Female leaders often walk a tightrope between being viewed as ‘too bossy’ or ‘too soft’ by their teams and colleagues. If we are direct and assertive, we are considered cold. If we show compassion, we risk not being taken seriously.
Many feel the need to adopt stereotypically male behaviours in order to be listened to and have an impact at work, but this risks pitching us into a lose-lose (and tiring) competition. Not only that, but mirroring a traditional male leadership style like the ‘command-and-control’ approach, whereby you fix and solve staff problems by telling them what to do, is losing its effectiveness in the modern workplace.
There is a better way for female leaders to transform their impact as people managers. Adopting an enquiry-led approach is the key to leveraging their innate female qualities— fostering more authentic connections with their teams, and cultivating an inclusive, engaged and productive workforce.
Here are 3 steps female leaders can take to develop an enquiry-led approach to supercharge their impact at work:
1. Learn to ask more powerful questions
Learning to use an enquiry-led approach focuses on asking better, more impactful questions of employees, rather than providing immediate directions and solutions.
Imagine an employee approaches you with a problem they’re facing. It might seem entirely obvious to dispense your knowledge and offer advice to fix or solve the problem. Yet with this ‘command-and-control’ approach, not only do you take the work on yourself, but you also rob the employee of a learning opportunity had you encouraged them to do the thinking themselves.
Learning to ask insightful questions more effectively taps into an employee’s potential and engages their thinking. Powerful and insightful questions shift the balance of the conversation by inviting others to reflect for themselves.
So, instead of itching to solve their problem yourself, learn to STOP and ask powerful questions that get them to reflect more deeply, helping them develop their own problem-solving skills. Asking authentic questions shows your belief in their ability to find the solution. Avoid asking ‘Why…? ‘ questions that might appear to be critical or assign blame—favour ‘What…?’ questions instead.
Developing your team’s capabilities through a process of purposeful enquiry will help to unlock their unique skills and talents so that they can use them to the team’s advantage.
2. Actively listen
Simply asking powerful questions isn’t enough for transformational change. Your intention should be to create a conversational tone that gets people to reflect more deeply, helping them make new connections that generate new insights. Listening actively to what they say is imperative during this stage of their thinking. You can’t think about the next thing you’ll say when you should be quietly and intently listening. In fact, if you’re truly listening, you won’t be able to do anything else.
Actively listening is also crucial if you want your team to trust you. When they come to you with a problem, try and sense how they’re feeling – what’s their mood? Do they seem stressed? What are they – and aren’t they – telling me?
If you have asked them a series of powerful questions and there is a period of silence, you must resist the urge to jump in and affect their thinking. Having created a learning opportunity, give them the space to do that valuable mental work. Filling the silence with your voice could be disastrous; it may actually extinguish the spark of an emerging thought or idea that they were shaping which might have turned out to be brilliant.
3. Give appreciative feedback
Adopting an enquiry-led approach deepens your situational awareness at work, as you become more efficient at picking up on what employees are excelling at and what they are struggling with. To develop this awareness further, focus on catching people doing things well as an opportunity to give appreciative feedback.
Instead of looking out only for what we want others to fix about their behaviour, deliberately looking for where someone has utilised a particular behaviour or strength that we’d like to see more of, can offer a perfect opportunity for us to draw their attention to what went well about that.
Giving appreciative feedback in flow reinforces positive behaviour and provides more positive interactions with employees. This not only strengthens the leader-employee relationship but also builds confidence in developing feedback skills.
What it means to be a leader is changing. Employees want a deeper sense of purpose, more opportunities for development and impact, and more collaborative relationships with their managers. Using enquiry as a skill to help others develop and advance is much more effective as you progress in your leadership career, as it brings Operational Coaching® into the flow of daily work. It also helps you cultivate confidence in your own abilities as you contribute to the development of a more connected and respectful culture.
Successful leaders will attest that no one succeeds alone, and you can only really achieve things through and with others. Taking people with you on your leadership journey by becoming a more intentional people leader sits particularly well for female leaders because it is less about ego and more about enabling others.
And who wouldn’t want to work for a leader like that?
About the Author
Laura Ashley-Timms is the COO of performance consultancy Notion, creator of the multi-award-winning STAR® Manager programme which is teaching leaders and managers in over 40 countries how to adopt an Operational Coaching® style of management. Laura is also the co-author of the new management bestseller, The Answer is a Question.
