Do you find yourself answering questions all the time?
Do you feel like everything depends on you?
Most likely, it’s your own doing. You trained your team to depend on you by committing one (or more) of these mistakes, often with the best of intentions:
- You try to save time by answering quickly
- You assume a question is an ask for help
- You believe you know more than the person asking
More often than not, a question from your teammate is actually an ask for permission, a sign of uncertainty about being empowered to make the decision themselves. Such uncertainty is completely your doing, but don’t feel bad – nearly every leader goes through this phase early on. It is especially true about founders.
There just never seems to be enough time to pause and teach or to explain. Most find it much easier to answer and move on with whatever one has been doing. Under existential pressure in a small team, this is rather understandable. However, not taking the time to break this habit is also hampering your growth and severely limiting your future potential. You are effectively training your people not to think, as asking is always easier.
How does one break this cycle? It is actually really simple (simple, not necessarily easy). You need to start training yourself. The first step? Stop answering questions, right away at least. There is a magic formula, a sweet little sentence you need to memorize, and use following every question served by your team:
“What do you recommend?”
I’m not using the word “magic” lightly here. It really does feel like magic. What you will inevitably find is that in 80% of cases, at least, your team will already know the answer you are about to provide. In the remaining 20%, they may be missing a piece of information, some context, or awareness, and you can help provide perspective. With that little habit, your cognitive load will go down, and your team will start feeling more and more confident and empowered. You can build on the momentum created later.
A CEO client once told me: “I got a text with a question from my sales rep. I typed an answer that took two screens, but then I remembered – so I deleted it and responded instead, ‘What do you think we should do?’ And he texted back, almost word for word, what I myself wrote first.” It really does work like magic.
What I often recommend to my clients is to literally count how many times in a given week they answered a question versus how many times they ask “what do you recommend” first. I now recommend the same to you.
Credits for this trick goes to David Marquet’s “Turn the Ship Around!”. Highly recommended for many ideas on how to empower your team – and free yourself.
