Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Qvest, Pia Lauritzen, PhD’s new article Want to make an impact? Change your questioning habits is out now in Strategy+Business.
Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Qvest, Pia Lauritzen, PhD’s new article “How to make big, old companies act fast” is out now in Strategy+Business.
Strategy execution in large companies often fails due to unclear or lack of communication. But if communication was the problem in the industry-leading companies, it would be solved by now.
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.
