you work? Well, it can happen. Of course, it gets a bit more complicated, but the underlying dynamic remains the same. The idea is to develop a level of Leadership Intimacy that enables you to understand what to Call and how to influence a Response.

I can’t explain it all here, but I do describe the coaching methodology in my Call and Response Coaching paper. In it I spell out how Call and Response can serve as a leadership coaching competency that you can use to motivate engagement and drive accountability.

Before you read the paper, you many want to learn which coaching styles you tend to use. Take our quick self-assessment first, and you will find yourself better able to apply what you read.

If you want to do more than read about it, then learn how to implement the Call and Response coaching methodology at a CoachQuest Leadership Coaching Workshop. Register now for our next workshop.

Coaching Leadership Checklist

Posted on April 23, 2012 by helanie

Almost half the working population, according to one source I found, moves on to another job because of the poor training they feel they’ve received from their employers. So if you’re going to train your team, make sure you give them training they will find worthwhile and, more importantly, training that sticks.

Most trainees find training helpful. They come back with practical tools and techniques. But that’s where the problem begins, back on the job. If the training doesn’t include follow-up, what they learned soon goes to waste.

Naturally, you expect your children not only to learn to read in school, but to read when they get home. Likewise, you should expect your team to apply new skills and to perform in new and better ways when they get back from a workshop.

When you come home from CoachQuest training, your training has just begun.

To begin with, we provide you and your team with a Coaching Checklist. It consists of 40 questions that prompt continued learning and includes activities and actions you can take to develop and improve what you learned at the CoachQuest Workshop.

CoachQuest is not about lecturing and listening. Instead we focus on giving you tools to develop further and continue to succeed. And we don’t expect you to go through your continued learning on your own. As a CoachQuest graduate, we guide you through a review of one coaching tool about every week. That makes your coaching impact last throughout most of the year.

To learn more about the benefits of CoachQuest, visit CoachQuest Leadership Coaching Workshops. Then, when you’re ready to take your coaching to the next level, Register Here for our next workshop.

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