Welcome to your first Manager Mindset challenge.
As we spoke about, being a great manager means helping your teams improve their thinking. Neuroscience shows that this is the fastest way to change performance. When we can drop to the level of changing thinking, it changes neural wiring. And when thinking changes, it changes our behaviors and habits.
Best yet, if you can coach your teams to improve their thinking, you’ll be less burnt out (since your team will do more of the problem solving).
This Week’s Challenge
For team members who are appropriate to coach, practice asking open-ended questions (starting with “how” or “what”, not “why”) at least 5x in a row.
Remember, coaching questions are:
- Open-ended (i.e., can’t be answered with a yes/no)
- Solution focused (vs problems)
A few examples:
- How are you thinking about this?
- What’s the most important issue here?
- Where do you want to go with this insight?
- How can I best help you here?
- What could have been different?
- How can we learn from this situation?
You might be tempted to stop after asking after 2-3 questions, but deeper insights usually take at least 5 questions.
I’ll check in next week to see how it goes with these practices, and what you’re learning.
Cheers,
Melissa