Leadership is about helping the people you lead succeed. In a previous post, I provided a list of tips for helping the people you lead succeed, grow and flourish. I’d like to discuss one of those leadership tips in more detail here.
Lead by accelerating the development of the people you lead.
What Great Leaders Do
- Great leaders use questions to accelerate the development of the people they lead.
- Great leaders use stories to accelerate the development of the people they lead.
Read on ...
How Great Leaders Use Questions
Great leaders know that effective questions can help develop the performance potential of the people they lead in a number of ways. They use questions to:
- Facilitate problem solving,
- Create insight in the people they lead,
- Develop the wisdom of the people they lead through critical thinking.
Great leaders facilitate problem solving on the part of the people they lead by using a TQM (Total Quality Management) approach.
Great leaders ask “why”, “what” and “how” questions.
- Why?
- o Why is this problem occurring?
- o Is it a special cause or is there a common cause?
- What?
- o What are possible solutions to this problem?
- o What is the best solution to this problem?
- How?
- o How should we implement the best solution?
Great leaders create insight, and help the people they lead articulate what they know at an implicit level, by using leading questions. Effective leading questions focus on critical success factors. When leaders use effective leading questions, they point the people they lead in the right direction, and assist them in articulating what they already know.
Here are some examples of effective leading questions:
- Who else needs to know about this?
- How will this affect you other projects?
- What are the regulatory implications in this situation?
- How does this fit with our strategic direction?
Great leaders help the people they lead think for themselves. They help the people they lead develop wisdom through critical thinking. Here are some of the types of questions leaders use to help the people they lead develop their critical thinking abilities.
- Comparison Questions (How is situation A similar to, or different from situation B?)
- Synthesis Questions (What are the key implications of this decision?)
- Evaluation Questions (If you could start over on this project, what would you do differently?)
- Evaluating Arguments
- o What conclusions does this person want you to make?
- o What support has her or she provided for this conclusion?
- o Is the support relevant, reliable and adequate?
- o What assumptions underlie the message?
- Do you agree with these assumptions?
- o Has he or she adequately considered and presented alternative perspectives?
- o Do you accept his or her conclusion?
How Great Leaders Use Stories
Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and master storyteller has been quoted as saying, “All stories are local. All good stories are universal”. Great leaders know that all stories are specific to the people and events being described; but good stories make a point that cuts across time and space.
Great leaders have learned a great deal from their experience. Good stories accelerate the development of the people they lead by helping them learn the lessons of experience without having to actually have the same experiences as the leader who is telling the story.
Here are two ways to that great leaders develop effective stories that will help them accelerate the development of the people you lead.
Leadership Story Development Method 1
- Describe a situation.
- Describe what you did.
- Elaborate on why you did what you did.
- Describe what happened.
- Determine what you learned.
- Choose a generalizable point or points can you make as a result of what you learned.
- Create stories from these generalizable points that you can use to help others learn and grow.
Leadership Story Development Method 2
- Determine 1, 2, or 3 things you “know to be true”.
- Identify the life and work experiences that have led you to this knowledge.
- Create stories from these experiences that you can use to help others learn and grow.
Stories are a powerful tool as they help people understand the human side of, and logic behind leadership actions and decisions. Great leaders know that in order to use stories as an effective developmental tool for the people they lead, they must be able to explicitly identify and state their implicit knowledge.
That’s it for today. Please log on to my other blog www.CareerSuperStar.com for common sense advice on becoming a leader and the star you are meant to be.
I’ll see you around the web, and at Alex’s Lemonade Stand.
Bud
PS: Speaking of Alex’s Lemonade Stand – my fundraising page is still open. Please go to www.FirstGiving.com/TheCommonSenseGuy to read Alex’s inspiring story and to donate if you can.
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