Every Thursday, we show you a real life management challenge, explain how traditional approaches come up short, and then walk you through how you could use AiMS thinking and tools to confidently overcome them in your own team. A few small, but important changes in how you think, talk and act can immediately increase your ability to drive results, improve culture and develop your people.
The Situation
If you’re anything like me, you’ve been in many 1-1 or group conversations where the conversation went into a downward spiral. People start complaining, talking about why things won’t work etc.
As a leader, it can be demoralizing because you might have had high hopes for the conversation. You probably hoped people would come together enthusiastically work together to support one another, generate new ideas and make things better.
Here’s a simple question you can ask a person or a group when the conversation becomes focused on what’s wrong, broken or missing:
“What would you like to see instead?”
That one question does two things simultaneously:
- It acts as a “pattern interrupt” that can jolt people from their familiar conversation patterns.
- It directs people’s energy towards what they most want. Often people are so focused on what they don’t want/like that they haven’t spent any time thinking about what they do want.
We call questions like this “Generative Questions” and asking them produces a few incredible outcomes. They:
- Challenge our ordinary ways of thinking and doing things
- Invite diverse perspectives
- Surface new information and knowledge
- Stimulate creativity and innovation
Try it out and let us know what happens!
