How can I use questions to get my management team to stop posturing and undercutting each other?

As the leader of a management team, you need your team members to be aligned in their thinking and decisions. You also need them to be supportive of each other and make timely decisions that are focused on the best outcomes for the organization. This often raises issues of conflict or self-interest that remain unresolved and impact the effectiveness of your team and the organization they lead.

Here are three suggestions as to how you can use questions to create a management team culture of inquiry, support and accountability rather than one of posturing and self-interested entrenchment.

1. The Agenda: How can we construct the agenda with relevant and laser-focused open-ended questions rather than bullet-point statements?

2. Better Decision-Making: What questions will go directly to the heart of the organizational and individual issues that will drive the decisions inherent in each agenda point? How do we raise them in the meeting?

3. Direct Inquiry: What questions should we be asking that we are consciously or unconsciously avoiding? How do know what are we missing?

BrainFishing can help you in each of these three areas to generate better thinking and an aligned management team

Here we go…

1. The Agenda: How can we construct the agenda with relevant and laser-focused open-ended questions rather than bullet-point statements?

Every good leader knows that the culture for their team is set from the top. If you want a more engaged and aligned team, you have to set the “space” for them to perform within. And then you have to set a inquisitive and non-judgmental tone so that your team knows it can raise and investigate challenging issues together without fear or embarrassment or retribution. As the leader, setting the agenda for the meeting allows you to create that “space” and put the most challenging relevant questions to your team to consider before the meeting even starts.

What does a question-driven agenda look like?

Start with open-end questions. These encourage the Blue Brain, the thinking brain, to kick in. As an example for a company looking to enter a new geographic or product market, the agenda questions to start with might be:
What will be biggest external competitive challenge be to entering that market? What is our greatest weakness? Our greatest strength? Our greatest risk? What milestone marks to we need in place and what will tell us we are winning or losing?

For a company facing challenges in finding qualified employees the agenda questions might focus more on:
How can we accelerate the recruiting process? Why are we not finding and securing qualified candidates? How can our internal training and success planning accelerate promotions of qualified candidates?

A good question is an invitation to think. You want your management team thinking and preparing before they come to the meeting. The meeting should be about the exchange of ideas.

2. Better Decision-Making: What questions will go directly to the heart of the organizational and individual issues that will drive the decisions inherent in each agenda point? How do we raise them in the meeting?

To optimise the effectiveness of both your team and their ideas, you need them to be thinking both about their own division’s interests and the interests of the overall organization. You can show your leadership here by being prepared with questions that both expand and focus the conversation. In preparing and asking these questions, you are modeling the behaviour you expect from your team. Some examples are:

• You’ve had some real success: What did you do to address the recruiting issue?
• How is this situation similar to when we relaunched our successful ecommerce push?
• It seems to me there are similarities. What did we learn that we could apply here?
• That’s an excellent idea – what resources would you need to get it going? How other departments will be impacted? What help do you need?

In addition to just asking good open-ended questions, there are two keys to the internal meeting questions that you are asking and that you are asking others on your team to ask to challenge and support their colleagues:

Key #1: No questions that are merely leading the witness to the answer you already know
If you know that basic answer to a question, then use that information to set up a more relevant question that makes the person – and the rest of the team – think and that can open them up to better solutions:

• I know you launched a successful training program and proactive coaching follow-up to hit those sales numbers, Rebecca. What else did you team do that might help Frank in his division?
• What were the challenges you faced in keeping the ongoing focus and engagement?
• How did you address those challenges?

Key #2: No questions that are veiled attempts to pass judgement on someone
We’ve all been in management team situations where the leader “takes a strip off” one of our teammates by embarrassing them in front of their colleagues with judgemental “questions” that aren’t really questions at all. So how did that system implementation turn out, Charlie? (When everyone knows it was a disaster.) What other great ideas do you have, Frances? (When everyone knows that Frances dramatically missed her targets this month.)

We look at why this happens in Chapter Two in BrainFishing.

And what is the quickest way to feel solid, safe and wise? By telling others they are wrong, and then showing them why we are right. We judge them, plain and simple. And we do it a lot. Telling (and hunting), you’’ll note, is almost always a sign of judgment. I’m right – and you’re not. Whether we do this consciously (sometimes) or unconsciously (much more common), we judge others as a way of protecting ourselves. Feeling “right” puts us in a defensible, superior position. It signals to our Red Brain that we’re on top, making us feel strong and safe. But this powerful feeling Red Brain position severely limits us in successfully solving real, tangible problems and, perhaps more importantly, from building long-term, productive, sustainable relationships. A key part of the First Shift, therefore, is shifting away from judgment.

Ask yourself this: How does it make you feel when you are being judged? Not so warm and fuzzy. In fact, the biggest problem with judging others is this: while we feel strong and safe, we make them feel threatened, triggering their Red Brain into action. They attack and judge us in return, now making us feel threatened, triggering us into our Red Brain. And we both head into the Red Brain boxing ring for a bruising session of “Who is Right? Who is Wrong?” Who wins, in the end, usually doesn’t matter. The only guarantee is that everyone leaves feeling emotionally battered and bruised.i

Remember what we said earlier: your behaviour as the leader sets the tone for the entire team. Ask yourself: Am I prepared with relevant, non-judgemental questions? Do I encourage healthy debate that engages my team to ask the hard, but relevant questions and find the best answers?

3. Direct Inquiry: What questions should we be asking that we are consciously or unconsciously avoiding? How do know what are we missing? Finally, find the way to ask the question that leads us to investigate what we don’t know.

• What are we missing?
• What other research should we be doing?
• What is the really data telling us?
• Where are the inherent risks in the decision we are making? What is our plan to mitigate them?

Once you set the tone of inquiry and non-judgemental questioning, you will rapidly find that your team is finding better solutions and finding them faster. But the first step is to shift your leadership style from telling to asking. Model the behaviour to encourage them to challenge each other in a respectful, non-judgemental way.

And look through BrainFishing. You will find a lot more ideas on how to create a management team culture of inquiry, support and accountability.