Influence & Insight | January 2025

Leadership Story | Cross The Knowing-Doing Gap

Frequently we’ll hear news of an amazing leader who seemingly has uncovered a new technique leading to spectacular results, when in fact, the leader has embraced tried and true principles that are generally ignored or forgotten.

This month Ben Cohen of the Wall Street Journal celebrates Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia in The Secrets of the Man Who Made Nvidia the World’s Most Valuable Company (behind WSJ paywall). The article is a terrific read, centered around a communication technique called T5T emails. T5T email is short for Top-5 Things that employees are working on, thinking about, things that they are noticing in their respective corners of the business.

Sounds great. Sounds novel. Thinking about Huang’s success brings to mind The Knowing-Doing Gap and Counter Mentor Leadership.

The Knowing-Doing Gap, penned over twenty years ago, remains a prescient book, especially as technology development and innovation accelerate. Recall the authors asked “What prevented organizations that are led by smart people from doing things that they know they ought to do?” Pfeffer and Sutton  found the answer in organizations that treated knowledge as a continuous, even fanatical sharing process rather than a static, often hoarding-based process. One organizational example of crossing the Gap cited was PSS/World Medical addressed through their values:

“The right to communicate with anyone, anywhere, without fear of retribution
is one of the core values at PSS.”

Likewise, in Counter Mentor Leadership, Kelly and Robby Riggs expose that most corporate managers rarely encourage input or feedback. Huang’s T5Ts serve as a perfect example of Crossing The Knowing-Doing Gap, in the process avoiding typical corporate manager pitfalls. According to Cohen, Huang has been reading all of the Top-5 Things sent to him for decades:

“If you send it,” he says, “I’ll read it.”

Lead by Crossing The Knowing-Doing Gap.

Leading With Questions | Book Review

“The primary difference between leaders and managers is that
leaders are those who ask the right questions whereas managers
are those tasked to answer those questions.” (p. 203)

Michael J. Marquardt and Bob Tiede’s third edition work, subtitled How Leaders Discover POWERFUL QUESTIONS BY KNOWING HOW AND WHAT TO ASK, is finely researched and based on interviews with 45 leaders. Their book consists of three sections: An introduction and three chapters which answer the question Why? [ask questions]; four chapters which answer How? [to ask questions]; and four application chapters explaining when and how to ask powerful questions. This review reinforces the authors' three sections with additional ways to think about the power of Leading With Questions.

Why?

To start, let's put asking questions in context. Sheila Heen and Doug Stone (Thanks for the Feedback) group feedback into three forms: Appreciation, evaluation, and coaching. We seem to be pretty good at both expressing and receiving appreciation, so let's look closer at evaluation and coaching. We may loosely think of evaluation as talking and coaching as listening.

Years of facilitating leadership courses with highly educated managers or subject matter experts (SMEs) suggests the first feedback profile. If we wish to become a more effective leader we must greatly reduce the tendency to evaluate and greatly increase how much we coach (this review suggests by a factor of four).

Tiede and Marquardt notice that too often, we ask questions that disempower rather than empower our subordinates (p. 3). If we ask a question such as "Why did you mess this up?" we're really evaluating first rather than expressing genuine curiosity. Transitioning from a manager or technical expert to an effective leader isn't easy. When we become leaders, we feel it is important for us to have answers rather than questions or that asking questions -- or being unable to answer questions addressed to us -- may show that we are somehow lacking as leaders (p. 12). Consider how difficult innovation becomes when we cannot disclose what we don't know or that we are curious about the possible. Sydney Finkelstein calls companies that are unable to question their prevailing view of reality zombies (p. 18).

Marshall Goldsmith adds "asking by top leaders has a secondary benefit that may be even more important. Since asking demonstrates a willingness to learn, a desire to serve, and a humility that can be an inspiration for the entire organization." (p. 24). The end results? Marilee Adams notes:

Organizations that ask questions will be
more dynamic, agile, collaborative, and creative. (p. 30)

Good questions energize people (p. 37). As we become leaders as coaches, our focus becomes empowering others which in turn moves the entire enterprise forward. Our role is more focused on alignment. Julie Giulione suggests:

If leaders could choose just one super-power,
I would recommend cultivating the ability to ask
great, meaty, engaging, thought-provoking questions. (p. 43)

How?

A great starting point is thinking about engagement. Let's call the below instrument an engagement tachometer, with four engagement levels:

Tachometer level 0                 
Tachometer level 600-700
Tachometer level 1000-4000
Tachometer level 4000-6000+

Our first tachometer level provides no engagement since this is where we are simply telling others what, when, or how to do things. The second level is much like an automobile at idle, the car is running but not moving. This happens when we ask passive questions generating little if any engagement. A telltale sign of a passive question is one that may be simply answered with a yes, no, or o.k. Our third level, with broad engagement possibilities, consists of active questions; questions that require pausing, thinking and active listening. Our fourth, genuinely transformative level begins with highly engaging or empowering questions and reflects a genuinely open and safe environment cultivated by a leader as coach.

The authors found four primary reasons we have difficulty with questions (p. 53):

1. We avoid questions out of a natural desire to protect ourselves.
2. We are too often in a rush.
3. We often lack skills in asking or answering questions due to a lack of experiences and opportunities, of training, and of role models.
4. We find ourselves in corporate cultures and working environments that discourage questions, especially those that challenge existing assumptions and policies.

Many managers or SMEs are poor at delegation. Yet, when we use questions, we should not be sharing just information but also responsibility (p. 58). This suggests we take our time forming our questions. The authors inform us (p. 69) this is contextual: What do I want my question to accomplish? Replace evaluation with curiosity. Empowering questions help develop alignment within teams and draw out the optimum performance from individual members and the team as a whole (p. 71). On page 77 the authors provide examples of good open-ended questions:

What do you think about?
Could you say more about?
What possibilities come to mind? What might happen if you?
What have you tried before?
What do you want to do next?

Marilee Adams refers to two types of mindsets that may reside in the questioner: learner and judger (p. 88). How about this? Let's think of coach and evaluator, respectively, from our prior two feedback profiles. The learner term is both operative and powerful. The authors explain: Asking questions as a part of a learning process rather than a judging exercise (p. 93). Retaining the learner, or coaching mindset, is key to performance breakthrough. When we continuously listen in pursuit of learning more, good questions organically flow leading to engagement and creative ideas.

Application | Guidelines

Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas (in remembrance) note that "telling creates resistance, whereas asking creates relationships." (p. 128) Much like Kouzes and Posner's conclusion that leadership is about relationships. The authors cite humanist psychologist Carl Rogers, who notes three conditions -- genuineness, empathic understanding, and positive regard -- are necessary if we are to help change the person we are with (p. 131).

According to Virginia Bianco-Mathis (p. 150), the leader who coaches with questions sees the team as having an independent existence in its own right, serving a larger organizational purpose. Exhibit 8.1 (pp. 151-152) shows that a Coaching Leader's Behaviors with Team are:

• Focused on expanding and facilitating.
• Holding self and team accountable for initiating actions.
• Facilitating acting with speed and flexibility; pushing for creative solutions.
• Consulting with team regarding problems and solutions.
• Establishing a partnership with the team.
• Sharing knowledge and information.
• Trying to lead and plan for change collaboratively. 

Summary                                             

As we continue growing into leaders as coaches, our priorities become generating alignment, creating a motivational environment, and developing the next generation of leaders.

“We become what we ask about.” (p. 203) 

Thank you, Bob Tiede, for the signed copy of your book.

Coaching Story | Leaders Prioritize Effectiveness

On day three of an Academy Leadership Excellence Course our first workshop focuses on Setting Leadership Priorities.

One of the more interesting exercises is based on Stephen Covey Urgency/Important quadrant chart, whereby course participants evaluate what activities tend to dominate their time.

At the beginning of the exercise, many participants not only find that many of their activities are in Quadrant 1, the attendees frequently seem to believe that being busy or attending to “fire drills” is actually a good thing. We often emphasize efficiency (or how to do something) rather that effectiveness (what should we be doing). Likewise, many genuine Quadrant 1 activities are often initially listed in Quadrant 2. With many groups, activities initially placed in Quadrant 2 are not opportunistic, energizing or motivating. Of course, this is an indicator many professionals are caught up in ordinary day to day events, with little or no priority given to things that may lead to breakthrough results. 

In a recent coaching session, it was abundantly clear this Quadrant exercise left quite an impression on a course attendee.

Right away the client shared that she wants to spend more time in Quadrant 2, and that she was noticing that her role had changed upon returning from maternity leave.

She mentioned that her new role and perspective made her feel weird, even creating an identity crisis. We talked about this for awhile and the question came up “What can I do differently in this new role, how can I be more of a strategist?” Great question. It made me think about the essence of good coaching and how asking questions is a hallmark of becoming a leader as coach.

“Why not ask your questions from inside Quadrant 2?” 

was the answer we came up with. Look at the activities inside Quadrant 2. If the majority of our questions tie to creativity, relationship building and learning, we’ll be challenging our teams to get outside of their comfort zone, creating an innovative and energizing team.

New roles requires new focus and new questions to ask.

Let’s Lead by Prioritizing Efffectiveness.