How many times have you tried to have a strategic conversation with an executive or client only to have him or her immediately revert to a tactical focus? Sometimes, the same happens with other members of our own teams. It’s hard to stay focused on strategy. When you’re putting out a fire, it’s hard not to just focus on tactics – deliver the order.
The best way to regain that strategic focus is to ask the right questions. Whether you are just asking them of yourself, or of a client, executive, or colleague, you can use questions to prompt people’s strategic thinking. First, be sure you craft the right questions:
- Questions should demand details, not a yes or no response
- Questions should use keywords straight from your organizational or departmental strategy
- Seek to clarify assumptions or complexity
- Use supportive language
- Ask questions that value the other person’s opinion, validating the importance of the tactic
Here’s a story that serves as a great example. I was working with a client on a survey and she wanted to add a question to the survey. It was a bad question that wasn’t actionable and wouldn’t contribute to her strategic use of the results. I asked “What will you do with the results? What will you improve based on the results from that question?”
Stopped her dead in her tracks. She decided not to include the question.
Here’s another example. I had a conversation with a client about the company’s intranet. The client doesn’t believe the intranet has any strategic importance at all. He views it as a distraction on his plate of more pressing issues. Here is the series of questions I asked him:
- How important is innovation for your business? (He said it is their most important goal.)
- What is required of a company to be truly innovative? (After some prompting, he agreed that conversation, dialog and idea sharing were crucial.)
- What role might your intranet play in enabling more conversation, dialog and idea sharing?
He stared briefly at me in a stunned silence. He had his answer. He answered his own cynicism with his own answers to my questions.
One more story. After a facilitated series of Q&A and planning, my client and her team realized they can no longer be order takers and still deliver truly strategic communication solutions. Instead, they must enable others to be great communicators and serve the organization in a whole new way. At the end of the day I asked her what she thought about the planning we’d done.
“I just hadn’t ever thought about it this way. No one had asked me those questions.”
Stacy Wilson, ABC, is president of Eloquor Consulting, Inc., in Lakewood, Colorado
