Say "YES! And" to All Requests (Even the Impossible Ones)

It’s Monday morning. You run a company that makes custom-designed magic markers for walk-up customers. A man rushes into your store holding a blue marker and a red marker and says, “I need for you to make me two markers that look exactly like this by 5:00pm tomorrow. I can pay you $10 for the job. How about it?”

Doing a quick mental calculation, you realize that it will take you three days to make the two markers. Even if you could make them in two days, it would cost you $15. The customer’s request is impossible to fulfill.

Now, let’s consider some possible responses you could give, and the potential impact of each:

a) “No, it can’t be done!” By saying this, you cut off all further conversation. The customer leaves unsatisfied, vowing never to bring you his business again.

b) “Yes, I’ll git ‘er done!” You say this in order to gain the customer’s business and to show a positive, “can do!” spirit. Even though you have serious doubts about succeeding, you maintain hope that things will break your way. However, when your original doubts are confirmed and you miss the deadline, the customer leaves unsatisfied, vowing never to bring you his business again.

So how can you maintain a positive yet realistic stance that will be more likely to satisfy the customer? How can you be a YES! Leader even in the face of an impossible demand? By using the following response:

c) “YES!, and …”

We’ll reveal the rest of the response shortly. First, though, I’ll point out that saying “YES!” doesn’t mean that you Agree with the person’s Position – the “position” in this case being the exact terms of his offer (a blue marker and a red marker, by the end of Tuesday, for $10).  What it does mean is that you Acknowledge the Possibilities in the customer’s offer and Advance with Positive Purpose. And, in this situation, you have a powerful tool that lets you Acknowledge and Advance.

It’s called the Tradeoff Triangle. As shown below, the Tradeoff Triangle depicts the three components of any work effort: 1) The Outcome desired; 2) The Resources required to produce the Outcome; and 3) The Time it will take to complete the effort. Its depiction as an equilateral triangle – all sides the same length – reinforces the fact that the “size” of any given Outcome must be supported by a proportionate amount of Resources and Time.

To apply the Tradeoff Triangle to the marker example, you would first mentally plot the stated Resources ($10) and Time (2 calendar days) on the appropriate sides of the triangle. But you realize that you can’t then plot “one blue marker and one red marker” on the Outcome side, because that would throw your triangle out of balance.

Rather than give up altogether, though, you think: What Outcome could I generate with that combination of Resources and Time? Quickly mulling over the options, you realize that by 5:00pm Tuesday you can make one blue marker and give the customer an orange marker from your inventory on hand, at a break-even cost (which is acceptable to you) of $10.

So now you’re ready to give the complete response to the customer:

“Yes, and here is what I can do for $10 by 5:00 tomorrow: I can make a new blue marker and give you an orange marker from stock.”

By giving the customer an alternative, you are (in improv terms) accepting his offer to engage in dialogue and advancing the interaction by making your own offer.

Now the customer can consider whether the revised Outcome you’ve offered is acceptable to him. And he might, for example, say, “Well, I guess the other marker doesn’t have to be red, and it doesn’t have to be custom-made. I only need a bright color for highlighting purposes, and orange will work just as well.”

This is how the Tradeoff Triangle helps you to be a YES! Leader: It allows you to think and act in terms of what you can do rather than what you can’t do! By keeping the dialogue open, you’ve reached a mutually agreeable result – one that never would have been discovered had you just said “No!” or “Yes!”

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

In actuality, there’s one question that you would probably want to ask even before you give the “Yes And” response. And that question is:

“Why?”

As we’ve seen before, asking this question is essential for getting past conflicting positions in order to discover the interests that underlie the other person’s position – thereby greatly expanding the field for reaching a resolution. 

In the marker scenario, the customer volunteered his underlying interests (blue for writing, bright color for highlighting) with respect to his requested Outcome. By learning that he just needs a bright color, you can now consider other colors besides “red.” But, in fact, you could have directly asked him the “Why?” question (and its variants) with respect to any of the sides of the Tradeoff Triangle. Exploring the interests underlying each of the three sides will likely open up even more opportunities for Advancing toward a positive result.

Listed below are some of the questions you could ask about each side. How can you adapt these questions to respond to requests that people (customers, co-workers, your manager) make of you?

OUTCOME: Why do you want the markers? What use will you make of them? Why do they need to be different colors? Why do they need to be custom-made? What aspects of the markers are important to you – color, length, diameter, other?

TIME: Why do you need them by 5:00pm tomorrow? Would 5:00pm Wednesday work for you? Could you accept part of the order by 5:00pm tomorrow and the rest on Wednesday?

RESOURCES: Why are you limited to $10? If the Outcome and Time are essential to you, can you pay a bit more so I can expedite the job? What kind of a payment plan might we work out?

Improv and Meetings: How to Achieve True Collaboration

Performance improvisers are taught one very basic rule: Always say “Yes!” to your onstage partners. If your partner says, “Look at that huge dark cloud,” don’t say, “That’s not a cloud – that’s a Plutonian spacecraft!” Instead, accept your partner’s offer of a “cloud” and build on it, for example, “Yes, and there’s a rotating cow in it!” You may have a great storyline in mind involving Plutonian spacecrafts, but if you try to steamroll your partner with that idea, here’s what’s likely to happen:

1) He’ll resent your denial of his “cloud” offer;

2) He’ll feel more like a second banana than an equal partner in the creation of the scene;

3) He’ll retaliate by denying your offers;

4) He’ll focus less on listening to you and more on vigorously asserting his own ideas of where the scene should go.

While all of this is being played out, the audience will become wise to the fact that you’re trying to upstage your partner and trying to put on a one-man show – and that’s not what they came to see. Savvy improv audiences expect a collaborative give-and-take, not a struggle for dominance. A bout of back-and-forth contradiction (a la Monty Python’s Argument Clinic sketch) is, frankly, boring to watch.

If you think about it, business organizations tend to be hotbeds of offer-rejection. In a typical meeting, you frequently hear people insistently asserting their positions and trying to get the upper hand, rather than listening to each other, seeking to understand the other’s point of view, and working together to find a solution. The results of offer-rejection behavior in the meeting room are the same as they are onstage: resentment, suspension of listening, power plays, competition, retaliation. To outside observers, the proceedings would probably seem as boring and banal as a contentious round of one-upmanship between two improv performers.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Improv performers have a lot to teach the YES! Leader about what true collaboration looks like – and how to achieve it. Many improv activities (for example, Word at a Time Story) are geared toward giving performers (and nonperformers as well) a sense of how it feels to go with the flow of a group-created effort. Such an activity can also be a gauge of a person’s natural comfort (or lack thereof) with relinquishing control and seeing what emerges from the group process.

You might benefit from these kinds of activities if your typical meeting behaviors include:

·        Getting frustrated when somebody makes a suggestion or observation that seems impractical or off the wall, rather than asking the person to elaborate and opening your mind to the possibilities;

·        Invariably responding to another’s opinion (“I think X!”) with your own opinion (“Yeah, well I think Y!”) rather than a question (“Why do you think X?”);

·        Prematurely cutting off brainstorming and kicking around of ideas by saying, “We need to get going on this. Here’s what we’ll do …”

·        Putting down others’ contributions by using IdeaChillers such as “We tried that before and it didn’t work” or “You can’t be serious!”

Thinking vs. Doing: Time Management for the YES! Leader

President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “What is urgent is seldom important, and what is important is seldom urgent.” This seemingly simple observation has given rise to a time management model (often called the Eisenhower Model) that has proven useful precisely because of its simplicity.

You can apply the model by looking at any task and rating it according to how urgent it is and how important it is. As you can probably tell by now, the combination of these two factors gives rise to a quadrant model, as follows:

1 - Urgent/Important: These are tasks you can’t ignore and which must be done right away. These often take the form of unanticipated problems, immediate requests from someone in authority, or tasks you’ve left to the last minute due to your own procrastination.

Clearly, these are tasks that must be done – but, as noted below, the more you focus on long-term planning and priority-setting, the more you’ll be able to reduce the volume of these firefighting tasks.

2 - Urgent/Not Important: Frequently these are “squeaky wheel” tasks that you think you can’t ignore because they’re right in your face, demanding attention. The most common example is interruptions – someone stops by your desk to discuss something that doesn’t really need to be disposed of now, but you feel you have to do something with it in order to placate the person standing before you. In addition, these days technology has added to the variations of interruptions you can experience – texts, instant messages, emails with little red exclamation points. Beyond interruptions, though, this category can also include minor tasks you won’t relinquish because you think nobody else can do them better – and so you attend to all the little details right now to avoid the discomfort of leaving loose ends.

Strategies for dealing with this quadrant include: (1) Learning to quit taking on more than you can handle, which often means being able to say a respectful “no,” and (2) Learning to delegate and ask others for help

3 - Not Urgent/Not Important: This is the “time waster” category – distractions, mindless activities, recreational pursuits that can get in the way of more important tasks. Again, technology has enabled a myriad of new ways to let you fritter away your days until you say “Where did the time go?”

Often your best strategy here is to first make yourself aware of how much time you're actually spending on these tasks and then (as shown in Quadrant 4 below) being clear about your long-term goals so you can assess the true cost of your time-wasting activities.

4 - Not Urgent/Important: This is the high-gain category – the quadrant that involves reflecting on your life, determining what matters most to you, and setting a vision for the long term. Here is where you can create the beacon that draws you forward and keeps you from getting thrown off course by the temptations of the other three categories. But since this quadrant involves investing time in tasks (such as reflecting, planning, and building relationships) that might not involve immediate payoff (i.e., are not urgent), it’s easy to get diverted from this quadrant into reactive mode (Quadrants 1 and 2) or let your mind wander where it will (Quadrant 3). The challenge, then, is to create positive habits that will remind you to take active steps to focus on this quadrant every day (see the link to the Marshall Goldsmith article, below).

In addition to the strategies mentioned above, you may find that the more you focus on Quadrant 4, the less you’ll find yourself mired in the other three quadrants.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Another Dwight Eisenhower quote comes into play here as well: “Plans are useless, but planning is essential.” In other words, the value in analysis and planning comes, not so much from the hard-copy output, but from the mental preparation you do while sifting through the possibilities and considering all the contingencies. Similarly, the world of improvisational theater teaches us that an improv performer practices his craft, not to create funny lines or other “schtick,” but to prepare his mind to deal in the moment with onstage incongruities, whatever they might be.

I mention all this because the Eisenhower Model of time management can itself carry an incongruity, namely: Isn’t Quadrant 4 time by definition “wasteful” time (Quadrant 3), that is, if you aren’t engaged in immediately producing an output, aren’t you frittering time away?

Think of it – how many of us have been told that time spent in thinking, analyzing, reflecting, sketching, browsing, playing, etc., is “unproductive” time? (And how many of us have been called “lazy” as a result?)

I’m not sure there’s an exact formula to be applied, but, as with anything having to do with resolving incongruities, I think there’s a balance to be continually struck between two extremes. Sure, on one hand, you can stay in your head and reflect on the great complexities of life, to the point where you never really get out and do anything. On the other hand, though, you can become so concerned with always being “productive” that you give short shrift to the value of just letting your mind drift where it will. In fact, it’s essential for the mind to take a periodic excursion from the immediate issues and tasks at hand in order to experience those “Aha!” moments of creative insight.

As a YES! Leader, are you:

·         Structuring each day to include unstructured time for reflecting on the big, long-term concerns that really matter to you?

·         Holding yourself accountable for taking regular action – even small steps – to attend to those long-term concerns?

·         Using your unstructured time either as a respite or as mental preparation – and not as avoidance?

·         Striking the proper balance between time spent “doing” and time spent “thinking” so that each informs the other?

(Also see Marshall Goldsmith’s article Ask Questions Daily for a simple yet powerful way to keep your Quadrant 4 priorities uppermost in your mind every day.)

Crying to Be Heard: Coaching the Actively Disengaged Employee

Much has been written lately about the topic of Employee Engagement. Engaged employees are committed to doing the best work they can, often going above and beyond what’s expected of them. Disengaged employees basically go through the motions, doing just enough to get by (and often not even that). Actively Disengaged employees are very vocal about their disengagement, frequently voicing their frustrations, resistance, and disagreement with the actions of the company and its leaders.

Actively Disengaged employees can be particularly challenging for leaders because, even though they may be few in number, they can have a disproportionately large negative impact on the organization. Their influence can be especially strong on the Disengaged employees, who are particularly susceptible to the carping of the Actively Disengaged and are often led into the Actively Disengaged category themselves. Because of this, organizations are often advised to do whatever they can to shield the rest of the organization from the Actively Disengaged – a strategy which calls to mind Yankees manager Casey Stengel’s quote about handling a baseball team: “I try to keep the players who hate me away from the ones who aren’t quite sure.”

It can be tempting to treat the Actively Disengaged as bad seeds with a poor work ethic who need to be isolated and ultimately removed from the organization. “Coaching” for these employees often takes the form of: “Shape up or else!” However, rather than writing them off, the YES! Leader might consider another coaching approach that can create a better outcome for everyone.

First, the YES! Leader does need to emphasize to the Actively Disengaged employee – in a clear but nonthreatening way – that behavior that disrupts others’ engagement is unacceptable and must be modified. But rather than stop there, the YES! Leader should proceed to ask questions that explore what is getting in the way of the employee’s engagement. Among the many possible sources of Actively Disengaging behavior, two in particular stand out:

1) A Sense of “I’m Not Being Heard!” People today expect to have a voice in important work issues that affect them. They also want to feel as if their knowledge, ideas, and perspectives are being fully utilized by their organizations. If they feel stifled and stymied – if they get the sense that the organization believes in the old “Deciders decide, designers design, workers work” approach to defining roles and dividing tasks – then they might well rebel against a culture that expects them to just salute and carry on.

2) Poor Job Fit. The management expert W. Edwards Deming once said: “A bad process will beat a good person every time.” Deming was speaking in the context of process design, but the same idea applies to organizational and job design as well. If a person’s values, skills, and interests are out of synch with the job she is expected to do, she’s very likely to become frustrated in her role. Especially if the organization’s culture discourages creative approaches to letting people do what they do best every day, then the person may react with vocal resistance to being forced into an unsuitable role. Rather than being regarded as a good (or even great) person in an ill-fitting role, the employee might instead be treated as a “bad actor” who bears full responsibility for her own situation.

By approaching the Actively Disengaged employee with positive expectations about her motivations, the YES! Leader may learn that the real problem is not the person but the environment in which she’s being expected to perform.  The leader and employee can then start working collaboratively toward removing the barriers blocking the employee’s path to greatness.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

If you have an Actively Disengaged employee, consider the following types of coaching questions that might uncover the barriers to engagement and help the employee take effective action to deal with them:

·         What is something important you’ve been saying that nobody is hearing? Why do you think they’re not hearing it? What can I do to make sure they hear it? What can you do differently to communicate it more effectively?

·         What have you been telling me that you think I haven’t been hearing?

·         What is one thing that, if it changed in your current role, would make you feel more satisfied and productive?

·         If you had a magic wand, what is one thing you would change about this department, team, or organization?

Naturally, asking these types of questions won’t do any good unless (1) You open your mind to the possibilities in the employee’s ideas, and (2) The coaching interaction leads to a joint action plan to start moving toward change.

It's Rough Out There! The YES! Leader and Creative Abrasion

In my previous article, I described the music of the group called the Free Design and their frequent use of the “harmonic rub” – the use of notes that, at first blush, don’t quite seem to fit but ultimately resolve into something beautiful.

The harmonic rub reminds me of a concept called “creative abrasion” – the pairing of incongruous concepts as a way of breaking old patterns of thought and discovering something wholly new. At first, the pairing may seem “wrong,” a total non-starter. However, through the suspension of doubt and the willingness to play with the possibilities, the pairings can be honed into something new, useful, and (yes) beautiful.

Creative abrasion is the lifeblood of performance improvisation. For example, in the game Actor’s Nightmare, two performers are assigned roles by the audience (say, fast-food worker and customer). One of the performers is given a script from a famous play (say, Waiting for Godot) and throughout the scene must pick random lines from the play in lieu of making up his own lines. The other performer then has the challenge of making his partner’s lines somehow fit within the context of the fast-food scene, no matter how wildly out-of-place they seem. The scene might start this way:

FAST-FOOD WORKER: Welcome to Big Bob’s Burgers, sir! What would you like today?

CUSTOMER [reading from the script]: “Nothing to be done.”

WORKER: Well, we can leave your burger a little pink, if you like.

CUSTOMER: “I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.”

WORKER: Yes, I almost accepted that full-ride scholarship to MIT, but then I thought, how could I give up all this?

A trivial example? Hardly. The mindset required to field these jarringly inappropriate lines is exactly the mindset required to create innovative solutions of any sort, in any field.  After all, any creative breakthrough idea began life as a rubbing together of concepts as seemingly incongruous as “a fast-food customer spouting Beckett.” Consider these conceptual pairings:

·         Creating music by dragging a needle across a piece of black vinyl.

·         Flying through the air in a 900,000-pound tub.

·         Driving full speed on a toll road without ever stopping at a toll booth.

At one time, each of these ideas would have drawn a “Wha?” response from most people. But by playing with the possibilities (and working doggedly to implement them), the creative minds behind these idea pairs sanded the rough edges off their abrasive conceptual surfaces and turned them into concepts we now take for granted.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

As I’ve frequently mentioned, one of the hallmarks of the YES! Leader is the ability to resolve seeming contradictions. I say “seeming” because, as described above, many if not most concepts that appear contradictory at first can be resolved through the willingness to suspend judgment, play with the possibilities, and live with a bit of dissonance and uncertainty while things work themselves out.

In this article, I’ve been focusing on “contradictions” in the context of generating breakthrough ideas. However, the YES! Leader can find many other examples of contradictions on an almost daily basis:

·         Team members who clash because of differing opinions and perspectives.

·         A team member who wants to gain experience in a new task that requires experience to carry out successfully.

·         A project that requires a detailed plan before execution, even though experience shows that “no plan survives contact with actual events.”

·         An organizational change that must be implemented even though many people actively resist it – but who still must be the ones to implement it if the change is to be successful.

As potentially dizzying as “a fast-food customer spouting Beckett,” right? Well, like the best performance improvisers, the YES! Leader is able to keep a clear head, avoid the urge to try to just “take control,” and negotiate the twists and turns required to mediate a successful result that takes multiple interests and concerns into account.

The YES! Leader as a Practitioner of Free Design

One of my favorite recent musical discoveries is a vocal group called the Free Design – four siblings (Chris, Sandy, Bruce, Ellen) from the Dedrick family who recorded seven outstanding albums between 1967 and 1972, and then regrouped in 2001 to record their eighth. They enjoyed little commercial success in their time, but their work continues to gain new fans even 40+ years later, mostly due to the pure craftsmanship and singular vision of their main songwriter and arranger Chris Dedrick and the impeccable execution of his compositions by Chris and his brother and sisters.

The Dedricks’ work and influence are well charted in a cover story in a recent edition of the UK music magazine Shindig, which features some wonderful anecdotes and recollections by Sandy Dedrick. In particular, I was struck by Sandy’s description of Chris’s compositions and arrangements as making frequent use of the “harmonic rub” – which she describes as “notes that are very close together and it sounds dissonant, and then it resolves into something harmonic and beautiful.”

This description of her late brother’s music (Chris died of cancer in 2010) echoes one of the recurring themes in The YES! Leader blog: The concept of the YES! Leader’s role as continually resolving “seeming contradictions” that collide in the world he encounters.

I can see this “harmonic rub” at work in the actions of the YES! Leader. The best YES! Leaders keep a loose rein on the actions of others, giving them enough leeway and freedom to experiment, take risks, and try out their ideas. And, whenever team members are struggling, the YES! Leader best serves them by letting them try to work through difficulties on their own, providing coaching and encouragement rather than immediately jumping in and taking over.

Allowing this autonomy and space often means living with some discomfort and uneasiness (or, as Sandy Dedrick says, a “dissonant” feeling) in the short term. However, within the dissonance lies the seeds of discovery, learning, and empowerment that (with patience and nurturing from the leader) can resolve into something harmonic and beautiful – and ultimately self-sustaining.

In many ways, I think the paradoxical name “Free Design” itself nicely describes the practice of YES! Leadership: Strategically crafting well-placed, well-timed actions in order to release the unique creative genius that lies within everyone in the organization.

Leadership: It's Not About Working Hard

Performance improvisers know that a good performance often turns on the little things – a small gesture, a raised eyebrow, a well-timed pause – rather than broad actions that dominate the stage and call attention to themselves. A performer doesn’t need to be loud, antic, and busy in order to be successful. Indeed, this approach often bulldozes over others and undermines the performance.

Similarly, good leadership often hinges not so much on broad strokes but on deftly applied actions and words that can have a huge impact on the overall performance of the leader and his team. A situation early in my career brought this point home to me in a powerful way.

I had just completed my first year in a formal leadership role and was sitting in the office of my manager – a fellow named Clif Anderson – awaiting my annual performance review. I expected Clif to lead off with feedback about my accomplishments and areas needing improvement over the past year. Instead, however, he began the session by asking me a simple question:

“Jerry, what do you think is your biggest strength?”

Taken aback a bit, I quickly ran through the Rolodex of responses in my mind and found myself blurting out the following:

“Well … I work hard.”

Without missing a beat, Clif smiled and said something I’ve never forgotten:

“Jerry, that’s great. We all want to put out our best effort. But now that you’re in a leadership role, one thing you need to understand is: Leadership is not about working hard.”

Clif went on to explain a point about leadership that I’ve observed repeatedly since then. When they first assume a leadership role, many people have difficulty making a mindshift from their former roles as individual contributors. Quite often the new leader still thinks of her role as one of rolling up the sleeves, expending lots of effort, and applying her technical knowledge to the work of the department. This is quite understandable – and I think Clif observed this in my own performance – because utilizing technical knowledge and getting work done are what have led to career success up to that point.

But, as Clif pointed out, a leader’s role requires different sets of skills than continuing to be a “doer” of the department’s work. Certainly there are times when a leader needs to pitch in and help out. But these are the exceptional situations. A leader’s role is primarily one of seeing that the department’s work gets done through the efforts of other people.

The kinds of skills this requires are less about performing tasks and more about utilizing such people-oriented behaviors as:

·         Understanding each of your people and what makes him or her tick;

·         Saying the right words at the right time to motivate, engage, and inspire;

·         Finding opportunities (and there are plenty) to recognize people for a job well done;

·         Encouraging innovation and creative thinking;

·         Using powerful questions to spark your people’s thinking and to coach them to come up with their own solutions.

Indeed , Clif’s own behavior in starting the performance review with a powerful question was an ideal model for the point he was making about leadership. And it’s a point that has stuck with me to this day.

WAITing to Be a Great Coach

Being a great coach is all about asking powerful questions, listening intently for the answers, and following up with even more powerful (and usually improvised) questions. Your role in coaching is, not to try to give the coachee the answers, but to stimulate his thinking so that he can come up with his own answers.

The goal of coaching is to facilitate the coachee's process of self-discovery. Rather than be led to answers, people generally prefer to lead themselves to their own answers - a process that results in better commitment and engagement, a better development experience, and better solutions.

Throughout the coaching conversation, the coach should continually focus on opportunities to ask rather than tell - even if that means restraining an urge to rush right in with advice, suggestions, and directives. This can be difficult for many (especially new) leader-coaches, since their past experience may have rewarded them for actions that involve taking the reins and asserting their authority and influence over others.

One indication that may help you judge any natural tendency you may have to maintain a control orientation in coaching: During a coaching conversation, what percentage of time are you doing the talking? The coach's voice really ought to be heard only about 20%-30% of the time during the coaching session. The coachee is really the one who should be "on stage" during the typical session - after all, it's the coachee's thoughts, ideas, and perspectives that need to be put in the spotlight.

If you find yourself dominating coaching sessions, you might try a powerful acronym called WAIT! In your next session, try to take note of times that your voice is being heard more than the coachee's. Then ask yourself "WAIT" - which stands for "Why Am I Talking?"

The more you can WAIT as a coach - even if it means learning to become comfortable with a little silence while the coachee thinks about a response - the better you'll be able to avoid upstaging the coachee, and the more you can stay in the role of supportive side coach.

What's Your Compensation? The Dangers of Overusing Your Strengths

Each of us demonstrates certain behaviors that we consider strengths – a bias for action, say, or the ability to brainstorm creative ideas on a blank page. Unfortunately, many people over-rely on their strengths as “go-to” behaviors to be used reflexively even in those situations where the behavior is ineffective or inappropriate.

Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger, creators of the Lominger competency suite, have noted that the overuse of strengths is a common reason why some leaders fail to successfully navigate the path from the individual contributor’s role to the CEO level – the route that Ram Charan has called the Leadership Pipeline. As Lominger associates Linda Hodge and David Workman put it, when some leaders transition to higher levels of leadership, they experience problems “not because of a weakness per se, but because their strengths have gone into overdrive. They continue to use what worked in the past and fail to learn new skills for the new situation.” The first-line manager who routinely knocks down obstacles to get things done may find that bullish approach less effective in a manager-of-managers role that requires more influencing and consensus-building.

So, if we want to move forward in our careers, must we suppress or even unlearn our strengths? The danger is that we may start to overfocus on our weaknesses to the point of losing sight of the natural, distinctive capabilities that have brought us success in the first place. We may then spend the rest of our careers trying to shoehorn ourselves into roles that don’t really fit us.

A better development strategy than downplaying strengths, say Hodge and Workman, is to focus on building “compensators,” which they describe as “competencies that can neutralize or balance overused strengths.” For example, the leader with a strong bias for action can develop interpersonal skills (approachability, humor) that can take the rough edges off his or her hard-charging approach.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

One competency in particular – the ability to truly listen – has been shown to be what Hodge and Workman call “the universal compensator.” “Improving listening skills,” they note, “can take the sharp edges off as many as 30 overused strengths. People who become better listeners look more patient, less arrogant, more approachable.”

·         Do you define “listening” as “the time I have to wait until I can start talking again”?

·         When a team member stops you to discuss something of importance to him, how well does your body language reveal your level of engagement? Are you looking the person in the eye – but pointing your feet down the hall?

·         To what extent do you focus on your own agenda, to the exclusion of other perspectives and concerns? Even if immediate action is required, do you ever circle back with people to address their concerns after the fact?

How to Create Great Questions to Coach Others - and Yourself

In a world in which we often just skip across the surface of topics like so many flat stones, it can be difficult to just pause and go deeper – to ask ourselves not just where we’re headed and how we’ll get there, but also why we’re headed there and what might happen if we chose a different course.

In her coaching role, the YES! Leader also needs to avoid getting drawn into this “full speed ahead” mode by asking deepening questions and truly listening to her coachee – and encouraging the coachee to listen to himself as well in order to get to that deeper level of reflection.

By making almost anything immediately available at our fingertips, technology often feeds this urge to keep moving forward as fast as possible. But it doesn’t have to be that way – if we can find ways to control the technology instead of letting it control us.  Here is one such example I recently created that utilizes a common software application to help coaches create better and deeper questions.

First, note that there are several different kinds of questions that a coach might ask:

INFORMATIONAL: These are the Who-What-When-Where questions that can help clarify the facts and figures in the coachee’s story. “You mentioned Mary – what is her role?” Or “What happened after she said that?”

ANALYTICAL: These ask the coachee to filter through the facts of his story and make some assessments and choices. For example: “Of all the issues you mentioned, which is the most important for you right now?” Or “What is the quickest, lowest-risk action you could take?”

SPECULATIVE: These ask the coachee to mentally project into the future and contemplate the potential outcomes of certain actions. “If you took that action, how do you think it would impact your issue?” “If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do?”

EMOTION-ORIENTED: These are feelings-based questions that can help the coachee reflect on his motivators, desires, or concerns. “Why is resolving this issue so important to you?” “When you succeed at your effort, how will it make you feel?”

Also keep in mind that powerful coaching involves listening for and inquiring into things the coachee doesn’t say – such as a metaphor, analogy, or strong choice of words that could indicate more than meets the ear. For example, if the coachee describes another person as creating a lot of “drama” in a situation, that might be a cue to ask: “What do you mean by ‘drama’?”

The activity is conducted by utilizing the whiteboard feature of a web conferencing tool such as WebEx or Microsoft Live Meeting.  You can utilize this in the context of a virtual training exercise for coaches, mentors, or facilitators. Proceed as follows:

·         Instruct each participant to tell a 2-3 minute story on any topic he wants. (Some typical topics: My first job, my biggest success, my hometown.)

·         Before a participant tells his story, display a whiteboard and have the participant minimize his screen.

·         As the participant tells the story, the other participants use the whiteboard to type questions that seek to dive more deeply into certain parts of the story. (Supply the participants with the categories listed above ahead of time.)

·         When the participant finishes the story, have him view the questions on the whiteboard. He can answer as many as he likes right then but doesn’t have to answer them all.

·         Repeat the process for all participants.

·         After all have finished, ask each participant to identify one thing (no matter how small) he or she learned about himself or herself during the activity.

For example, in a recent session I conducted, I offered up my own story of my first job as a book editor for a large publishing company. Here are some of the questions the group generated:

·         How did this work experience influence your future career experiences?

·         What about reading excites you the most?

·         If you could go back and take one aspect of that job and apply it to your current job, what would that be?

·         If you could write your own book, what would your first book be about?

·         You mentioned your first boss was a great mentor – what did she do that reflected great mentorship?

Practicing this activity can help the YES! Leader listen for more than just the facts of a story. It can help her and the coachee listen for the meaning that often lurks beneath the facts.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

The YES! Leader can also use this exercise to help her engage in self-coaching. I came away from the above session in a decidedly reflective mood as I thought, in particular, about the parts of my editorial job that I could see in my current job. More significant, though, were the parts that I didn’t see in my current job but would like to see more of – as well as the parts that I do currently have that I didn’t have in that first job.

What would happen if you devised a set of questions that you could ask yourself every day to stay mindful about, not just the events of your life, but the meaning of those events? For example:

·         What is my purpose?

·         What did I do today that did/didn’t align with my purpose?

·         What strength did I utilize today?

·         How did I improve myself today?

·         How did I get in my own way today?

·         What word describes how I feel right now?

·         What will I do differently tomorrow?