Questioning - The Unused Management Tool

Why leaders are hesitate to ask questions:

1. Leaders are perceived to be decisive, bold, charismatic and visionary to know all the answers even before others have thought of the questions.
2. From an early age, people are discouraged from asking questions, especially challenging ones, as they are considered rude, inconsiderate, or intrusive.
3. Afraid of asking dumb questions, but what they don’t realize is that the dumbest questions can be very powerful. They can unlock a conversation.
4. As we ask fewer questions, we become ever less comfortable and competent in asking questions.
5. When we become leaders, we feel that it is important for us to have the answers rather than questions.

Seek to understand first before lead:

1. When the people around us clamor for fast answers, we need to be able to resist the impulse to provide solutions and learn instead to ask questions.

Learning Organization:

1. A growing number of organizations recognize that their success depends upon creating a learning organization, an organization that is quickly adapt to the changing environment, where every engagement becomes a learning opportunity.
2. Learning, questioning and business objectives are necessarily interlinked.
3. Leaders need to create a questioning climate where employees feel safe and able to trust the system and the people involved. Without this level of safety and comfort, people are generally unwilling to be vulnerable, and to be comfortable answering questions that might seem threatening.

Leading from Good to Great:

1. Collins is his book “Good to Great” tells us, leading from good to great means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.

Reference:

1. Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions By Knowing What To Ask
2. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

Book I Read - Leading With Questions

Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions By Knowing What To Ask

1. Do you know you can lead much more efficient with questioning?

2. Do you know questioning is a management tools?

3. Do you know what the benefits of a questioning culture are?

4. Do you know how to create a questioning culture?

5. Do you know how to ask questions effectively?

6. Do you know what the right question to ask?

7. Do you want to learn the art of questioning?

8. Do you want to learn how to use questioning to manage people and relationship?

9. Do you want to learn how to use questioning to build a good working team?

10. Do you want to learn how to use questioning to shape your strategies?

11. Do you want to learn how to be a questioning leader?

If the answer is YES, then this is the right book for you!

ABOUT ME

Hi, I'm a Malaysian who like to read and take notes.
So here's the books I read and notes I take!
Enjoy :)

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Matching Beyond The Identity

At a social level, this comes from a shared culture. At a spiritual level it comes from realizing that you are part of humanity. This is where you are most yourself and most connected to others.

Matching The Identity

To gain rapport at the identity level, you need to understand and respect another person's core beliefs and values, and pay attention to them as an individual, not as a member of a group. You need to be genuinely interested in who they are in themselves, and be willing to share some of your own beliefs and values.

Matching The Beliefs and Values

You build powerful rapport by respecting and understanding the beliefs and values of another person. You do not need to agree with them, only respect what is important to them.

Matching The Capabilities

This level of rapport comes from shared skills and interests. Sporting competitors, teammates and fellow professionals can all have rapport at this level.

Matching The Behavior

Matching at the behaviour level means matching another person's movements while maintaining your own identity and integrity.

There are three important elements to matching on the behavioral level: Body language, voice tone and language.

1) Body Language. You can gain rapport by matching:

• Breathing pattern


• Posture


• Gestures


• Eye contact

2) Voice tone. You can match:

• Speed of speech


• Volume of speech


• Rhythm of speech


• Characteristic sounds (e.g. coughs, sighs and hesitations)

3) Language. You can match:

• Key words and phrases chat designate values (for example when you summarize to check for agreement)


• Words that show how a person is thinking. These are called predicates. They show chat a person may be visualizing, hearing mental sounds or voices, or paying attention to feelings.

Non-verbal matching is far more powerful than verbal agreement.

Adopt a posture that is similar but not exactly the same. Give the same amount of eye contact as the other person, though, because this is what they feel comfortable with. Lots of eye contact is not necessarily a good thing!

Matching The Environment

Rapport at this level is usually superficial and comes from working in the same building or for the same company. Here you match other people's expectations about dress code and personal appearance.

Matching

Matching is when you mirror and complement an aspect of another person. It is not copying, it is more like a dance.

Matching can be done at the following neurological level:

1. Environment
2. Behavior
3. Capabilities
4. Beliefs and Values
5. Identity
6. Beyond Identity

Mismatching is a useful skill, however. You can mismatch body language to end a conversation in a natural way.

Leadership

Leading is when you use the influence that you have built up from pacing. You cannot lead a person unless they are willing to be led and people are not willing to be led unless they have first been adequately paced.

Pacing

Pacing is when you enter the other person's model of the world on their terms.

Pacing is the equivalent of understanding the present state in order to build a more appropriate and empowering desired state.

For any successful change in yourself or others, pace then lead.

Once you have paced another person, established rapport and shown that you understand where they are coming from, then you have a chance to lead them.

You pace and build rapport through 'matching'.

How to Build Rapport

1) By taking a genuine interest in another person.
2) By being curious about who they are and how they think
3) By being willing to see the world from their point of view.

Other people trust us when they believe we are strong and will not let them down.

To build rapport and good relationships, you have to begin by pacing another person.

Relationships

We create our relationships by what we do and how we think. To be influential in any relationship we need rapport. Rapport is the quality of a relationship of mutual influence and respect between people.

Satisfying relationships are built by rapport not agreement.

Sensory Language

Your words on a page can spark linguistic fireworks that burst with multiple meanings in your reader's mind. But for ideas to live, they must be described in the language of the thing, the language of the senses. When you describe something in a way that the reader could see or hear or touch, then you are using sensory language.

When you use abstractions such as 'understand', 'think', 'education', 'interest', then you are not.

In fiction, the golden rule is: 'Show, don't tell'. Let the reader see, hear and feel your story. This principle applies to non-fiction whenever possible,

Metaphors are an excellent way to use sensory language.

Keep a balance between metaphor and straight description. Use metaphors like salt and pepper on food. They add flavour, but if you add too much, the food is spoilt,

Avoid jargon unless absolutely necessary.

The Meta Semantic Generator (MSG)

Here is a procedure for constructing fully functional digital language. It is known as the meta semantic generator (MSG for short). It is fully recursive, because it was used to name itself. It is also known as the meaningless jargon generator.

LIST A:
quality
organizational
modular
developmental
strategic
meta
positional
enhanced
adversarial
neuro

LIST B:
tactical
linguistic
systemic
community
functional
computational
environmental
authentic
semantic
marginal

LIST C:
culture
operation
model
objective
throughput
project
programming
displacement
generator
productivity


To use the meta semantic generator, select a word from LIST A and LIST B and put them in any order before one of the words in LIST C. Now you have an erudite-sounding concept that means whatever you want it to mean.

How to Calculate Fog Index

1) Take a typical section of approximately 100 words.

2) Count the number of words, not counting proper names and counting hyphenated words as one word.

3) Count the number of sentences and divide it into the number of words to get the average number of words per sentence. Call this number 'X'.

4) Count the number of words with three syllables or more. Call this number 'Y'. Do not count words that reach three syllables by changing a part of speech (for example plurals or verb tenses, so the word 'achieving" would not count, as its third syllable is due to its tense).

5) The fog index is the average number of words per sentence (X), plus the number of words of three syllables or more per 100 words (Y), multiplied by two fifths.

6) Fog Index = (X + Y) * 0.4

7) Clear writing has a fog index of between nine and twelve. In tabloids it can be as low as five. Aim to keep it below ten.

The Fog Index

The fog index is a well-established way of measuring the clarity of a piece of writing. It works on the principle that long sentences and long words make writing more difficult to understand.

Clear Writing Rules

1) Know your outcome. To make sure your writing gets the response you want, first you have to know what that is. What do you want to achieve in your writing? What do you want the reader to get out of it? When you have finished writing, second position the reader. Read what you have written and see if the message comes across. Remember the NLP presupposition 'the meaning of the communication is the response it gets'.

2) Take care of the basics. Check your spelling and punctuation. Mistakes are embarrassing and damage your credibility with the reader. Do not rely on the word processor to check these. It only has artificial intelligence. You have real intelligence.

3) Use nouns and verbs in preference to adjectives and adverbs. They are nearly always stronger. Adverbs (words that describe verbs) and adjectives (words that describe nouns) can be useful, but use them sparingly.

4) Beware of nominalizations. They are weak because they are not sensory specific. Reading a paragraph full of nominalizations is like wading through jelly. Use many nominalizations only if you want to put the reader into a trance.

5) Use sensory-specific details when possible. Illustrate abstract points with concrete metaphors. Make metaphors clear and relevant. Sometimes you can refer back to them when developing a point (organizing metaphors).

6) Match your nouns and verbs. This will reduce ambiguities. If in doubt about something, read it aloud to someone else. If still in doubt, change it. (I read an advertisement recently that said, 'Are your worries killing you? Let us help')

7) Track your verbs. The strongest verbs are those that involve doing something. The next strongest involve dialogue - saying, speaking. The next strongest involve thinking or feeling. Weaker still are the passive forms of verbs - being done to. Watch for all forms of passive verbs where the subject is deleted and only the action remains, for example 'The house was bought.' Weakest of all is the verb 'to be', unless it is part of another verb (as in 'to be interested', for example). Look through your writing and substitute a stronger verb where appropriate.

8) Look at the way you lay out the writing. Long paragraphs in small type are hard to read. Avoid long sentences, with lots of clauses and sub-clauses, word upon word for the sake of it, as if the full-stop key is not working, sometimes with ideas nested in others, like Russian dolls at a Moscow fair, as they are hard to understand, aren't they? The clearest way to lay out informational writing is inductively. Start with the main points and then proceed to the smaller chunks. Imagine a pyramid with a few main ideas at the top and then more and more subsidiary ideas. Start at the top, not at the bottom.