Blog | Personal development

Attention Leaders: Three Questions to Transform Your Team

Attention team leaders, facilitators and trainers. I'm going to give you three quick killer questions that will prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the brilliance is sitting in front of you, not in your own head.

You can find geniuses on your team by simply asking a few key questions and saying very little.

That's right. If you want to be a great teacher, a great leader or a great facilitator of anything -- your family, your team, your business, a class, whatever –the key is to understand that you have got to take the burden off of you. Brilliance and genius sit in the room with you.

I'm in the middle of teaching a master facilitator program that I share with only a few people every year as I teach them how to be world-class teachers, leaders and facilitators. But I'm going to give you a piece of that course right now by sharing three questions are game changers.

Let’s say you have a set of sales goals and the numbers come in.

Let's say you're in a teaching environment. You give people an exercise to execute and the results are in.

Let's say that you have a big win or a vital learning experience.

What do you do? Do you analyze the numbers and tell them what's wrong and how to correct? That's what most normal people do, but why does that not seem to work so well? Why do you seem to get resistance? Because the message is coming from you and your good ideas. The people who were executing the sales or the course think their ideas are better since they are the ones doing the work.

This technique has helped me over the last 25 or 30 years while working with countless organizations -- helping them build championship teams and massively increasing sales.

So here it is, the results come in.

The first question is not rocket science. It's not going to rock your world.

1. What happened?

   In other words, what were the results? You listen and you acknowledge.

   Then the second question comes. This is even more difficult

2. Why did that happen?

   Tell me about that.

   Through all of this, you have said nothing.

   Of course, then the third question arrives.

3. Based on that, what did we learn?

   Where does the responsibility go? When you ask that question, the responsibility goes back over there. Not over here. It's not on you to answer all the questions.

It's not about you and your ego. It's about you being able to drive the day with your facilitation skills, your love of the team and the project and the desire to get better.

That final question is going to draw out answers from the group. Some of them may be right. Some of them may be wrong, but together you'll figure it out.

So, what happened? Why and what did we learn? And at that point, let them think it over.

Then, you might want to add some other questions, like: How do we get better? How do we leverage this? What worked? What didn't work? These are all questions.

The quality of the questions will determine the quality of the responses. You’re not a schoolteacher, asking leading questions. True questions pull the best out of people that are in the field actually doing the work.

When you're in a classroom or when you're teaching any kind of topic, once results come in, you’ll want to debrief. That's what this is called, not a post-mortem which means “after death.”

If you ever watch a basketball game, how long does it take to play the last two or three minutes of an NBA game? When the game is close, that two minutes on the clock becomes five or 10 minutes in real time. Why? Because they're constantly calling a timeout to debrief.

What's working? What's not working? The coach is going to jump in and say, “Do this, this and this,” because the team is in a time crunch.

In your case, the debrief is critical. The timing is critical.

When you get a win, when you have a setback, when people are confused, call a

debrief and ask the questions.

Try it and let me know how it works for you.

I'm sure it's going to bring up a lot of Little Voice Mastery issues for you, if you're a leader. Just trust me on this. Your willingness to be patient and your willingness to draw out the genius around you will show you that you can take the weight off of you.

Put the responsibility out there and reveal the fact that there is true genius on your team. You need to let it grow.

Be an awesome leader.