Directive v Non-directive – Where do you sit?

Where do you spend most of your time when chatting to people in your team?

Directive is quicker, but if you keep telling people what to do they will forever keep on coming back to you for the answer 🤔

Before diving in with advice, why not ask a few open questions that might get them thinking. More importantly, you’ll be helping them to come up with the answer themselves, and lets be honest they probably know the answer anyway 😉

Here’s a few questions you might ask:

💡What do you think you should do next?
💡What might the consequences be?
💡How might they react? How might you react?
💡On a scale of 1-10, how serious, or urgent is it?
💡What’s your priority?
💡What’s the main thing concerning you about this situation?
💡What help do you need from me?

These types of questions will help you to be a little more non-directive 👊

Don’t come to me with problems….

“Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions” – This is a common manager saying, but for us, we feel it stops people coming forward if they do have a problem but they don’t have any solutions!

In this short video Mike explains why you might want tweak what you say and how you say it 👊  

Skill v Will – Do you have a ‘Janet’?

As a Manager, your life is made much easier if you have a team you can delegate to.  But, in reality, this can be a challenge if your team don’t have the skills to take on the task, or worse still they don’t have the desire or the will.  

In this clip, Mike introduces you to five members of his team and the challenge he faces when he has too many who aren’t high skill/high will 

Click here for Mike’s video