If you’re a leader, now is not the time for answers. Instead, make room for questions.
These days, everything is changing—and fast. In your case, the expectations people have of you as a leader are changing day to day. In fact, you have probably never had to change the way you think and act as quickly as you need to right now.
Corporate offsites and leadership summits are usually key to keeping up strategic momentum in companies – so what can you do when you cannot meet in person? Below is our recipe for how you can use Qvest to replace your in-person events with a virtual process and still keep your strategic momentum.
I bet you cannot think of a single large company that is not in the midst of a transformation. All large corporations are undergoing a profound, often digital, shift in the business that keeps the top management incredibly busy. Yet, none of these executives and companies have found the winning formula for succeeding with transformation. We know this from the statistics: Digital transformations have a dismal 16% success rate, and we know this from the anecdotal evidence: Many executives express that they do not know how to secure and measure employee buy-in to the transformation journey.
It's good to be good at asking questions. Also as a leader. But good management is also very much about when NOT to ask questions. The following are examples of five situations where you should carefully consider your questions.
Many leaders use questions to disguise their own power. Using questions in situations where the intention is to provide feedback will either play out as manipulation or turn into a responsibility game. If, as a leader, you try to convince yourself that you are "just asking” a question, when both you and the employee know very well that there is a “right answer", then you have actually abdicated your managerial responsibility.
Qvest is designed to solve the biggest problem that every leader, consultant and change agent face every day: You cannot succeed alone.
Being a leader - whether formal or informal, corporate or political - means being on a mission that’s bigger than yourself. If you go alone, you fail.
The only way to succeed with a mission that’s bigger than yourself is to make other people commit to the same mission you are committed to. So, the question every leader asks - or should ask - themselves is: How do I get people onboard?
Knowing what employees actually talk about sounds like a simple task. It is not. When managers and consultants show up, the conversation changes.
But there are some simple dos and don'ts to remember when you want to know what's on peoples' minds at work. And once you know what gets talked about and how it is discussed, you have a much better chance at being an effective change leader.
