How do you feel when you have the leeway and support to pursue your own idea? What if the action steps you’re taking are the same, but the idea and the steps were dictated to you by your manager? If the action steps are the same, what feels so different about the two situations?
If you’re thinking the answer lies in where the idea came from, I’m right there with you. But as managers and team leaders, so many of us are solution-oriented people – we use the data available to us to pursue a solution to a problem (this might be single-, double-, or triple-loop learning). Solving problems quickly serves us well in our career, and we’re rewarded well for it. The trouble is, we’re often so quick to move to the solution that we miss what the actual problem is. We think we know – and in the majority of cases we might be right – but often we’re just off the mark. Or we’re treating the symptoms of the problem, rather than addressing the underlying cause. (This happens on the global stage too: Responding to an assassination attempt with tighter restrictions around campaign events does nothing to address the underlying issues of mental health, access to firearms, and venomous political rhetoric.)
So how do we make sure we’re addressing the real problem? Well, one step is to keep checking your understanding of the situation with those who know it well, and asking open-ended questions to hear different perspectives and gather more information to deepen your understanding of the situation. This can be a giant step forward if you’re not already doing this.
It still leaves you as the one coming in to solve the problem and provide solutions, though. A banquet style of leadership. You’re providing a top-down solution for your team to follow. This can work, but exacerbates existing power dynamics. If you happen to be a white manager (especially a white male) managing people of color, this also reinforces the painful and problematic “white savior” dynamic.
Which brings us back to our opening questions: How do you feel when you have the leeway and support to pursue your own idea? What if the action steps you’re taking are the same, but the idea and the steps were dictated to you by your manager?
If your response to the first question is that it feels empowering and honoring, how can we make sure that the people we manage feel that same sense of empowerment? By the same token, if your answer to the second question was disheartening or like you’re just a worker bee going through the motions, how do we avoid doing that to the people we manage? What would that look like on a daily basis in our team meetings and 1:1s?
You may notice I’m asking a lot of questions in this piece. And you may feel like you already have the answers, that’s great! Run with those. That’s both a) a perfect takeaway, and b) a meta example of the point of this piece; as I worked with a client recently on questions she would ask her team to uncover more of an ongoing situation and make sure she was addressing the underlying cause rather than just the symptoms, she had an “a-ha!” moment and said, “this is like Inception!”
Inception, if you don’t know or don’t remember, is Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi movie about placing an idea deep into someone’s unconscious dreams so that when they wake they believe it’s their idea and run with it. The client argued that by asking lots of open-ended questions, the manager’s own ideas would come out of the team members’ mouths instead, leading to more ownership and more self-interest in seeing those ideas come to fruition. Part of me loves that thought – and since she was all bought in on now using open-ended questions, perhaps that was an idea “incepted” through our conversation. But what’s missing in that is that one of the most powerful outcomes of open-ended questions is that ideas can come up that the manager would never have thought of, which both shed light on blind spots and amplify voices beyond your own. That blue sky thinking can lead to innovation that both addresses underlying causes (not just symptoms), and new paths forward into uncharted territory.
So how can these ideas be helpful for you this week?
This Week’s Tips:
- Keep those questions coming. With your team members, with your peers, with your managers. Ask lots of open-ended questions (“What…” or “how…” work best) to check your understanding of a situation. Avoid rushing to a solution at your usual pace.
- Don’t be the savior! Practice the potluck model of leadership. For your team members, ask clarifying questions to make sure you understand their proposed solutions for problems, and allow them the leeway to work on those. Trust that if they came up with the idea, they will want to see is succeed; you can still check in with casual questions every now and then for progress updates.
Try these out this week, and let us know how it goes. We’d love to hear from you!
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Building Bridges Leadership 