As a change agent, you have a tough task of raising the awareness, educating, training and transforming the minds of the teams and leadership, while still maintaining your sanity. Sometimes they GET IT! And sometimes they act as innocent kids, enjoying their pranks while displaying passive or active resistance to your change efforts.
To me, this situation seems very similar to the dilemmas of the teaching community, who have similar problems everyday with the school kids. But if you watch the teaching community, one of the techniques they use is the Power of Questioning.
Power of Questioning
Power of Questioning includes asking the right questions, which challenges your teams, and promotes a higher order thinking, incubates creativity and helps them to finally develop learning!
So as a Change Agent, you should start to ask the right Questions, so that you can gather useful information about the team, about their interactions, their personalities, and help you in bonding better. You can start to listen more, with open questions, and practice active listening.
Different Types of Questions
It helps to develop a broad base of questions and mix up different styles. Below are some examples –
- You can ask Rhetorical questions to emphasize a key point, and create a dramatic effect !
- Check out some examples from an education project, which you can customize for your team interactions.
- But really the most important way is to go with Socratic questioning, which makes the individuals think for themselves, rather than elicit information from you.
- Check out additional examples from an education project, which you can customize for your team interactions.
- Other times you can use Reflective questions and it can help with having with Question Cards , examples below –
- What was easy?
- What was hard?
- What did I learn?
- How will you use this learning in the future?
Check out examples from an education project, which you can customize for your team interactions.
Your Next Steps
Looking at the above examples, you might be wondering that the Sprint Retrospective questions sounds familiar. But in my view, it is simply one of the many forms of questioning that you use at a team level, but the variety and situations are immense for you to experiment and start using this technique in almost every situation. So ask yourself – if you can use the Power of Questioning everyday? Can you learn and pick some of these questions and apply in your Change journeys?
In my experience, as we learn the process of inquiry and questioning, we become better at it. You will start to use the insight from the process of inquiry to develop cues to asking better questions and you will find your sanity.
Conclusion
Power of Questioning should be an important arsenal in your tool box, and should be a daily affair, and not just at a certain ceremonial point. It engages your teams and leaders to reflect on their current state and make it easy for you to overcome the passive/active resistance in your change journeys.
So next time you see your kids or your teams displaying resistance to your change efforts, and playing some funny pranks, try the Power of Questioning, and see if you can see through their beliefs, and reflect the mirror!
What are your favorite Questions ? Which questions inspire your team ? Which questions do you use most often?
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As you run your daily grind, do you reflect and think about your Own Development? Or do you let your circumstances dictate your agenda? and drown your Development needs? As the famous woodcutters story goes, do you sharpen your Axe? Or do you keep on doing the same thing, same process, same boring steps everyday? Or Do you Take a step back, and Reflect? do you LEARN? and really ask yourself if I have sharpened my Axe or not?