One of the reasons our good intentions can go to the wayside after even the very best leadership training is lack of practice.

Sometimes, if a particular skill is new to us or underused our brains need to develop new pathways to make it familiar and therefore easy to call on particularly under stress.

 

Open questions are a good example.

 

Intellectually we understand what they are and their importance. In the adrenaline of a tricky conversation, those great questions suddenly become harder to find.

We ask multiple questions, closed questions, leading questions and then afterwards kick ourselves that we should have remembered “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “why”, “how”, and of course if we were really on form, the hypothetical “what if?”

To make open questions easier to find it helps to practice them outside the crucible of a difficult conversation first. Then, we can get used to the phrasing of the questions.

In this way we can move our skill in this area from unconscious incompetence (we don’t know what we don’t know)

To conscious incompetence (we become aware of what we don’t know)

To conscious competence (we are aware we are doing it right)

Until, eventually, we are able to operate in the desired zone of unconscious competence. (We do it without thinking about it – it has become second nature to us).

 

Practice

 

Grab a friend and tell them you want to practice open questions.

Your friends role is to respond to your questions, and to monitor how you’re asking them.

Ask them about what’s coming up for them at work. Then, as the conversation continues you can respond in only three ways:

1. To repeat something they’ve said (verbatim)

2. Ask a single question beginning with

What….

3. Ask a single question beginning with

How…..

For every response you give that isn’t a repeat, what. or how, you have to put a £1 in ajar that is given to your friend.

Your friend is the judge!

At first you’ll probably find finding the questions a bit clunky.

We’re not used to structures being put on a conversation like this, and not used to focussing so much on our questions structuring.

After a while, as your brain gets used to the formulation those questions will get easier and you’ll find less money going in the jar.

 

Don’t forget…

 

Oh and don’t forget to swap round, and get a chance to win your money back.,,,

 

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