When a team struggles with a problem, there’s a temptation for a boss to provide answers. A better approach is to ask questions that help the team arrive at answers itself. The author offers three questions: 1) What do you recommend? 2) How can we test that? 3) What do you need from me?
When people working with me face a perplexing problem, they often ask for guidance. I can’t help but feel a little flattered. They are obviously stumped, and they expect I will have the answer. My first instinct is to sit back, stroke my chin, recount an impressive story or two, and then tell them what to do.
Though incredibly satisfying, this approach rarely works.
First, I might not even be solving the right problem. I don’t have the insight of those on the front line, so I end up relying on my own history, what I think are similar events. Second, though the team was relieved by my answer, they are probably not fully committed to making it work. It isn’t their idea, after all, and if it doesn’t pan out it’s easy to blame the boss by saying, “We knew it wasn’t going to work all along.”
When it does fail, finger pointing begins. My advice was good, I continue to convince myself, so the problem must have been their execution. The next time I will be even more specific to ensure they don’t mess up again. Soon we are in a doom loop of increasing micromanagement. I want them to succeed, but I suspect they are not capable of doing that by themselves. Like a helicopter parent, I step in to play roles they should play for themselves, undermining the team’s self-confidence and removing their opportunity to develop skills they will need as future leaders.
This approach has a long history. Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the first management consultants and someone whose ideas were widely influential, taught executives to tightly supervise employees, warning that, in his estimation, workers deliberately try to do no more than one-third to one-half of a proper day’s work, while pretending to appear as busy as possible. Managers must do the thinking and tell others what to do, he asserted, because workers aren’t smart enough to manage themselves. In his 1911 monograph “The Principles of Scientific Management,” Taylor wrote that a worker performing routine tasks “shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.”
Today, such ideas seem entirely wrong-headed. Nearly 33% of the U.S. population 25 years and older has at least a bachelor’s degree. Younger generations are increasingly data savvy and tech literate. And 30% of the U.S. workforce is part of the creative class, the fastest growing group in developed economies, and one that research has found to be less inspired by money and more by intrinsic motivators such as the ability to make choices.
It’s no surprise that Taylor’s approach has been giving way in recent years to a different understanding of leadership. In his first interview after becoming CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella told The New York Times: “Perhaps the No. 1 thing that leaders have to do [is] to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading.” Three years later, in his book Hit Refresh, he asserted this even more forcefully: “I have come to understand that my primary job is to curate our culture so that one hundred thousand inspired minds — Microsoft’s employees — can better shape our future.”
As I’ve studied and learned more about agile ways of working, I’ve concluded that instead of giving answers to teammates with a challenge, everyone is better served if I ask three questions.
1. What do you recommend?
Asking this may rock your associates back on their heels for a moment, but once the surprise has worn off, they learn to come to any discussion prepared with a hypothesis. If they don’t have a recommendation ready, we may brainstorm for a while, but eventually I will adjourn and ask them to come back when they have one. I won’t let them go before I say: “I trust you. You are closer to this than I am, and you will know how to adapt as the situation evolves.”
I’d guess that 75% of the most practical and effective ideas for innovation come from the frontline workers closest to customers and operations. This group understands customer frustrations, operating realities, technology opportunities, and other issues much better than people in ivory towers do.
2. How can we test that?
A fascinating recommendation has been made. We’ve got something that could be exciting — now, how do we take it for a test drive? A test-first approach allows a leader to let the team’s idea play out at relatively low cost and risk. Even if I am skeptical of an approach, rather than launch a fight or engage in theoretical arguments, I push the team to create a prototype and see if it will work. Sometimes I am surprised.
Behavioral scientists such as Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely have taught me to use creative, real-world experiments to discover what customers really do rather than relying on rational calculations of what they should do. Business systems aren’t complicated like a watch you can take apart, fix, and put back together. They’re complex. Ideas that sound right don’t always play out as expected in the real world. Testing offers helpful surprises, and, with deliberate practice, we get better at it.
3. What do you need from me?
Think about what obstacles you will face, I advise each team, and then tell me what I can do to help you address them. Do you need resources? Money? A testing environment? Access to teammates with certain skills? This puts the right part of the burden on me and makes sure I am working to facilitate and accelerate their work rather than inspecting and impeding it.
When people who have good ideas aren’t allowed to contribute, they grow disengaged. Surveys show that globally only 15% of employees feel engaged in their work. Professor Amar Bhidé of The Fletcher School at Tufts University has found that more than 70% of successful startups are launched by people who had their idea while at a previous employer. Instead of finding a way to harness those good ideas, the companies end up paying millions to buy the startup later. Research done by my firm, Bain & Company, has found that companies that unleash the time, talent, and energy of people develop employees who are more engaged and 40% more productive.
But how managers treat their employees matters in ways that stretch beyond productivity and profits. Troubling statistics suggest that today many people regard purposeful work as an oxymoron. The majority (56%) of adults worldwide believe that capitalism is doing more harm than good. More than 60% of American employees describe themselves as burned out, and they are beginning to vote with their feet. In a movement some economists are calling the Great Resignation, more than half of U.S. workers are considering a job change. For them, the Covid-19 pandemic has been a wakeup call to act on their suspicion that life is too short to waste on bad jobs.
By creating a workplace in which employees are encouraged to innovate and exercise their creative passions, leaders can both improve their company’s near-term results and contribute to a necessary re-thinking of the contract between employer and employee. They can help make bad jobs good, and it starts with three simple questions.