How To Get Your Team Thinking For Themselves

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction. So let's dive straight in to this week's episode.

If you are a leader or manager who finds yourself thinking things like why do my team always come to me for the answers? Or I just wish my team could be a little more proactive and think about some possible solutions before coming to me for advice. Then today's episode of the Leader's Kit Bag is for you. In today's episode I'm going to share with you a few very simple tips that when consistently applied, will very quickly bring dramatic results. So part of the solution to this challenge of wanting our team to be more proactive and solutions orientated lies in shifting our approach and moving away from simply being their manager. Trying to become much more of a leader coach. So what typically happens in the world of work when someone in our team comes to us with a challenge and wanting some support is that we default to just telling them what to do and how to do it. And this happens for a number of very good reasons. Perhaps it's because we, we're in a rush and we just want to solve their challenge in the nicest possible way. Get them away from our desk or off the phone as quickly as possible so we can get back to what we're doing. Or it happens because it's highly likely that we have done the job that the person coming to us asking for help is doing. It's highly likely that we have experienced this challenge before and therefore we know how we solve the problem or overcome the challenge in the past. But the challenge is if for those various reasons we just tell people what to do when they ask. We are training them, we're conditioning them to always come to us for the answers. It's a bit like Pavlov after he trained his dogs to come to the bowl whenever he rang the bell. It's a bit like Pavlov suddenly one day turning around and going, hey, why do the dogs come to the bowl every time I ring the bell? Well, it's the same, right? We have trained and conditioned our people to just come to us for the answers. And if we've not done that, perhaps the previous manager or leader of this individual in our team, they trained them to just come to the leader for the answers. So the solution then lies in just investing a little bit more time to ask some coaching type questions. What this looks like in practice is the first few times someone comes to us for help, we might pause and say, hey, grab a chair for five minutes, or let's just dive into the meeting room and have a quick chat. You might simply ask, okay, what options do you think you've got? What are the pros and cons of those options? If there was a third option, what would it be? And if you continue just asking some simple questions like that, which is coaching, what I'm describing here is coaching. If you take that approach, just investing five, maybe 10 minutes, gradually over time, the conversations will start to shift. You'll go from hey Ben, I've got this problem, what should I do? To asking them some coaching questions. A few more weeks will pass and those conversations will change to hey Ben, I've got this problem, I'm thinking about doing this and then this. Just want to check that's okay. And in your experience, do you think I've missed anything? You might ask a few more questions in that situation and help guide them to an even better solution. A few weeks will pass and then the conversation might change to hey Ben, I had this challenge, this is what I'm going to do. Just letting you know, are you okay? Then a few more weeks pass and suddenly you're in an entirely different world where at the end of the week, maybe in your one to one, your weekly catch up, people say, oh, by the way Ben, just so you know, this happened earlier in the week. This, this is what I did, it's all taken care of and suddenly your team are being proactive. Suddenly they're not coming to you with problems asking for the solutions. They're simply telling you about what they have done to fix problems that are already in the past. And at that stage we have got a massively proactive autonomous team who are thinking for themselves and, and we have got shed loads of time back in our diary and that is success as a leader. That is it for this week's episode. Hope it's been useful. As always, look after yourself, look after those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead and until next time, folks, lead on.