In our Courageous Cultures research, 67% said their manager operates around the notion of “this is the way we’ve always done it.” That’s not just a lack of imagination. It’s hard to solve a problem differently when you’re holding on to outdated assumptions. If you want your team to get better at strategic thinking, start by helping them challenge assumptions.

Here are seven of our favorite questions to help your team reframe problems and consider alternative perspectives

7 Questions For More Strategic Thinking

1. How would our competitors approach this problem?

This assumption-buster nudges your team to consider overlooked opportunities. Understanding a competitor’s angle can be incredibly insightful, sparking creativity and perhaps, a bit of that winning spirit.

This is one of our favorite questions to ignite strategic thinking because it’s not only an “I wonder” question. Because guess what? Your competitors probably ARE faced with a similar problem. And these days, it’s not that hard to poke around and see what they’re doing.

This question also promotes strategic thinking, as you consider why your competitors might approach problems differently.

In Courageous Cultures terminology, this is a great question to ask as part of the Y- in Own the U.G.L.Y. Where are we missing the Yes?

2. How would we handle this issue if our budget was cut in half?

This provocative question is a call for efficiency and prioritization. This question encourages your team to think lean and imagine scrappy, cost-effective solutions. Sometimes, a little budgetary pressure can hatch the most brilliant ideas.

3. If we had unlimited resources, how would we solve this problem?

This strategic thinking question is the flip side of the one above. When constraints are lifted, the sky’s the limit for creativity. It allows the team to think without barriers and then work backward, scaling grand visions to match our resource constraints.

4. What would happen if we did the opposite of our initial plan?

This question invites the team to view the problem from an entirely different angle, potentially revealing unexpected solutions. It’s about challenging the norm and the beauty of 180-degree thinking.

Encourage your team to think past the sunk costs and consider a do-over. This kind of strategic thinking is remarkably liberating. A related question is “What if we DIDN’T do it this way?”

5. What would future generations criticize about our current approach?

This assumption buster instills a sense of legacy and responsibility. It encourages your team to think beyond the immediate and into the long-term impact of their decisions. It’s about making decisions that our successors will thank us for.

This is a great way to expand your team’s thinking to more sustainable, inclusive solutions.

6. If we could only choose one aspect of our project to succeed, what should it be and why?

This is a great way to get your team thinking about the MITs (most important things). Identifying the core element that defines the success of the entire project can help the team focus on what truly matters. It’s like finding the keystone in an arch; without it, everything else crumbles.

A related question, “Which elements of this project should we say “no” to? Note: We have an entire chapter in our upcoming book, Powerful Phrases for Dealing With Workplace Conflict about how to say no, for a more strategic yes.

7. What would we do differently if we were to start over with the knowledge we have now?

This is a look down the mountain question. Help your team reflect on the journey. This strategic thinking question is a recognition that wisdom today results from yesterday’s lessons.

When you’re working hard and moving fast, it’s not always easy to take a step back and challenge assumptions. When you’re feeling stuck in a rut, or results are suffering, invite your team to show up more curious and with these strategic questions.

What would you add for #8? What’s your favorite question to foster strategic thinking?

See Also: Year in Review: 7 Questions to Help Your Team Reflect on Success and Key Learnings

The post Assumption Busters: 7 Questions to Propel Your Team’s Strategic Thinking appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

On, this edition of Asking For a Friend, I talk with Rita McGrath, author of Seeing Around Corners. We discuss, “How to think strategically when you don’t know what’s coming next.”

“Snow Melts From the Edges”

Andy Grove, former CEO and author of Only the Paranoid Survive observed that “When spring comes, snow melts first at the periphery because that is where it is most exposed.”  I love that image.  That’s why it’s so critical to listen carefully to the people closest to the edges: particularly your frontline employees and your customers.

This conversation about seeing around corners made me think of our early live-online, spaced learning over time leadership development programs.

The idea for what would become one of our signature programs came from the edges, a prospective customer at the time. Michelle Braden (you can watch her on Asking For a Friend here), said:

“I’ve read your books, and I want to work with you guys, but my teams are all over the world.  Can you design a program where I don’t have to fly you to Bulgaria, Ireland, Asia, and Las Vegas? Ideally, I’d love to have them working in mixed International cohorts.

We designed a six-month, highly interactive live-online program, with mixed cohorts which included micro-learning, learning lab, action learning, and application/reinforcement sessions in-between.

The program was highly successful and we learned a lot about the technology and techniques to maximize engagement and sustained learning. We’re so grateful because right around the corner, was a global pandemic.

Michelle’s ability to help us see around corners positioned us to quickly pivot our in-person programs to live online and to give our customers and prospects the confidence that we could do that well.

More from Michelle Braden on Leadership Development

What are Your Best Practices for Seeing Around Corners?

In this interview, Rita shares some great examples of companies thriving because they got good at seeing around corners. And shares examples of what happens when they don’t.

I’m curious, what are your best practices for seeing around corners?

The post Seeing Around Corners: How to Know What’s Coming Next (Video) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

And yet, it can all feel like a lot. Where do you start?

Use This Strategic Planning Conversation Starter To Get Your Team Talking

Focus on the 5 Cs

Today we’re sharing a tool we use in our leadership programs to help leaders think strategically about their business and prioritize the next steps. You can download it for free here to assist with your strategic planning conversations.

1. To start, give each member of your team a copy of the 5Cs assessment in advance of your strategic planning session.
2. Then take each of the five categories and calibrate your individual assessments around the five strategic areas.
   • Clarity: We know where we’re going and how we will get there.
   • Capacity: We invest in building our people, systems, and tools.
   • Commitment: We keep our promises.
   • Curiosity: We ask great questions and take appropriate risks.
   • Connection: We trust one another and invest in our mutual success.
3. You’ll likely come up with more strategic areas to focus on than time to address them. Here’s where the prioritization comes in. Consider what will have the biggest strategic impact and focus your planning there.

Let’s Grow Leaders 5 Cs Strategic Planning Tool

This strategic planning tool is just the beginning of the conversation. We’d love to talk with you more about your planning efforts and how we might help. Just give us a call at 443-750-1249 or drop us a note at karin.hurt@letsgrowleaders.com.

See Also:

End of Year Meetings: How to Make Yours Remarkable

Own the U.G.L.Y. Four Strategic Conversations to Have by Year End

Virtual Kick-Off Meeting: Why You Should Have One and How to Make it Great

How to Cultivate More Solutions-Oriented Employees

The post Strategic Planning Tool: How to Engage Your Team in Better Conversation appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

It’s the number one challenge we hear from managers – time. You need time to do the work only you can do, but how do you support your team and get your work done?

It’s especially challenging when your team is struggling. You want to be supportive, so you give them the answer … but then they’re back next time and before long you don’t have time to do anything but solve other people’s problems.

In this episode, David shares a quick coaching process you can use to help your team develop their problem-solving and critical thinking skills—which will free you up to do the work only you can do.

The post How to Help Your Team Solve Problems and Think Critically appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

“Karin, TRUST me. I would LOVE to delegate more of these decisions and loosen up the reigns, but then I go out into the field and find all this crap. I just don’t think we have the critical thinking skills we need for success.”

Have you ever said those words?

Yeah, me too.

Can you imagine the freedom in knowing that your team will use the same (or better) “common sense” as you when the going gets tough?

I love this simple definition of critical thinking.

Critical thinking is not a matter of accumulating information. A person with a good memory and who knows a lot of facts is not necessarily good at critical thinking. A critical thinker is able to deduce consequences from what he knows, and he knows how to make use of information to solve problems, and to seek relevant sources of information to inform himself.

So how do you build THAT?

7 Ways to Build Your Team’s Capacity to Think

Critical thinking is not a gene. Yes, it comes more naturally to some, but it is teachable (much of the time). Here are a few ways to get started.

1. Ensure they understand your strategic priorities.

Much of the time when leaders tell me their employees lack critical thinking skills when we dig deeper, it turns out that they just don’t have enough information to be strategic.

Be sure your team can answer these strategic questions.

2. STOP being the hero.

It’s hard. Who doesn’t love being superman? Particularly when you know EXACTLY what to do. It’s even harder if your boss is a superman too and you’re their go-to guy.

There’s a certain rush from jumping in and doing what must be done at exactly the right time. And it can’t hurt, right? The worst you’re going to get after your superman intervention is a THANK YOU and a developmental discussion six months from now, saying you need to build a bench.

But here’s what we hear offline. “She’s great. But she’s a do-er. I’d put her in my lifeboat any time. But her team is weak.”

Great leaders don’t have weak teams.

Great leaders take the time to slow down just enough even during times of crisis, to bring others along and help them rise to the occasion.

3. Connect What to Why (more often than you think is practical or necessary.)

Yes, you can overload your team with TMI (too much information), but the truth is I’ve NEVER heard a manager complain that their boss overexplained “why.” It’s impossible to have great critical thinking if you’re not connected to the big picture (including key challenges). If you want your team to exercise better judgment, give them a fighting chance with a bit more transparency.

4. Expose them to Messy Discussions.

It’s tempting to think we must have it all figured out before wasting our team’s time. But if you’re really working to build leadership capacity, it’s also important to sometimes bring your folks in BEFORE you have a clue. Let them see you wrestle in the muck and talk out loud. “We could do this … but there’s that and that to consider … and also the other thing.”

5. Hold “Bring a Friend” Staff Meetings.

An easy way to do #3 is through “Bring a Friend” staff meetings. Once in a while, invite your direct reports to bring one of their high-potential employees along to your staff meeting. Of course, avoid anything super sensitive, but be as transparent as possible. Every time I’ve done this, we’ve had employees leaving the meeting saying, “I had no idea how complicated this is,” and “Wow, that sure gave me a different perspective.”

6. Ask Strategic Questions (and encourage them to go research the answers.)

• Why have your results improved so substantially?
• What was different in August (or whenever you saw a change in the pattern)?
• And, what evidence do you have that this strategy is working?
• How does this compare to your competition?
• What’s changed since implementing this program?
• How do you know it’s working?
• What are the employees saying about the change, how do you know?
• How do you know this is sustainable?
• What would a pilot teach us?

7. Teach them how to vet their ideas.

If you want your team to get better at critical thinking, teach them to vet their ideas using our  I.D.E.A. model.

Why is this idea:

1. Interesting (strategically aligned with where you need a great idea)
2. Doable (could you pull it off)
3. Engaging (who else should be involved)
4. Actions (what are your recommended next steps

Your turn. What are your best practices for building critical thinking capacity?

See Also: 6 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Town Hall Meetings

How to Help Your HR Team Be More Strategic

For more insights check out this episode of Asking For a Friend. 

The post Critical Thinking: 7 Ways to Build Your Team’s Capacity to Think appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

It’s nearly a leadership cliché:

You’ve probably been on the receiving end of a harried manager barking these words at you. You may even have said them yourself.

I’ve delivered many keynote programs and workshops where frontline leaders in the audience approach me afterward and proudly announce how they are in the habit of telling their people not to bring a problem without a solution.

Some of them even mean well. They believe that they’re helping their people. Others just want people and their problems to go away. They’re usually surprised at my response:

Please stop.

Unintended Consequences

Here’s the thing, if you’re in a leadership role, yes, your executives can fairly expect you to think things through and bring solutions (particularly when you’ve got bad news – see the D.A.R.N. Method). You’ve got the experience and responsibility to be able to own your problems and look for answers.

However, your employees are a different audience. Telling employees not to bring a problem without a solution is careless and lazy.

They may not know how to problem solve. They may lack critical thinking skills. They may not have the training or information they need to arrive at reasonable solutions.

The problem with telling people “Don’t bring me a problem without a solution” is that when they don’t know how to come up with solutions, you’ve essentially just told them, “Don’t bring me a problem.”

Now you’ve got people mucking about with problems they can’t solve and that they won’t bring to you. The problems fester, productivity and service decline, and everyone is frustrated.

There’s a better way.

Help Employees Learn to Think Critically and Solve Problems

click image to download the tool

The answer is definitely not to play the hero and jump in with answers, nor is it the old-school “Don’t bring me a problem without a solution!” The immediate problems might get solved and work continues, but next time an issue comes up, your team still can’t figure it out for themselves and, worse, you’ve now taught them that if things get difficult, you’ll just figure it out for them.

Yes, you’re the hero, but say goodbye to your own productivity!

What they really need from you in these moments are your questions: the kind of questions that focus on learning and the future. Questions that generate ideas and solutions.

Examples include:

• What is your goal?
• What did you try?
• What happened?
• Do you need a specific skill or tool to be able to solve this?
• What would you do next time?
• What do you think will happen when you try that?
• What will you do?
• Super-bonus question – keep reading to learn this powerful tool!

Assuming that your staff have the basic skills, training, and materials they need to do their jobs, this conversation doesn’t have to take more than a few minutes. For a complex project, it might take the time required to drink a cup of coffee, but it shouldn’t take much longer than that.

Now, you might be wondering what to do if the person replies to one of your questions with, “I don’t know.”

Don’t despair – it’s time to use the super-bonus question. When a team member says, “I don’t know,” most managers will then jump in and supply the answer, but not you. There’s a better way.

“I don’t know” can mean many things. Rarely does it mean the person has zero thoughts about the issue.

More often, “I don’t know” translates to:

• “I’m uncertain.”
• “I don’t want to commit before I know where you stand.”
• “I haven’t thought about it yet.”
• “I don’t want to think about it.”
• “Will you please just tell me what to do?”
• “I’m scared about getting it wrong.”

Your job as a leader is to continue the dialogue – to ease the person through their anxiety and train their brain to engage. This is where the super-bonus question comes in.

With one question you can re-engage them in the conversation and move through “I don’t know” to productivity.

When someone says, “I don’t know,” your super-bonus question is: “What might you do if you did know?”

Before you judge this tool, try it.

Try it with your children, with your co-workers, or with the person next to you in a coffee shop. In any conversation where someone says, “I don’t know,” respond with a gentle, “What might you do if you did know?” and watch what happens.

It’s like magic.

The person who was stymied two seconds ago will start to share ideas (often good ones) brainstorm solutions, and move on as if they were never stuck. It’s amazing and hard to believe until you try it.

The super-bonus question works because it addresses the source of the person’s “I don’t know.” If they were anxious or fearful, it takes the pressure off by creating a hypothetical situation: “If you did know…” Now they don’t have to be certain or look for your approval and they become free to share whatever they might have been thinking.

If they hadn’t thought about the problem or didn’t want to think about a solution, you’ve lowered the perceived amount of thought-energy they must expend. You’re not asking for a thesis on the subject, just a conversational “What might you do…”

Our brains can do amazing work when we remove the emotional blocks. When you do this for your team, you train their brain to engage, to push through their ordinary blocks, and increase their performance. Ultimately, they will be able to have these conversations with themselves and will only need to bring the very serious issues to you.

You’ll know you’re succeeding in asking healthy questions when a team member tells you: “I had a problem. I was going to come and talk it over with you, but then I thought, you’re just going to ask me all these questions. So I asked myself all the questions instead and I found a solution.”

Celebrate those moments and encourage them to start asking those questions of the people around them. You’ve just increased your team’s capacity for problem-solving, freed up time to focus on your work, and…you’ve built a leader!

Your Turn

Before you bark “Don’t bring me a problem without a solution,” remember that when a team member has trouble thinking through a problem, good questions are your best solution.

Leave us a comment and share: How do you develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills in your team?

See Also:

How to Help Your Team Bring Better Ideas

5 Poor Leadership Practices You Need to Stop

The post One Awful (but Common) Leadership Practice and What To Do Instead appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Most of the time when executives tell me their team is “not strategic,” the real challenge is they just don’t have enough information to see the bigger picture. The occasional all-hands meetings help, but without interim reinforcement, those motivational meetings can feel like a fire hose of plans and numbers. If you want your team to truly “get it,” sprinkle little bits of big picture reinforcement into their week.

6 Ways to Get Your Employees to See the Big Picture

“The big picture doesn’t just come from distance; it also comes from time.”  -Simon Sinek

1. “Postcards”

It’s easy to forget that the main reason many employees don’t think more strategically is a lack of information. And, it’s hard to connect the dots when a third of them are invisible.  It’s also tough to translate all you heard three days later. What I’ve found works quite well is just to send soundbites out via text message or slack throughout some of the more strategic meetings I attend to connect what I’m hearing to the big picture.

I make them fun and relevant to their roles. It creates interest and sets the table for the more robust conversations that follow.  These have worked for years, long before 140 characters was the way of the world.

“Oh boy, Competitor X just launched new plans that will change the way customers think about our pricing. Let’s talk more on Monday!”

2. Gamification

It’s easier than ever to turn learning into a game. Make learning the big picture fun.

In our long-term leadership development programs, we use our Let’s Grow Leaders learning lab to create lasting behavior change. Participants learn to apply what they’re learning to their daily leadership and also gain a better understanding of their most important work fa into the bigger picture.

3. Bring-a-Friend Staff Meetings

Sometimes the best way to understand how the sausage is made is to help make it.

Giving people exposure to the conversation and thought process, not just the outcomes of strategic decisions, goes a long way in helping people connect the dots to the bigger picture. Every time I’ve held a “bring-a-friend staff meeting” where my direct reports each bring one of their direct reports, you can almost see the light bulbs going on.

4. Field Trips

There’s a reason every elementary school takes a trip to the zoo. You can read about giraffes all you want, but until you have one bend down and lick your face, it’s hard to really understand what they’re all about.

If you want your employees to take a big picture view, take a field trip to another department and seeing how they really think and operate.

5. Mentoring Circles

One of my favorite techniques in my executive roles at Verizon was to create skip-level mentoring circles of high-potential managers.

We would meet monthly to discuss strategic big picture challenges, work on real projects together, and have candid conversations about what was getting in the way of their strategic success.

6. Teaching Operations Reviews

Another one of my key go-to’s. For step-by-step instructions click here.

And of course, before you got there, be sure they can answer these 7 strategic questions:

2021 Update…2 More Ways to Help Your Employees Think Strategically

This article has proven to be so popular, I thought it might be useful to provide an update on communicating the bigger picture.

7. Be a Translator

Since the original writing of this article, we’ve been doing a lot of work with middle management teams to become better translators

In our popular article, One Crucial Skill The Best Middle Managers Master, we shared 5 ways managers can help translate the big picture to their teams. They translate:

• Industry dynamics into pragmatic straight talk.
• EBITDA to “What I need from ya.”
• Executive urgency to tangible actions.
• Employee angst into reasonable requests.
• Deep questions into dialogue.

Help your team see the bigger picture. Before you motivate, translate.

8. Provide Clarity Around Where You Need Great Ideas

In our research for our latest book, Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates, we found the most innovative companies who tapped into the best thinking of their employees were clear about two things.

1. They provided clarity that they really wanted their employees’ ideas, and
2. They were clear about what a great idea would accomplish (e.g. they explained the big picture).

This clarity goes way beyond having an open door policy.

You can learn more about our Courageous Cultures research and download the first few chapters for free here.

Your turn:

What are your favorite techniques for helping your team see the big picture?

Are you ready to establish a Courageous Culture of critical thinkers, problem solvers and customer advocates within your company? Visit our Strategic Leadership page to learn how Let’s Grow Leaders can help you build a Courageous Culture – with higher engagement and a results-oriented approach to innovation.

The post 6 Simple Techniques to Help Your Employees See the Big Picture appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.