Leading by Adventure - 029 - Scouting the Terrain

Develop your facilitative leadership skills – Provide empowering leadership through your choice of questions

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Why take this challenge?

Develop more facilitative approaches to leadership through questions

Build greater participation, contributions and ownership from your team

Use normal working opportunities to better grow your people’s potential

Graphic image reflecting different pathways to take the adventure

Good questions are the most powerful tools available to us. They stimulate engagement, confront error, energise debate, foster humility, unearth reason, generate insight, build ownership, deliver progress and help us find the right answers. Questions are key to adopting a more facilitative (and less directive) style of leadership. They help us to ensure progress, and to develop our people at the same time. And they enable us to ‘Scout the Terrain’ – to really understand what is going on before seeking to influence an outcome.

But how do we find good questions?

I have been a consultant and a facilitator for over 30 years now, and I confess they still don’t come as easily as I want them to.

I believe that part of the issue is attitudinal – in my heart (read ego) I still like to be the one with the answer. But I also like to help people grow. And I know that an answer provided by me is nowhere near as powerful as an answer discovered by ‘them’.

Something that has been immensely helpful to me is Monitoring my Internal Condition. If I can keep my head in curiosity, questions come much more easily. And if I can focus on my role as a facilitator over my role as a consultant, I can rid myself of the expectation that I should already have the answers.

Also, if I can think through the journey (at a meta-level) that people are likely to be taking beforehand, I have more time to develop the questions and incorporate them in the process I am using.

And there are also sources of good questions available if we have the time to peruse them in advance. Liberating Structures is one such source, and contains a range of question / format combinations that can be used effectively to engage people’s thinking.

So this week’s adventure is to practice deliberately using questions where you might otherwise provide answers.

+ Green track - taking it in your stride

Practicing Questions

The green track this week is to try to get through just one meeting using only questions. Keep a small piece of paper beside you, and on the left side right the following words in a column: Who, what, when, where, why, how. And on the right, keep a tally of every time you start to speak without using one of these six words.

Then, at the end of the meeting, reflect on how you fared and the impact it had on you, on your team, and on the meeting. That’s it.

If you want to repeat it, then please consider the blue track.

+ Blue track - a bit of a workout (click to open)

Developing a Questioning Approach

The challenge of the blue track is to try and develop your skill of asking questions across a number of meetings. Each time using the six words and the tally chart. Keep a record of your progress over a number of meetings. (You may want to plot the tally score divided by the meeting length in hours. And you may want to record different plots depending on whether you are running the meeting.)

Hopefully,you will see the graphs you plot improve in a downward trend (albeit somewhat erratic – meetings are like that). But if the plot plateaus, take some time to think through the possible factors behind that and whether you can do something about them.

+ Red track - stepping up to bat (click to open)

You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop

To catch up on past adventures you may have missed, feel free to browse our Adventures Library

Let us know how you get on.
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Useful links:

Introduction to Leading by Adventure  |  What we mean by spirituality?  |  Why Adventure
Adventures to date   |  I did it, but it didn’t work very well   |  How do I know if it is working
Bringing this thinking into your meetings   |  Adventure & Mental Health
Leading by Adventure community   |  Explore Strategic Support options