Better Leaders Ask Better Questions - Lindsay Ph.D Tighe

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for making me understand that Better Questions are definitely the right answers, and I’m going to try hard to enhance these skills in everyday use.

      •I have a tendency to jump in and recommend without listening to a staff member’s opinion. The Better Questions approach is the only way that staff can learn and develop in their practice.

      •Thank you for sharing this amazing tool and for inspiring me to look at all people in a way they deserve to be treated.

      •If I hadn’t listened and used Better Questions well, I would have just accepted it when one of our staff members resigned and we as an organisation would have lost a dynamic, highly skilled person, not to mention all the wasted time, effort and expense of orientating someone to the organisation.

      •You have changed my life and I thank you.

      •I was totally blown away by your insights.

      •Just wanting to let you know that I have been inspired by many people in my life, but you are up there with the best. I have a long way to go to get the questions right but am now aware of what I am doing wrong so will continue to work on getting it right. Thank you so very much and keep up the fantastic work. Everyone needs to hear you speak.

      •Thank you for the opportunity to become more aware of myself, and of things I can do to enjoy my work and life more!

      •I have heard such a positive buzz around the office in response to your Better Questions training, which is just wonderful!

      Prologue

      Once upon a time there was a humble and boring question mark. He had been described as ‘boring’ because his role in life was to simply sit at the end of a sentence. Indeed, the role of the question mark was simply to make a sentence into a question. BIG DEAL!

      What this little question mark found sad was that in the past great scholars had recognised the amazing qualities of his ancestor question marks and people like Socrates and Plato had hailed them as heroes. But here he is today, living his life in the 21st century, unrecognised and unappreciated, and he feels sad that so few people appreciate his potential.

      One day, a lady came along who saw his potential, and she used his abilities for many years with her clients with life-changing results. He became great friends with this lady, and she started to get so excited about his potential to make the world a better place that she asked his permission to write a book and a website about him.

      This lady was aware that if more people knew about him, they would be able to tap into the potential of other people by empowering these people to make decisions that are right for them. She also knew that they could use him to enable them to be more reflective in making better decisions about their own lives and, ultimately, the choices they were making about the way they were living.

      Whilst he was still a little shy and very humble, he liked the idea of being able to share his potential with the world through this lady and, sure enough, his fame started to spread far and wide.

      In this book you are going to be introduced to and be inspired by the humble question mark – he really does change lives and can make leaders into even better leaders.

      Introduction

      From a very young age most of us have been told what to do. During my formative years I was surrounded by people who were excellent at providing much-needed advice and guidance, particularly my parents and schoolteachers, and so I learnt early in life to be a more natural ‘teller’. This ‘telling’ style continued to develop as I became an adult, in part because it was ‘role modelled’ to me in the various workplace settings of which I was part. By way of clarification, what I mean by the word ‘teller’ is someone who does some or all of the following: directs, advises, suggests, educates, problem solves, informs.

      As ‘telling’ was the most common way of being ‘role-modelled’ to me, I became practiced at taking this on as a natural response when I was presented with a problem or was asked for advice. Indeed, I unconsciously related this way to people for many years and had never contemplated that there could be another way to respond to people. I believed that I was being helpful when I was in this ‘telling’ role.

      I must stress that I am not saying that it is wrong to tell someone what to do. I can already hear many of you out there justifying that ‘telling’ is a good and really helpful thing to do, and so I must take some time to clarify my intention in writing this book.

      One thing I am absolutely sure of is that I would not be the person I am today if I had not had the benefit of interacting with people who typically ‘tell’. Indeed, certainly in my formative years, that was primarily the way I made sense of the world, how I worked out what was right and what was wrong, and how I became an educated and knowledgeable person who has built a successful life for herself.

      So ‘telling’ definitely has a place in the world and it is OK to continue to ‘tell’ in many areas of our lives, including our leadership roles. However, what I know from experience is that most people spend too much time ‘telling’ and not enough time ‘asking’, and this is the reason I am raising your awareness in this book of ‘TELLING’ vs. ‘ASKING’.

      Most of us conduct our lives in a space that we might refer to as ‘unconsciously competent’. What I mean by that is that we don’t think about what we do, we just do it. The main reason we don’t think about what we do is that we are too busy, and if we did think it would take much longer to get things done. So in most instances operating in this space is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if we are getting the results that we want in this aspect of our performance.

      Where it can be dangerous, however, is when we think we are doing well with our performance, but there is some knowledge that, if we became aware of it, would allow us to perform at a significantly higher level. If we are too busy to even recognise that there is an opportunity to be better than we already are, the result will be that we will keep doing what we have always done and miss out on an opportunity to be better.

      If we step back from being ‘unconsciously competent’ at ‘telling’, and learn and practice the skill of ‘asking’ (which incidentally often means we feel less competent for a short while), we eventually return to being competent at both ‘asking’ and ‘telling’ and become much more rounded in our ability to communicate and to tap into the potential of others.

      The skill of asking Better Questions is definitely something that can be life changing when we become aware of it, learn it and put it into practice. I constantly get feedback from people who tell me that they had no idea how much of a ‘teller’ they were, and that now that they have become aware of the option of being an ‘asker’ it has dramatically changed their experiences of leadership as well as radically improving their life in general. I have a term that I use for people who use Better Questions and that is a ‘Potentialiser’. The definition of this word that I use is a ‘releaser of amazingness in others’, and you will come to learn that Better Leaders are ‘Potentialisers’.

      The reality is that it isn’t hard to put the ‘asking’ process into practice, and I commend you for being prepared to step out of your comfort zone for a while by taking on board the messages outlined in this book. The old adage ‘no pain, no gain’ is definitely true when we are trying to learn a new skill, so be prepared for some internal resistance to these new ideas. After all, it is far easier to do what comes naturally than have to think about doing something differently!

      I hope that you can see that there is no need to build a case for ‘telling’ or to provide you with any more skills in this area – you probably already do it extremely well! Remember, typically we already are good at ‘telling’ and have had it ‘role modelled’ into us for most of our lives. My aim in this book is to ask you to step out of your comfort zone of doing what you have always done, think about the ideas I present and have a go at putting them into practice. I guarantee you will be a better leader as a result!

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