Using Questions to Review Works in Progress

Do you want to be more involved in your direct report’s content creation, but aren’t sure where to start? Perfect. If you follow a few key ideas, your direct report or team member will feel grateful for the help while feeling no loss of autonomy.

First, your goal

Perhaps we should start a couple steps back. What kind of manager, leader, or boss do you want to be?

If you want to be a bossy boss, I’ve got no tools for that.

Assuming you want to be a helpful boss, let’s continue. A strong leader provides direction, models behaviors and values, and coaches her reports. Her questions lead them to better decisions. She helps them connect the project they’re working on to their professional goals and listens with empathy to her team members. Above all, she catches them doing something right and warmly acknowledges the value of their successes.

My assumption is that your goals are to deliver the desired business outcomes by improving the quality of your team’s work, while also building strong relationships.

Build trust

Spectacular writers have published extensively on trust, and I don’t presume to know better. All of us would benefit from time spent learning and reflecting on trust. My experience shows that trust is best built deliberately. When teams understand they can disagree with each other and their leader, trust can grow because safety doesn’t depend on maintaining a constant consensus.

When you advise, but don’t tell people what to do, you build trust.

When you provide curiosity and support while withholding judgment, you build trust.

What if they’re the experts?

Frequently, a manager leads people who have deep expertise beyond their own skills.

The leader doesn’t have the same capabilities her direct reports do. Obviously, this can be uncomfortable. Sometimes it means they offload the evaluation of the team member’s work to a third party, often stakeholders. Or it may mean that popularity and a positive attitude trumps quality work.

Do you want to help but don’t know how?

An effective leader stays deeply involved in her team member’s work at every stage of a progress, even when she doesn’t have their expertise.

Start with a Time for Questions

Start a regularly scheduled meeting that sits in between a formal review and no supervision at all. Done well, you’ll understand where your team member feels confident, where she feels strong, and where she could use help.

Your team member will get the benefit of your perspective, the advice and suggestions you may have, and most of all the transformative benefit of having someone listen carefully to what she’s doing and why she’s doing it.

For my first question, I always ask how I can be of help. And I listen. Listening attentively may be the greatest gift I can give to my colleagues and team members.

My next step is to remind the team member of the ground roles: mostly that we don’t have to agree on everything and that I’d prefer she hears my suggestions as advice than direction.

Below are the questions I ask most frequently, although I wouldn’t be likely to ask all of them in a particular interview. None of them require deep knowledge of the leader, nor do they need to be answered using jargon.  

My Current List of Questions:

• What is the problem you’re trying to solve? How do you know you’ve got the right target in your sights?
• Where do you describe what success looks like? How did you come to define success that way?
• Does the content rely on telling the learners, rather than asking them to do things?
• What’s the most important point everyone should get? Why is that idea so important?
• How did you decide on your delivery method? What might happen if you tried something different?
• How did you decide what to include? What would your learners think you might cut?
• How are you going to test the deliverable with real learners? How could you get it to them at an early stage?
• What stories can you integrate into the learning experience? Who could provide better ones?
• How do you introduce the WIIFM​? Can the WIIFM be simpler and more effective?
• What bears repeating in this experience? How can you use repetition to achieve your goals?
• Where does this experience fit in with everything else we provide? How might we reuse it with a different audience?
• Will the learner be able to practice during the experience? How will she integrate what she’s learned into her regular habits?

Read Ahead of Time

If you can read the content at least one day ahead of time, you’ll be setting an exemplary example for your team. This is a clear sign to your team member that her leader cares enough to apply some of her discretionary time to preparing for the meeting. And I always read my current list of questions before reading the materials my team member has provided for me.

Make a few notes as you read the content and decide whether you want to provide those notes or simply reference them to ensure you’re asking the most useful questions. When the meeting begins, you might gently suggest the team member take notes or record it for her own use.

Curiosity and enthusiasm will motivate your team members.

Finally, show your enthusiasm for the project and her work so far. Provide praise  for what she did right. If time allows, ask her to reflect on the meeting you’ve had. Done well, this meeting will leave your direct report feeling inspired, not chastened.