Category: Leadership

Leadership, Learning, questions

But who will I ask?

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“You don’t happen to know what that was, do you?” Lindon asked hesitantly. “You’re asking me, but who am I supposed to ask?”

Will Wight, Soulsmith

Starting your journey as a leader or manager can be a lonely experience. Going from being a colleague to managing others, and feeling responsible for their success, can be daunting. To combat this, it is important to find new colleagues who are also managers or leaders. These peers can provide a safe space to discuss, ask questions, and learn together.

While you may have a great manager who can coach you, it’s not always the same as discussing with colleagues who are in the same stage of their journey. It’s important to consider what you’re learning, how you’re learning, and who you’re learning with. If you’re unsure about any of these things, take the time to find your answers.

Adaptivity, Leadership, Learning, Resilience

Prepare to be spontaneous

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“One can never prepare for everything, but when one prepares for what one can, it’s much easier to deal with the unexpected.”

L. E. Modesitt Jr., Imager

Preparation and thinking about what obstacles might happen is not about predicting exactly what will happen and creating a plan that should be followed to the letter. It is about opening our minds to the unexpected and to create a culture in your organisation around adaptiveness, resilience, and learning. It is about accepting that we will fail, that things we didn’t plan for will happen and that we need to be able to act on it. By talking about obstacles and creating scenarios together for how to deal with them, then we are much better prepared when sh*t hits the fan and when there is no time left to think and you just need to act.

Coaching, communication, Leadership

Are you really asking a question?

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“Would you like to come inside,” she said. It wasn’t a question. For a sentence to be a question, you had to care about the other person’s answer.”

–Full Fathom Five by Max Gladstone

Lots of leadership courses focus on teaching people to ask more and better questions. The challenge with asking questions is that you first must want to listen to the answers, and then you have to have the time and will to use it.

Many people have already decided what to do, but still try to include people by asking for their opinion. Other people don’t want to hear the feedback and will change the questions to make it very clear what they want to hear: Was the presentation good? Do you like it here?

You first have to make it ok to fail and be wrong in your organization, before people will start asking better questions.

Coaching, communication, Leadership, questions

The most important thing

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“You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn’t, you could still find out a lot.”

– Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

The important thing is not that you ask the perfect question that will reveal everything or that the person you asked the question completely changes their view of the world. The important thing is that you ask questions, and listens to the answers. Then based on the answer you could ask another question and slowly get to the heart of the matter. Or you could choose to go and ask someone else questions.

Brain, Coaching, communication, Leadership, Organizations, questions

The human eye

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“The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”

– Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

When we join a new organisation, we get a new role or become part of a new team we can easily see all the strange behaviours and norms that they have. After a while, the strange behaviors and norms seem to disappear, and we become blind to them as well.

As a manager or coach, we have an enormous challenge when we get new people on board. This first period is when people are least likely to give feedback, but it is also the time when we need to ask them for it.