Why Should I Question?

This article tells us why it makes sense to ask the right questions to lead the right way...

‘Bhoruka Steel does it again: It has once again broken its own record and tapped the heat in 55 minutes flat.’ I still remember this ad released by a Bhoruka supplier during the eighties not just because I was working for Bhorukas then but because of the precious lessons I learnt during my initial years of my career there. The most significant one came from the then production head, N R Pai. Every record the melters made is it tapping the heats in record time (heat is the time taken from loading the furnace with raw materials to the time of tapping the liquid metal into the ladle) or reducing the consumption of power or materials, it can be attributed to the leadership of Pai. His style was simple –he had a way of asking questions in a very non-threatening style – to bring out the seemingly irrelevant data, to trigger thinking and to induce learning.

Why and How Leadership:

Bold red-inked ‘why’s marked by Pai in the previous day’s log book would form the basis for most discussions during his meetings. His daily meetings with the shift managers (who took pride in calling themselves melters) would happen during the overlap time of the first and seconds shift. Although night shift in-charges were exempted from the meeting, most often they would find their way to it, not minding their weariness. Pai would swing his whys and hows between metallurgists and melters and thus melding theory and practice. Whys helped in identifying the cause for deviations and bring them into control so that the set standards were always met. When melters performed better than the standards or broke the old records, Pai never forgot to pat their backs. But he did not stop there – he translated the new record into a new learning by asking a series of hows. The learning helped others to replicate the new record and the new record became a new standard.

Leading With Questions

My early lessons on ‘leadership by questioning’ were reinforced when I happened to read the book ‘Leading with Questions’ by Michael Marquardt, an internationally noted educator and consultant. Here are a few things I got from the book:

Leadership is not about knowing all the answers. It’s about knowing what great questions to ask, and carefully listening to those answers. Leadership is about asking great questions – questions that inspire, motivate and empower the organisation. Astute leaders use questions to encourage full participation in teamwork, to spur innovation and outside-the-box thinking, to empower others, to build relationships with customers, to solve problems, and more. Questions wake people up. They prompt new ideas. They show people new places, new ways of doing things. They help us admit that we don’t know all the answers. They help us become more confident communicators.

LWQ provides a comprehensive foundation on ways to employ questions effectively when leading others. The book offers a variety of principles and strategies for asking questions as well as numerous stories on how leaders have used questions to attain organisational success and personal fulfilment.

From an early age, we are discouraged from asking questions, be it at home or school, as they are considered rude, inconsiderate or intrusive. As we ask fewer questions, we become ever less comfortable and competent in asking questions. When we become leaders, we feel that it is important for us to have the answers rather than questions. The failure to ask questions can lead to a distorted sense of reality.

Questioning Culture:

Leaders need to create a questioning climate where employees feel safe and able to trust the system and the people involved. Without this level of safety and comfort, people are generally unwilling to be vulnerable, and to be comfortable answering questions that might seem threatening. Leaders, through questions, can build a culture in which questions are welcomed, assumptions are challenged, and new ways to solve problems are explored. Questions establish an inquiring culture in organisations, and such an inquiry and culture builds a learning organisation.

Questions also build a culture of accountability. When we ask questions of others and invite them to search for answers with us, we’re not just sharing information, we are sharing responsibility. When responsibility is shared, ideas are shared, problems become shared – problems and not yours or mine anymore. Asking questions results in empowerment and shared ownership of results.

Six hallmarks of questioning culture:

When an organisation has a questioning culture, the people in it

• Are willing to admit, “I don’t know.”

• Go beyond allowing questions; they encourage questions.

• Are helped to develop the skills needed to ask questions in a positive way.

• Focus on asking empowering questions and avoid disempowering questions.

• Emphasize the process of asking questions and searching for answers rather than finding the “right” answers.

• Accept and reward risk taking.

Questions serve as the foundation for increasing individual, team, and organisational learning. Learning depends on curiosity and asking questions. Questions, especially challenging ones, cause us to think and to learn. When we open our eyes and minds to the perspective of others, we open ourselves to learning.

Questions encourage and enable individuals and groups to understand, to clarify, and to open up new avenues of exploration for solving problems. They provide new insights and ideas for strategic actions and potential paths for solutions. Questions and responses to those questions provide necessary and valuable information to solve problems faster and make better decisions.

Empowering Questions

A key for leaders in asking questions is contextual:“what do I want my question to accomplish?” One of the reasons that questions cause trouble is that we often ask questions that disempower others, that is, those questions that focus on the reasons why the person did not or cannot succeed, for example: Why are you behind schedule? Empowering questions, on the other hand, get people to think and allow them to discover their own answers, thus developing selfresponsibility and transference of ownership for the results. Empowering questions build positive attitudes and self-esteem. Empowering questions help develop alignment within teams and draw out the optimum performance from individual members and the team as a whole. They create a high-energy, high-trust environment and enable people to identify, clarify, and express their wants or needs. Such questions encourage people to take risks, nurture deep relationships, and dissolve resistance to change.

•How do you feel about the project thus far?

•How would you describe the way you want this project to turn out?

•Which of these objectives do you think will be easiest to accomplish? Which will be the most difficult?

Effective questions:

Effective questions are those that accomplish their purpose as well as build a positive relationship between the questioner and the questioned. There are many types of open ended questions:

Why questions. These are perhaps the most important types of open-ended questions for leaders to ask as these questions force everyone to go into deeper layers of cause and effect, and of purposes and assumptions. When asking why questions, the leaders should watch their tone of voice. The why question should indicate curiosity and the search for knowledge, and not anger or frustration.

Explorative questions, on the other hand, open up new avenues and insights and lead to new explorations: have you explored or thought of ?

Affective questions invite members to share feelings about an issue: How do you feel about leaving this job?

Reflective questions encourage more exploration and elaboration: You said there are difficulties with your manager; what do you think causes these difficulties?

Probing questions invite the person or group to go more deeply into a particular issue. Words such as describe, explain, clarify, elaborate, or expand get into more depth or breadth on a topic.

Fresh questions challenge basic assumptions: has this ever been tried?

Questions that create connections establish a systems perspective: What are the consequences of these actions?

Analytical questions examine causes and not just symptoms: Why has this happened?

Clarifying questions help free us from ambiguity, but such questions are sometimes difficult to ask: What specifically did you mean by that?

Building a Questioning Culture:

The goal for the inquiring leader is to change the corporate culture from one of telling to one of asking, to help everyone see and understand that questions need to become their primary communications tool. How can a leader develop a questioning culture? Here are some strategies that can build a powerful learning and questioning culture:

• Start at the top. The questioning culture must begin with the most senior leaders, who model the frequent use of good questions.

• Create an environment that enables the people to challenge the status quo, take risks, and ask more questions.

• Connect the values and processes of the organisation to the use of questions.

• Optimise the opportunities to ask questions by building questioning into every business activity, including formal and informal meetings, sales calls, and conferences with clients, or presentations.

• Report and appreciate questioners; promote risk-taking and tolerate mistakes.

• Provide training for people to be better at it and more comfortable in asking questions. Successful leaders go beyond asking questions; they work to create an environment in which everyone can ask and be asked questions. This means, first of all, that they focus on fostering a climate where employees still feel safe in asking questions and able to trust the system and the people involved.

Communicating to the Other End

“When you work in a global organisation, chances are that networking with a colleague turns into a nightmare. Here’s our list of collaborative applications for starters.”

When we think of a global workforce, the first thing that comes to our mind is communication between teams. There are a lot of hurdles such as cultural differences leading to different slang being used and conversations happening across different time zones. There is also the difficulty in expressing oneself and understanding the other person because you can’t see the person. What might be a simple five-minute explanation in a meeting room could turn out to be an arduous task with employees situated across the globe.

The problem is not only about communication but also about sharing knowledge and managing projects across different locations. The software used to bridge this gap fall under the category of collaborative applications. The most basic of all is a corporate messenger service that enables employees to connect with their colleagues through the local network (intranet) and helps companies avoid expensive telephone bills. Challenges other than communication that arise in a global workforce are training and managing knowledge.

There are different collaborative applications that help with different aspects in a corporate world:

• Offline communication – e-mail clients and servers

• Instant communication – messengers

• Knowledge sharing – online forums

• Document management – version control software

All these are hosted on the company’s local network for employees alone and are not meant for the public domain.

Knowledge sharing

As a company grows, the way it manages knowledge can determine how it progresses. With people joining and resigning, it is very important to have a knowledge base that makes it easier for new recruits to quickly come to speed in work. There are numerous instances where trainings are repeated just because the person who was initially trained, quit. And in case these trainings are imparted by employees in other countries, then the cost of training is high and the frustration of the trainer when a trained person resigns is even higher.

Wikis: Wikipedia has become a source of daily reference as many people and companies are trying to replicate the success of Wikipedia within their organisations. But a wiki with the purpose of the upper management wanting to interact with employees would probably not work because wikis are meant to encourage people to share knowledge easily. A wiki established within smaller units, of around 40 people, would help in consolidating the knowledge of that unit – it can help the team to quickly publish articles about the processes they follow and any how-to articles related to their regular job.

Example: MediaWiki (this application can support a huge number of users).

Blogs: People love reading blogs but most of them would never write one. Surveys have found that less than 5% of an organisation writes blogs even in large corporations. Blogs are a good forum to post news items and insights from the management. Blogs require focus so that new content is posted regularly. And remember that not everyone is good at writing articles.

Example: WordPress

Document management:

With the amount of documents produced every day – presentations, minutes of meetings, status reports, metrics etc. – it is important to have them archived in one place where they can be accessed easily and searched for as well. And with a global workforce it is important that the same material is not recreated. Rather than mailing documents back and forth for editing, it would be handy to have the document available in one place from where it can be edited by anyone. Document management software helps provide a repository where documents can be uploaded, versions of the document can be maintained and history of changes can be tracked.

Example:Microsoft Sharepoint

Sharepoint has the extra advantage of providing a content management system as well.

Content management:

Depending on the type of content, it might be more relevant to have process documentation maintained on an intranet website rather than a wiki. Maintaining an internal website has its own share of maintenance problems. But to simplify this, there are content management software available that make it easy to create internal websites and also provide inbuilt search features. Just imagine how it would be if each team had their own website that explained all about their work. The task of training is simplified and many hours can be saved. It also improves the morale of the team since they wouldn’t need to hunt for information. It would also be handy to have features like an online calendar, vacation planner and surveys. Many content management software come with all these.

Example: Microsoft Sharepoint

Bulletin boards:

We’re talking about electronic bulletin boards hosted on the intranet – a place where employees can post on diverse topics from technical to travel questions. An employee might be travelling to another office for a week and would be happy to get accommodation along with a fellow employee. Or maybe they would like to know about transportation there. Bulletin boards are very important as the organisation grows larger and across borders. A lot of times they are used for unofficial purposes as well but as long as no corporate policy is being violated, this is a good forum where employees can network across the organisation.

Implementing a bulletin board is pretty simple and can be integrated with the e-mail application being used.

Example: Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook – public folders can be created in which employees can post messages which can be read by everyone else who is subscribed to that folder.

Instant messaging and e-mail :

Even within the same building, people feel more comfortable messaging. Telephoning the other person or walking to their area and talking creates noise that others would not like. And in a global environment, instant messengers makes it easier for employees to interact. What started out as a messenger service has now gone beyond plain messaging. The messaging service now permits screen sharing, messaging conferences and some even provide for video conferencing although it could eat a lot of your communication bandwidth.

Google Apps:

Companies that do not want to worry about the hassles of maintaining e-mail servers can opt for this. Google takes care of the administrative burden. Most employees would already be familiar with Google Talk and GMail and won’t find it difficult using Google Apps. The problem with this is that a lot of sensitive company data ends up residing on a server that is not under the control of the organisation. This option is good for smaller companies but larger ones would not prefer this because of the security issues.

The two Goliaths in the computer industry are competing to cover the entire gamut from providing e-mail server software to collaborative tools for corporations: IBM and Microsoft. Microsoft has always held an edge because most organisations use some form of Microsoft Windows as their operating system. And for word processing and spreadsheets, Microsoft Office is still the most popular application in organizations. IBM established a place in the collaborative software world when it acquired Lotus Development Corp in 1995. Both these companies are constantly striving to provide new features in their instant messengers and e-mail clients. Web access to e-mails enables employees to access their mailbox from anywhere via an Internet connection.

Software:

IBM Lotus Notes for e-mail and Lotus same time for messaging.

Microsoft Outlook for e-mail and Windows messenger for messaging.

In the past, people would get bogged down with the number of choices they have in picking collaboration software for different purposes. But what we are seeing lately is applications that are providing multiple features. The day is not far off where you will find one application having most, if not all, the features we have discussed. Efficient use of software can help employees work effectively when they are spread across the globe and this in turn will help the organisation scale quickly.

Conversing with Your Employee

Man is a social animal, but then of course, Animal Planet and National Geography have proved to us that so is every other animal! We will however restrict our discussion to human beings in this article. What exactly do we mean when we say, and accept that human beings are social? Does it imply that we physically need to be in close proximity to other human beings? Does it mean we are inter-dependent? Does it mean that we need a set of rules and regulations that drive our behaviour? Well, probably all of these and more, but most importantly it means that we need to share thoughts and feelings, we need to express; in other words we need to communicate.

Contrary to the popular belief that women need to express more than men, all human beings need to express. Different people choose different mediums of communication depending on various factors including gender, age, culture, upbringing, etc. While some choose to use words to communicate, others feel the very way they conduct themselves (the choices they make, the clothes they wear, the work they do, etc.) speaks for them.

People carry this need to communicate everywhere they go and a workplace cannot deny the importance and the magnitude of this need. Ironically, while need for communication defines man’s social behaviour, communication is also one of those skills that all of us need to improve upon as individuals and as groups!

Statistics state that more than 50% of failed marriages can be attributed to a collapse in communication. Similarly, organisations come tumbling down when the information sits with strategists who don’t share it with those who deliver. Many of us believe that the Third Reich failed and Hitler lost his war, despite the meticulous planning and obsessive passion, on account of lack of communication between him and the last of his soldiers on the war frontiers…

The success of an organisation largely depends on its people, their understanding of the goals and strategies of the organisation, their ability to identify with the organisation’s leaders, culture and ideology and their desire to be a part of it. Just like individuals, organisations also have their own communication strategy.

To share or not

Some organisations believe in complete transparency and strive to keep their people informed about not just history, values and culture but also about financial aspects, prospective clients and other such aspects. It is important that the maturity level of the employees is high for an organisation to follow this policy of complete transparency. Employees need to have been a part of the organisation for some time and at a certain level to feel engaged enough to appreciate this set-up.

There are some other organisations that (probably at certain times) believe that ‘ignorance is bliss’. This may work as a strategy when the tides are unpredictable and the ship is rocking uncontrollably! Leaders absorb the tension and the insecurities and allow the rest of the organisation to concentrate on day-to-day activities. When organisations work with low-skilled employees or with very young and inexperienced staff or with transient population, it might be a smart decision to only reveal what is required!

Most organisations follow the system of selective revealing - selective information, selective members of staff and selective situations in which the information is released. Different factors are taken into consideration to ultimately arrive at the appropriate mix/ the right strategy for internal communication. This is probably the most effective of methods and the most prevalent system in the corporate world. The pitfall, however could be leaving too much to the discretion of individuals. There needs to be a strong system that defines the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of internal communication.

Whether it is planning summits, focus groups, magazines, newsletters, emailers or internal team cascade sessions, all ways to communicate serve a specific purpose and have their own limitations. One method cannot be better than the others and hence, ‘Corporate Communication’ teams of organisations have to be very careful while choosing their ingredients for that perfect recipe - employee engagement!

The bare essentials of internal communication

• Give a face to the brand

• Constantly communicate the management’s vision for a product/ service/ division

• Bring about role clarity

• Open a channel for feedback from the foot soldiers

• Communicate values and ethos of the organisation

• Define the road map ahead

• Play a crucial role in crisis/change management