One of the first tips that I got from one of the mentors I’ve had since I started working as an engineering manager was “on your one on ones, you should be asking a lot of questions and your report should be talking more than you”.
Following that suggestion, I created a bank of questions that I use in my 1:1s. This question bank helps me because at the beginning I found myself asking really vague questions such as ‘how is everything going?’. That type of questions rarely got an answer that we could iterate on. I wanted to have more productive conversations to try making my reports more successful.
The why question
In my question bank I had one question that I found myself using a lot because I thought it would help my reports. My question was: ‘Why did you do X?’.
At that time, I thought that asking this was going to encourage the report to do a retrospective into why did she do something (that most likely could have gone better) and thinking about alternatives that could be done in the future. To be fair, I actually usually changed that question for ‘why did we do X?’ so that it didn’t sound too personal or aggressive.
The problem with asking this question is that the report is more likely go into defensive mode. When asking ‘why did you decide to do X and not Z on that project?’ (in a context where the project failed), you are putting that person in a position where she might think that you are judging her values and that you question her willing to do things well.
The what question
A really simple change that I have done is to modify that ‘why’ for a ‘what’. So instead of asking ‘why did you do X?’, I now try to ask ‘what let to the decisions of doing X?’. By doing this little change, I’ve noticed that the reports are more willing to engage in the conversation with me, analyze the situation that occurred in the past and provide ideas to improve in the future. There is no time spent in trying to defend themselves, but all the time goes right away into problem solving.
I encourage you to try this. I think that by doing it, your conversations will go from being emotional and charged with value judgements to productive conversation that focuses on what happened and what can we change to get better.
But I still love using why…
I think there is a time where we can use ‘why’. And that time is when we are talking about future scenarios. The future is something that hasn’t happened yet (in case you didn’t know), so when we ask a report ‘why are you going to do X and not Y’, we are not encouraging the person into having regrets or self blames on something that they can’t change, because they actually can.
Asking why for future scenarios helps balancing all the different alternatives that we have and that we haven’t chosen yet.
