Ego vs. Altruism

Why is it important to lead with questions? Why this strategy over others?

Organizations are made up of people. Like you, every employee has his/her own goals, aspirations, concerns, experiences, and dreams. And each of us has an ego. The ego allows us to believe that we are capable of performing many tasks successfully. In all likelihood, your ego is what propelled you to a leadership position. Your great effort and desire to succeed led to major accomplishments and accolades.

Here comes the paradox. Egos can vault you into a leadership position, but as a leader, you must set your ego aside. Your ego can prevent you from being an effective and truly great leader.

Before you became a leader, you likely operated as an individual contributor. You used your creativity and resourcefulness to meet objectives—a reduction of resources, an increase in quality, or an increase in revenue. If you asked questions, they were about how you could accomplish a specific task. In general, however, your ego discouraged you from asking questions and disliked having to follow orders. Egos want to accomplish and achieve. And, egos crave recognition from others.

Every time you accomplished a task and met the objective, your career moved forward and your standing in the organization or community grew. With each accomplishment, your ego grew, too. You asked fewer questions and provided more answers. After all, with your success, others came to you as an oracle of information—perhaps even your boss or your boss’s boss. You were in control.

As a leader, you must relinquish control. You must shrink your ego and concentrate on altruism. Your career advancement is no longer task-oriented. Leadership is about allowing others the chance to achieve and flourish. You advance as a leader only when you place your employees’ egos above your own. The heads of many organizations are not able to do this. Their companies may still succeed based upon their drive for individual success, but they are not true leaders. For one thing, their employees will not be inspired to reach their full potential because they know they will not receive full credit for their efforts.

General Jack Chain is a true leader. When he was in the Pentagon, serving as a staff officer, his ten-year-old daughter asked him, “What do you do?” He thought for a minute and said, “I answer questions.” Later, when he was made a commander, he reminded his daughter of their earlier conversation. She asked him how his new role would be different. His response: “Now I ask the questions.”

As a leader, why should you lead with questions? Because questions confer power and control to your employees. It allows their egos a chance to shine. And you, they, and the organization will all be better served.

Independence Day

We have more individual choices than ever. We can choose from sixteen movies at a megaplex, eight different kinds of orange juice (low acid, some pulp, not from concentrate, etc.), and countless shoe brands and styles. Is it any surprise that we want to be free to make choices in our jobs as well?

If you grew up with only four TV channels to choose from, you might believe the command-style leadership is still viable. You might believe in shared values and needs, the way we did in the ‘60’s. Unfortunately, centralized leadership doesn’t work with this new generation. They want to work their way, not your way. They know what motivates them, how they best achieve results and obtain information, and they want to receive full credit for their efforts. If you try to steamroll their independence, you will wind up with flattened cartoon characters, not productive employees.

As a leader today, you must decentralize the power and authority. With leadership opportunities, your employees will find personal meaning in the work they do. And they will do it well, provided you meet their needs. Your challenge—accommodating leaders on all levels of the organization—is daunting, maybe even terrifying. How do you align each employee’s needs with the needs of the organization? With so many leaders, so much independence, will chaos be far behind?

Not necessarily. Not if you build in some safeguards. It’s important to understand that total independence is often desired, but not always healthy. Individualism can lead to a sense of helplessness, and this helplessness can lead to depression. Despite fiercely independent childhood heroes like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, we want and need to be part of something greater than ourselves. We want the support of a community.

We want to feel like the work we do has meaning not only to ourselves, but to others. Chances are, this meaning has already been established—in the form of your organization’s founding mission, vision, goals, and values. These pillars were originally set by the founder and then enhanced through time by the organization’s leadership teams. As a leader, you can bring this meaning to your employees by frequently asking how their needs and goals match the organization’s. In doing so, you give them the respect they want and need, as well as communicate a sense of belonging to a larger community.

Do you believe in your organization’s mission, vision, goals, and values? If so, you will be able to impart this sense of togetherness to your charges. If not, you will be herding cats.

Authentic leadership requires allowing everyone to lead at times, but to instill one cohesive purpose, so that these leaders will work together and move in one overarching direction. For each and every project, ask yourself, “How does this contribute to our organization’s mission, vision, goals, and values?” Ask the same of your direct reports. And have them ask the same of their direct reports.

The Annoyance Factor

Question: Have you written on the "annoyance factor” yet? In my eighteen years running business affairs at three different studios, we always talked badly about the "leader" who could only ask questions and never come to a decision. I agree with your premise about Ask, Don't Tell, but not taken to the extreme. Do you? Do you really? No, I mean do you really? See what I mean?

Answer: I like that, “annoyance factor.” I have been accused of it more than once from my former direct report. She became annoyed when she believed I was leading her somewhere that I wanted her to go. As an “Ask, Don’t Tell” leader, if you receive a lemon face (all forehead lines bunching and lips puckering) or a particularly loud sigh, it could be because you are making employees fish for a specific answer you have in mind. If you do know exactly what you want, don’t play games. This is when you should tell, not ask.

One key to avoiding the “annoyance factor” is to ask yourself, “Am I the decision maker here?” when employees confront you with a problem. If you are the appropriate decision-maker, you need to pitch your questions so that your direct reports will provide you the information you need. If not, you need to ask non-leading questions that will assist your direct reports with making their own decisions. If you are unsure about who will make the ultimate decision, you will often ask the wrong questions and annoy (or confuse) your employees.

If you are the decision-maker, your first questions likely will revolve around establishing the problem. It is a mistake to try to solve problems before fully understanding their complexity. Then, after brainstorming potential solutions, rank the best options, determine who will be responsible for implementing the plan, assign a timeline and communication plan, and build in a feedback loop to ensure that all aspects were done correctly.

Sometimes employees will encourage you to make a decision when, in fact, they are simply shirking their responsibility. No matter how much they slump their shoulders and give hangdog looks, you must not make their decisions for them. If you do, be prepared to make more and more decisions for them in the future. Pretty soon, you might as well assume their job title.

How can you help your employees make decisions on their own? What sort of questions should you ask? How do you provide wisdom without telling your employees how to accomplish the objective? First, be clear. Here’s what you might say: “I really would like to help you with this issue, but I won’t provide you with an answer because this is your decision to make and I trust you to make the call.” Then ask your employee questions that you would ask yourself if you were in his/her position. You might start by asking the employee to define the problem in more specific detail. Have your employee jot down his/her own answers. Explain that you will not be doing anything with this information. The decision is still the employee’s to make.

If you are not the decision-maker, remember that you are the teacher, not the learner. If you position yourself as the learner, you will subtly suggest to the employee that you intend to come to an independent decision about the problem at hand (even if you never reveal your decision to the employee). By positioning yourself as the teacher, you will impart a valuable message to your direct reports—trust. You trust them to fully establish the problem and make their own problem-solving decisions. And you have helped define boundaries—your role vs. their role. Your employees will leave your office inspired to make good decisions.

Sometimes leaders can use questions to shirk their own responsibilities. A venture capitalist shared with me a story recently about how the senior partners at [his or her?] company were providing assignments to junior associates without any explanation or resources. When the junior associates went to the seniors for help, they would engage in “annoyance factor” questioning. The junior associates would ask for direction and the senior partner would say, “How do you think it should be done?” Inwardly the junior associates were saying, “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have come to ask you!”

Sometimes leaders behave irresponsibly because they are intent on re-enacting what happened to them as junior associates. If I had to suffer, why should it be any different for my employees? Instead, a true leader would ask, “Why did this system work so poorly when I was a junior associate?” and “How can we improve the performance and morale of our junior employees?” Leaders seek to uproot dysfunctional systems, not perpetuate them.

To avoid the “annoyance factor,” determine who is the appropriate decision-maker for the problem at hand. If the decision is your employees’ to make, let them make it. Ask non-leading questions. Be sure your employees have a clear objective and access to enough information and resources to complete their work. And convey your trust in them to make good decisions.

Avoid the Battle

One of my best friends is a senior vice president for one of the world’s largest travel companies. He was recruited to do for them what he has done for three other organizations over the past five years: install a unique marketing system that increases revenues by hundreds of millions per year. Despite his impressive track record, starting up a new business unit within a monolithic company presents considerable challenges. He has to dance with the elephants and swim with the sharks to get his goals met—while constantly bumping up against bureaucracy and fiefdoms.

When we talk, every week or so, he tells me of his struggles. When he tells his boss, subordinates, or peers what he wants or needs from them in order to achieve his goals, he often meets resistance. “What if you asked them a question instead?” I respond. “What would that question be?” he wonders. This is where true leaders roll up their sleeves and earn their money. We discuss the nuances of the problems for ten to twenty minutes (people involved, roles, company mission, situation specifics, etc.) until he comes to clarity about what the right question would be. I then ask him to imagine what the reaction of those involved would have been. He pauses and says, “They would have gone along with it without a fight. I wouldn’t have had to explain my position over and over and demonstrate how this would best serve the company.”

Recently, he presented a detailed plan of how the payment system was going to bill the consumer for the travel program. He estimated that the annual revenue for this program would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars; it was critical to the overall success of the business. When the accounting department saw the plan, their reaction was “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to delay the plans for this project. We’ll need to add too many staff to our department to deal with the increase in volume because our new billing system isn’t online yet.” He was boiling inside when he got this message. Picture Popeye with steam whistling out of his ears and corncob pipe.

He was ready to hit the hallways of mahogany row to make his case with the CFO and CEO. He started imagining what he was going to say. He has done this before and eventually wins the day, but not without a strong emotional cost and some lost relationships. Nobody likes to lose a battle, even if (sometimes especially if) they are on the same team.

This time, however, he paused and recalled my motto: Ask, Don’t Tell. Instead of putting together a PowerPoint show demonstrating the cost delays to this revenue stream and making a case for how important this is for the corporation, he simply wrote a short email to the accounting department. It read, “How many more staff will you need to add?” Their response: “Only two additional employees.” End of conflict. The CFO would never bring such a paltry inconvenience up to the CEO to block this revenue stream. My friend learned that asking questions not only helps motivate employees, it can prevent intra-company battles.