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Guaranteed you will get results. After all, you are eliminating a negative aspect of your leadership and replacing it with a results-producing one. When you make this a long term endeavor — going from item to item — results will come to you in new and often unexpected ways.
(4) Encourage people you lead to question rewards aspects of their own leadership. Be aware of their reactions to your encouragement. Do they see questioning as meaningful to their jobs? Do they want their colleagues involved in such questioning? Do they want to have senior management question their own leadership?
If people want questioning to be a regular part of their daily work, continue it. If they feel it has little value, call a time out. After all, if people believe they are powerless to change things in organization, seismic questions like this will only frustrate and anger them, creating a hot house environment for cynicism to flower.
As you go forward:
--Cultivate among people a common, self-reinforcing fervor for questioning. Don't force things. Be an observer and a supporter. Observe their reactions to questioning and support their efforts to make it succeed.
--Encourage development of networks of people taking initiative to engage in questioning together.
--Now and then, and especially in beginning, set aside special times and places to have them focus exclusively on such questioning, making sure they continually link answers to getting increases in results.
--Keep that linkage alive. This is not an academic exercise. It's not meant to simply have people feel good or, on other hand, vent their frustrations. It's sole objective is to get MEASURABLE INCREASES IN RESULTS. If results are not forthcoming, have people refocus on need for questioning; and if you still are not receiving results, curtail or even eliminate it for awhile. You can always reactivate it when time and environment are more conducive to having it succeed.
--Avoid having process deteriorate into name calling and finger pointing. The idea is not to use questioning to get goods on people or as a platform for emotional outbursts against organization but instead for what it is meant to be, a powerful tool to get more results continually.
Mind you, people shouldn't be spending inordinate amounts of time on questioning. Nor should it be seen as a major, discrete effort, like an operations or marketing program. Just opposite: It should be a natural part of everybody's leadership activities. Constantly asking, Are we rewarding right things? should eventually come as second nature.
2005 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
The author of 23 books, Brent Filson's recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: "49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results," at www.actionleadership.com