Questioning Tips: Let Go of Your Answer

If you are a teacher before you show up for class you will have prepared yourself to insure you know the material. As a leader of an organization, department,or group you likely are thinking about the subject deeply before beginning to ask about it. You may have even rushed to a solution or conclusion before a question leaves your mouth. If you start down this path you will spoil an opportunity for others to engage and find their own vision of possibilities or conclusions. Your voice will detour their journey.

Let go of your answer when asking!

Top 11 Questions to Ask to find Resolution to Conflict

(Previous Blog Post w/ Stewart Levine)
Part II Interview with Stewart Levine, author of Getting to Resolution

Gary Cohen: What are the Top 10 Questions you ask--or suggest to your clients to ask--when needing to find resolution to conflict?

Stewart Levine:

1. What is it, and briefly what's your "story" about it? (how do you talk to yourself about the conflict?)
2. On a scale of 1-5 (1 being slightly agitated, 5 being gripped by emotion) how do you feel about the other people involved and engaging in the dialogue? Are you ready to engage in effective collaborative negotiation? What will enable you to do that?
3. Can you treat the resolution process as an opportunity to listen and learn?
4. Can you participate with open mind and open heart?
5. Can you accept that with trust, good faith, and creativity everyone can win and get what they need?
6. What aspects of the resolution process are you unsure of?
7. Do you need a third party facilitator? Why?
8. Are you willing to have compassion and stand in the shoes of others involved?
9. Are you fully aware of what the conflict is costing you?
10. Are you ready to let go, forgive and make an agreement for the future?
11. What other support will empower you to engage authentically?

Related Blog Post:
Leadership Resolution - Interview with Stewart Levine

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Leadership Resolution - Interview with Stewart Levine author of "Getting to Resolution"

I would like to welcome Stewart Levine to our Just Ask Leadership Blog.
Stewart Levine is founder of Resolution Works and author of "Getting To Resolution" Stewart is a creative problem solver. He is widely recognized for creating agreement and empowerment in the most challenging circumstances. He improves productivity while saving the enormous cost of conflict. His innovative work with "Agreements for Results' and his "Resolutionary" conversational models are unique.

Gary Cohen: How did you decide to make conflict resolution your area of expertise?

Stewart Levine: It was what I naturally did in situations. Here’s the opening story from my book:

During my second year of law school I had my first “real” lawyer’s job. I was an intern at a local legal services clinic. On my first day I was handed 25 cases “to work on.” This would be my job for the semester. Three weeks later I asked the managing attorney for more cases. When he asked about the 25 he had given me, I told him that I had resolved them. He was very surprised—and very curious. He asked how I had done it. I told him that I had reviewed the files, spoken to the clients, thought about a fair outcome and what needed to be done, called the attorney or agency on the other side, and reached a satisfactory resolution. I knew nothing about being a lawyer. I had no inclination that the cases were difficult, needed to take a long time, or had to be handled in any particular way. With common sense and a “beginner’s mind,” I found the solution that worked best for all concerned. Simple? It was for me! I spent the next 12 years becoming a “successful” lawyer—and becoming less effective at resolving matters. Then, feeling frustrated, anxious, and fearful, I stopped practicing law. I have been in “recovery” ever since, recovering what I knew about resolution when I started, discovering its component parts and learning how to teach and model it for others. As a young attorney, although I listened politely to more senior lawyers, I was surprised at the coaching I received. Standard practice discouraged communication among the parties in conflict, communication that I had used in my legal services cases, communication essential for efficient resolution. Many lawyers were playing a very different game from the one my natural instincts chose. Since you have spent much of your career helping others resolve or embracing conflict, how has it informed the way you behave in your personal relationships (You know the shoe makers dilemma)? I live my life very congruent with my work…I do walk the talk…and I sleep very well at night!

Gary Cohen: There are many books on the subject of dealing with conflict resolution what was it that you thought was not being offered in those that you have address with your most recent book, Getting to Resolution?

Stewart Levine: I provide a step by step road map…a conversational process people can follow by the numbers.

Gary Cohen: Some businesses today are deciding to merge companies together to survive this economic downturn. In merging companies together there are usually conflicts between cultures. Sometimes as dramatic as when one side of the business is unionized while the other side is not unionized. What would you recommend to resolve such possible cultural and economic conflicts?

Stewart Levine: Dialogue, conversation, giving people on the front line the tools, capacity and responsibility for creating their own solutions.

Business Partners rarely value each other until it is too late. What advise do you have for partnerships to increase their performance and enhance their appreciation of differing perspectives?

Make sure they have clear agreements on the front end, and I do not mean legal agreements.

The best way to prevent conflict is to have a covenantal relationship – meeting of mind and heart.

My agreement model provides the conversational template to do that.

Gary Cohen: What resolution have you been involved in that had the biggest impact for you or your client? And what did you do to accomplish this outcome?

Stewart Levine: Resolution Gives Life Gail Johnson is the executive director of Sierra Adoption, a nonprofit transforming lives of foster children through finding permanent adoptive families. Thousands of children are trapped in the California foster care system, out of reach of adoptive families. More than half of foster youth who come of age without a permanent family are homeless, in prison, or dead within two years. Gail’s success recruiting and preparing families to adopt children with disabilities often ended in the frustration of being told such children were “unadoptable.” Because of Gail’s work, California no longer considers any child unadoptable! In 1999, Sierra was engaged in a federally funded partnership with the Sacramento County agency that was referring children to Sierra. The working relationship had fallen apart. Gail wanted to resolve long- and short-term conflict, get beyond mistrust, and forge a high-performance team. Few believed the partnership could be salvaged, let alone become a high-performance team. Sixteen people were gathered and over twelve hours in two days using the Cycle of Resolution, the conflicts were resolved and a working agreement was structured. That agreement was the foundation for a healthy, productive partnership with a new vision of collaboration. In the first year following the intervention, 109 “unadoptable” children were placed in permanent families.



Gary Cohen: Stuart, you work with a great number of leaders in your work under high stress circumstances. How do you find leaders use questions to demonstrate their leadership? And what kind of questions do they ask?

Stewart Levine: Good leaders take responsibility FIRST…they always ask what they did or did not do to create the particular challenge they face What implications are there for leaders who over use telling verses asking? …they are not leaders… They may get compliance, never inspiration People do not learn to think People resent not having control They do not develop successors, leaders

Gary Cohen: Is there any other insight you would like to share with us?

Stewart Levine: Critical to engage and:
Realize it is a learning process – teaching and learning about each others perspective… Show up…be present to deal with the situation Listen to them Tell YOUR truth (know there are other truths) Allow yourself to be influenced by what you hear

Gary Cohen: What are your Top 10 Questions that you ask or suggest to your clients to ask when needing to find resolution to conflict? (Tomorrow's Blog Post)



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5 Questions to Build Trust - Leadership Questions

Trust begins with me. Trust begins with each and every one of us. Trust building is everyone’s responsibility. Here are a few key questions in which to start:

1. How am I, as a leader or team member, practicing behaviors that foster, encourage and empower trust?
2. Where am I experiencing areas of fear, vulnerability or doubt? How am I responding to those situations--in trustworthy or trust-breaking ways?
3. Where is trust strong within our team or organization? Where is it weak?
4. What behaviors are we as a team or organization practicing that build trust?
5. What behaviors are we as a team or organization practicing that break trust?

From an interview with Dennis & Michelle Reina

Related blog posts:

1. Building Trust in Your Organization
2. Three Ways to Trust & More
3. 90% of Employees Feel Betrayal Frequently
4. Trust Begins With You! What is Your Trust Score?

Remember to look at CO2 Partners - Leadership Assessment

Leadership - Top 5 Questions Leaders Should Ask Their Team

In our interview with Bill Treasurer earlier this week he offered some insight into what questions leaders should ask their team or organizations:

1. Where are we playing it too safe, as a business, and why?
2. How am I, as the leader, contributing to our playing it too safe as a business?
3. What business situations and/or goals are worthy of the application of peoples’ courage?
4. What would it take for people to be more willing to take risks, make smart mistakes, and be more courageous?
5. What actions can I take, as a leader, to be a better role model of courageous behavior?

Top 10 Questions To Building Courage

In our interview earlier this week with Bill Treasurer he offered these top 10 questions he asks to help an organization build courage:

1. What do we want to become as a business?
2. How can courage be applied to help us get to where we want to be?
3. Where are we playing it too safe, as a business?
4. Where is courage most needed, but often avoided, in our business?
5. Why do people avoid being courageous even though it is needed here?
6. What courageous actions from the past are we most proud of?
7. Where in the past did we fail to act courageously?
8. What are our “pink elephants” – politically sensitive, don’t-go-there areas that need to be acknowledged and addressed?
9. What would it take for people to be more willing to take risks, make smart mistakes, and be more courageous?
10. Once everyone starts behaving more courageously, what do we hope will be different?

Motivation - What motivates you? Video by Dan Pink

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

Top 10 Questions You Should Ask in Strategic Planning

Scott Glatstein, President of Imperatives, shares with us the Top 10 questions you should ask in doing strategic planning and why!

1. What’s your marketplace promise?
a. Identifies whether a clear promise exists
b. Asking the same question across the organization tests alignment
2. Lots of companies make promises they don’t keep; why should the marketplace believe yours?
a. Identifies whether the company has thought beyond the t-shirt slogan
b. Determines whether there is understanding of how the promise is delivered
3. How do your products and services deliver on the promise?
a. Checks to see if the marketplace offerings are aligned to promise made
4. Has the end-to-end customer experience been mapped to ensure it aligns with the promise?
a. Identifies the key touch points and sensitizes the company to heretofore ignored drivers of preference and success
5. Do hiring and training practices create a company culture poised to fulfill the promise?
a. Tests to see how serious the company is in driving their promise through their people
6. Are internal processes managed holistically across silos with a critical eye toward their effect on the customer experience?
a. Tests awareness of breakdowns that can occur when processes cross silos
b. Tests awareness of the effects of every process on the customer’s image of the company
7. How do you gather feedback from your market-facing employees regarding potential improvements to your business processes?
a. Tests lines of communication and respect for front-line employees
b. Offers insight into management’s awareness of the market and the organization
8. Do you have any business processes you believe are strictly internal and have no bearing on the customer? If so, why are you doing them?
a. Offers an opportunity to point out that everything the company does should, in some way, serve the customer promise. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be done.
9. How do you ensure new IT systems support delivery of the marketplace promise?
a. Tests linkage between the development of tools and their effect on the customer experience. (“I’m sorry sir…the system just won’t let me do that.”)
10. Do your employees embrace the tools you’ve provided or do they view them as a hindrance to doing their jobs?
a. Identifies potential disconnects that could stymie strategy implementation:
i. Employee doesn’t understand role and thus sees no value in the tool
ii. Employee understands role but tool does not enable employee to fulfill the promise
iii. Employee has not been properly trained

You Can't Handle The Truth - If this is true are you really leading?

In A Few Good Men, Col. Jessep (played by Jack Nickleson) and Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise) square off. Lt. Kaffee shouts, "I want the truth!" Col. Jessep responds, "You Can't Handle The Truth!" and then proceeds to tell his truth...

Col. Jessep: "Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and curse the Marines; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives and that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use them as the backbone of a life trying to defend something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you," and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest that you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to."

Col. Jessep reveals a truth that is his alone and not necessarily shared by any of those he reports up to or who report to him. Just because he believes it does not make it true.

As a leader, it's important to realize that your truth is not always in line with your team members'. Get your truth and your team members' truths out on the table. The more you share your truth and encourage others to share theirs, the less likely you'll have diatribes like Col. Jessep's, which come from bottling up truth and feelings for too long.

Leaders & Social Media 20 Questions To Start The Learning

Article Title: 20 Questions To Start a Social Media Discussion by Amber Naslund

Let’s make something clear: you can be the person that starts asking the questions and initiating the conversations that move social media forward. You. Sitting right there. Yes, you.

I don’t care if you’re the marketing assistant, the PR coordinator, the customer service manager, the HR director, or the mailroom clerk. What it takes is the intent to be part of the progress, the bravery to start an open conversation, the maturity and patience to not make it personal, and the investment in the outcomes to take it a step further.

These are not just conversations for the communications department. Be courageous. Pick up the phone, or fire up the email, and ask for 15 minutes of time from the people that can help move social media forward in your organization (or at least reduce some of the friction around it). That means the marketing folks, the customer service folks, finance, HR, PR, product management, QA, sales. Yes, that includes the people you’ve never talked to before, and the ones that aren’t in your “box”.

Ask them one or two questions that can help you form a business case for social media. Your goal is to align social’s capabilities with the problems your organization needs or wants to solve for their own business. Note that the questions below aren’t all specific to social media; they’re attempting to uncover some of the underlying culture, brand, and operational issues that social media could help address. Remember, we’re talking culture change as well as operational change. You need to be the one to translate.

1. What do we do and why, in your words (not a vision statement)? On what could we, as a business, spend more time, energy, and focus?
2. Are you passionate about your role? If so, why? If not, what would help you be?
3. What goals do you have for your role this year? How do you hope to impact the success of your department? The company?
4. ..... Yes there are more 17 in fact Read Altitude - Great Blog

I found this through my buddy David Brake Author of The Social Media Bible. His book is hot and has the stickiness that books named the Bible should have. Read about him in Fast Company.

Questions - A story that you have to hear!

Jim Estille has a blog named CEO Blog Time Leadership. He recently did a review of my book Just Ask Leadership. From that we started to exchange emails to one another - I guess this is how social networking works. He recently sent me a story for my speaking engagements. I liked it so I am sharing it. I am thinking he has many of these types of stories in his blog. Take a look.

Family, Mother, Father, little boy walking in the Zoo.

Boy – “Daddy, what kind of animal is that?”

Dad (fidgeting with his Blackberry) – “I don’t know” (somewhat absent-mindedly)

Boy (a bit later) – “Dad, what is that animal doing there?”

Dad – “Oh, Jimmy, just enjoy yourself!”

Boy (a short while later) – “Daddy, Daddy, why is that animal rolling on the ground?”

Mom (preemptively) – “Jimmy, don’t bother Dad with all those questions!”

Dad – “But let him ask questions. That’s how he’s going t learn!”

Question

Who do you inspire?

Question

What resistance is causing us to stall or slow? How can we use this resistance to our advantage or turn it around on itself?

Howard Gardner Believes One Of His Best Skills Is Asking Questions

When I spoke to Howard Gardner (Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, he has also written on topics such as creativity, leadership, professional responsibility, interdisciplinary study and the arts. Recent books include Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work and Five Minds for the Future, and he is the author of the seminal Multiple Intelligences) about my upcoming book Just Ask: Greatness Happens When You Ask he shared with me one of the greatest quality he believes he has as a teacher is the questions he asks his students. His disappointment is that he finds very few of them pick up on this modeling of behavior. I asked if he does this as the Socratic method and he said no - he is not asking questions that he knows the answers to they are really true inquiry. I said I found they same response from the many leaders I interviewed for the book.

I don't believe that simply modeling the behavior of asking questions is enough. I think that one needs to become explicit about the questioning approach and let those you lead whether in the class room or in the work place know why your asking so many questions.