Before I explain the exercise, I want you to keep this in mind: Great managers seem to have a special sauce. This sauce is one employees and employers alike want to recreate. My theory is that one of the ingredients in this special sauce is something great managers avoid. What is it?
Giving advice.
Great managers offer advice the way great chefs add salt: just a pinch. In order to understand what this looks like, you need to know what a meal without salt tastes like. Hey–everyone is trying elimination diets these day…why not try it out in the name of healthier managing?!
Here’s the challenge: Go an entire week without giving your employees advice. If they ask for it, you must use open-ended questions, allowing them to draw their OWN conclusions (Warning: they might hate this at first.)
A quick reminder: Open-ended questions look like this:
Who?
What?
Where?
When?
How?
And SOMETIMES…why? (Quick heads up: Why can be tricky. People often feel accused when they are asked why they did or did not do something.)
During this exercise, we use open-ended questions because close-ended questions can be answered with a simple one-word answer like “yes or no.”
Let me know if you want to try this exercise and, if you do, what were the results?
