Leading through questions.

When you are leading and responsible for the work of others, your approach matters.

Some leaders like to command and control - and that can work.

I prefer to lead like musician... creatively.

Instead of asking, "may I offer feedback?" or asking "well, what do you think you should do?"

I like to ask questions like:

  1. Why did this idea or effort fail? Why do you think it worked?

  2. What if we could take what we've learned from this failure/win and try a revised approach? How might we do that? What it wold it mean for us and our customer to get this right?

  3. In this failure, what went right? How might we capitalize on what we know works?

  4. Are we failing differently each time? Or are being insane?

And here's the thing, you can ask these questions of yourself, too. Great leaders not only are effective at leading others, they effectively self-lead themselves.

Back phrase if you must, but tell everybody you're doing it... and why it's okay to be behind.

Yogurt