You’re the boss – good for you. You talk then employees listen, follow and do what they are told. Yeah, right. Not in today’s intellectual workplace. Few jobs have employees following the same procedures day in and day out (taking orders from management). Instead, we are now mostly in jobs that require our thinking, effort and engagement. Employees have to pack their brains when they pack their lunches.
In our previous industrial age, most employees followed procedures to ensure accuracy and efficiency as they built products. Learn the procedures, follow the rules. Bosses tell, employees comply. Command-and-control management worked in this environment. Work didn’t require thinking as much as it required compliance. But talk to your employees like that now and they either ignore you or quit. Today’s employees think their way through their days and telling won’t activate their best performance.
There is a great line in education – “telling isn’t teaching.” Well it works the same in management – “telling isn’t managing.”
So, how do you get through to your employees in today’s intellectual or conceptual workplace? You do more asking than telling. The power skill in today’s workplace is in asking great questions – questions that require employees to think, invent, respond and be accountable for their work.
Here are some examples of questions in lieu of the normal telling:
1. Tell: I want you to do __________ and ___________ to improve how we treat customers. Rephrase to a power question: What will make the customer’s service event even more significant – one that they would then share their story with friends?
2. Tell: Call that customer back and apologize for how you treated him on the phone. Rephrase to a power question:When you are curt and short-tempered with customers, what does that do to our business? And what should you do now to reconnect with that customer?
3. Tell: That error is going to come out of your pay – and now you have to call and apologize. Rephrase to a power question: How do you think you should handle this error with this customer’s order in a way that will keep the customer and be fair to our business?
4. Tell: I want you to change this report, this process, etc. to be more efficient and more effective. Rephrase to a power question: What are three ways we can better connect what you do best to what we need done here at the company?
Asking questions is the key to gathering information and holding people accountable. By asking questions we not only find out what employees are thinking but we force them to solve, invent and own their situations; no longer do they rely on us to do their work.
So at this point in this post I have two choices:
I could tell you – Start asking your employees more questions; just do it.
Or, I could ask you - How do you think this approach could improve employee performance and increase employee loyalty? When could you start a more question-focused approach to management?
The first one shares my idea; the second solicits your ideas.You will always act more on your ideas than someone else’s.
How can you use FireUpYourEmployees.com to learn more about talent-based tools to help you attract, hire and retain today’s best talent? And how can you use more workplace coaching to better activate the performance power of your people?
coaching employees, questions, telling isn't managing, telling isn't teaching, workplace communication
This entry was posted on Monday, August 26th, 2013 at 12:22 pm and is filed under For Managers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
