Welcome to the third episode of the video series ‘7 Questions to Ask When You Want to Tell!’ (For 7 weeks you will receive an episode of this series instead of the usual written eNews.)

I reckon this when people ask you what to do (or some version of that question), they’ve already given it some thought! This is special question to ask with lightness and humour when you think they have the answer. It should generate a flash of insight.

Please share this with another leader you think might be jumping in with the answers, inadvertently disempowering people, and risking them being a bottleneck in solution finding and decision making.

Go Fearlessly – Corrinne

PS If you are interested in the content, but don’t like watching video, here’s the transcript of what I say:

This is a special question because it’s a question to ask when you are pretty confident they’ve already got answers to their own questions. So it’s a question to ask with a bit of lightness and fun and see what happens.

Welcome or welcome back. If this is the first video of this series that you’ve tuned into, my mission is to help you out of the advice trap so that you can empower your people with good questions instead of jumping in with answers. I reckon that most of the questions people bring to us, they’ve already got some pretty good ideas.

It might be something that they’ve seen before or a challenge that their team has faced. Maybe what they need is a little bit of confidence and reassurance from you. Sometimes I’m sure you’ve seen this is – just a bit old fashioned ass covering. Right? If it stuffs up and you’ve told me, then it’s your fault. And we don’t want that.

Don’t fall into that trap as a leader and disempower your people. Keep the authority with them with this question. “So what do you think I’m going to tell you to do?” And then just to hold the space? Like I said, ask it fairly quickly and lightly and then just hold the space. I would be shocked if you didn’t get a response to that.

And my guess is you’ll have a chance to try this out this afternoon or tomorrow so give it a go and let me know. Let me know what happens. The next question will land this time next week. So look out for it or DM me and we’ll send it to you. Go fearlessly.