Your job as a manager is to help get the best at people, not in a transactional way, but in I love my people and they love me so much that they are willing to perform for me. The main issue is: How do you do that? Below are the outlines of best practices for people leading teams.

Running a Good Pre-Mortem

A pre-mortem is an exercise where teams ask the question: “If we were to fail, why?” In this process, you would list out all of the reasons and then create ways to mitigate the probability of each reason.

One issue that people are not aware of in pre-mortems. The first person to speak has a lot of influence on everyone’s thinking. This limits the thinking capacity of everyone to consider more possibilities because the first opinion serves as an anchor.

Annie Duke suggests before saying their thoughts everyone takes a couple of minutes to think of the possible reasons for failure. When people have their ideas on paper they are less likely to get influenced by other people’s anchor statements. This extends the possibility of options for failure.

Another step Annie suggests is to list up to 5 points of failure within your control and outside your control. As you discuss as a team you narrow down to the most likely ones and creates ways to mitigate failure.

How to Make Pre-Mortems Even Better?

One thing that is missing with most pre-mortem teams is a reverse engineering success. The leader might ask “What does success look like?” Everyone has their answer and you put it down on the board. The problem is we did what are the things we need to do to maximize the probability of success.

A good framing to reverse engineer success looks something like this.

“Imagine after we finished the project the day after and we are celebrating. This was the best project implemented by this company/team. How would be able to do that?”

As Mike Williams says “The goal is to imagine not just success, but wild success.” Wild success expands your perception of what is possible. for that thought expanding your perception of what is possible. The more you can perceive the higher the likelihood of achieving more.

As Tom Bilyeu says “You can only get as good as the goals that for yourself” Wild success invites you to think beyond hitting a threshold, instead you are trying to set the bar. Most of any success (however you define it) is the ability to believe that you can do it.

Building Trust Through Communication

According to Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator there are 2 main drivers for human behavior:

1. To feel safe and secure

2. To feel in control.

Here are his different methods for achieving that?

Mirror

Mirroring is when you repeat back the last 1–3 words that the other person just said. When you copy, you activate the other person’s mirror neurons making you seem familiar. Familiarity creates certainty. Certainty creates safety.

Ex. Them: Could you get me a notebook

You: Notebook?

Them: Yeah…{then they specify the type of notebook they want.}

In this example, there are 5 types of notebooks. There is Spiral Notebook, Composition Notebook, Scientific or Lab Notebook, Novelty Notebook, Business Notebook.

This question tends to have people explain what they were asking for in a slightly different way.

Side note: The reason I added “Yeah” at the beginning is that it is the first word I usually hear after mirroring.

Label Their Feelings

Labeling their feeling explicitly say your observation of their emotional state. By doing this you make the other person feel understood because you observed instead of them needing to tell you.

How? {Insert either “It seems like” or “It sounds like”} you are {insert emotion} about {insert situation}.

Example: It seems like you are worried about this upcoming deadline.

Example 2: From the charity work that you are doing it sounds like you are a very generous person. Example 2 affirmed a belief that they want to have themselves

Even if you label their emotion incorrectly they will quickly object and tell how they are feeling. Even though you didn’t make them feel safe and secure (through being understood), you allowed them to feel in control because they corrected you.

Paraphrase

Paraphrasing is when you repeat what the other person said in your own words to demonstrate that you understood what they were saying.

Example

You: How was your day?

Them: Today was good!

You: Good? (Mirror)

Them: Yeah. I got an A on my latest physics test, had an awesome conversation with a friend I haven’t talked to in a long time, my soccer team just won the finals of the state cup…{and insert whatever else they talk to you about}

You: It seems like you were very excited today (labeling).

Them: You know what I also learned? {insert another thing they talk about.}

You: Wow, You did X, Y, and Z today and you learned A.

Even though the example above was trivial and clear the point. Most people when they talk they go in 10 thousand different directions and as a result, you lose clarity and coherence. Paraphrasing paired with mirroring and labeling creates 2 things

1. Improves your ability to listen. This happens because you are focusing on repeating and observing keywords and tone.

2. It makes the person feel heard. Which is the essence of feeling good when you are with someone else.

Side note: A small way to enhance the other feeling like you are listening to them use minimal encouragers to convey that you are listening: Yes, uh-huh, I see, Ok.

Asking Calibrated Questions

You can only last so long in a conversation (and still have) using the 3 techniques above. The next step to moving conversation is through Calibrated Questions. A calibrated question is the question that starts with the words “What” and “How.” They avoid words like Why, Can, Is, Are, Do, Does Questions.

When you ask “What” and “How” questions they are usually prompt more elaboration on the other person’s side (similar to the first 3 techniques).

The obvious exception is “How are You?” The problem with this question is most people have a scripted answer: Good, which doesn’t exactly get you anywhere. When you ask “What was on your mind” or “How are you thinking about approaching this problem?” You don’t have a 1-word answer for that.

When you have people elaborate you get 2 things

1. You get an insight into their thinking and how they process information, and their thinking patterns — this is useful for identifying what kinds of roles/problems this person would be best for.

2. As they start expanding on something thing like “What is on your mind?” What tends to happen is they have the opportunity to diverge from a just work-focused call/meeting to a more personal call. This allows you to start building a non-transactional relationship with your employees/team. When you care about them, they care about you, and as Simon Sinek says it usually shows in your results, engagement/happiness levels on employees.

On the other side if you look at Why, Can, Is, Are, Do, Does Questions. They usually prompt 1-word answers.

Can you do this? No.

Is that the reason you became excited? Probably.

Are able to get this done by Sunday? No.

Do you like soccer? Yes.

Does it make sense to take this decision? Nope.

Even though these questions have their place when you are just trying to coordinate between people and create certainty that something will happen like a deadline and specific thing for each task.

These questions are not the best ways to gather information from other people. You could ask “Don’t you think that Person A is a total jerk?” vs “What do you think of person A?”

The first encouraged a 1-word answer and you are implying what you think is the right answer by your question. The second didn’t try to influence your opinion. It just asking for your thoughts.

The one that I conveniently left out is “Why”. “Why did you include the word “Why” in bad questions starters.” Yes, asking “Why” prompts the person to provide you information similar to “What” and “How” questions. The issue is no matter what language that you speak asking “Why” puts other people in a slightly defensive.

People need to try and justify their position to you, making it you vs them. This reduces trust and makes your relationship more transactional. This creates worse performance in people and reduces engagement and happiness levels over time.

What you can do to replace Why is asking “What are the reasons that you are going with this approach? It needs to have an out of curiosity tone because you are trying to understand their perspective rather than try and question their ideas/abilities. This creates a less defensive atmosphere and implies “We are working together to fix this problem and I want to understand your perspective because I think it is valuable.”

Pause

After you mirror, label, paraphrase, or ask a calibrated question, be silent. The time of silence is when the other person is thinking. Don’t let your need to avoid silence make you talk again, these are types of things that make people sit and think, magic happens in that silence. The answers they would give if you let them think are usually deeper and more personal answers than if you didn’t let them think.

In the process of creating rapport using the strategies above, you are breaking the barrier to people telling you things. The more the barrier decreases the more honest they are with you. The more honest they are, the other person trusts you. The more they trust you the more interested they are to work to the best of their ability for you. A higher work ethic leads to better company metrics, higher revenue, and more employee satisfaction.

Creating Trust

Even though the model above is meant to create trust and rapport that is for early stages in relationships to decrease time to begin initial trust. For the long term, we often hear or intuitively understand that trust in a team is important. Even though it is obvious. Nobody talks about “How” and even people who try don’t have a good idea of how. Bernie Brown, a researcher that has spent decades studying the topics of courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy suggests this as a long-term trust model.

Reliability | You do what you say you’ll do. When people need something from you, you always deliver. People can rely on you, whenever everything goes wrong you are one person working to fix it.

Accountability | Own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends. When you as a manager admit your mistakes you signal to everyone else that owning up to your mistakes is the norm. The more mistakes the people own up to the fewer unexcepted problems come up, the lower magnitude of problems you need to fix and then you fix them faster.

Vault (No gossip) | You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share. When you talk about person A’s secret to person B (who shouldn’t know it) you are violating the trust of person A. It also signals to person B that if they tell you a secret you are an untrustworthy person.

Generosity | You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others. Let’s say someone doesn’t get their work done by the specified deadline. Instead of thinking this person is lazy or uncommitted. You can think maybe one of their children is sick, a close friend might have just died. When you go through negative thinking about other people it shows up in your tone turning them away. It also makes you more distrustful of that person by default, which is not exactly a great environment.

How to Help Your Team Perform Better.

As Michael Bungay Stanier describes, most of us fall into the advice trap. This is when an employee asks you how they should approach a problem that they are experiencing and then based on your knowledge/more experience in the company you tell them how to fix the problem.

There are just a couple of issues when constantly seek advice without learning how to solve the problem themselves leads them to be reliant on you to fix problems. Which is the long-term would be a net-negative for the employee.

What good coaches and managers do is ask more questions than answers. When the employee asks a question — the manager can provide them with guiding questions to help the employee figure out the answer. As a result, the employee has an idea of how to approach the problem and most of the information came from themselves, not the manager. Over time, the manager is training the employees to use their figure-it-out muscles while also reducing the time it takes for them to get to the answer.

In the book The Coaching Habit, he has found amazing general questions that act as good starting point to understand help understand how your employee is doing, what they are working on, their biggest challenges, priorities, etc.

1. What is in your mind?

2. A 2010 study showed that at any point in time we have something on our mind — meaning it uses energy which reduces our mental capacity to do anything else. Making you less efficient with your time. You ask this question to help others to release the unconscious drainer of computation energy. The question acts as a more natural conversation starter no matter who you are talking to.

3. What’s the real challenge here for you?

4. The word “real” implies that the challenge has to have a significant impact. The word “challenge” is asking for what is blocking progress. According to a 1997 study, the words “for you” limit the person being asked to just problems for themselves. Not high-level abstract problems that have nothing to do with them.

5. What was the most useful for you?

6. Most of the information advice you give is pointless. Regardless of how good the advice was. The learning from the advice happens when you try to remember it. When you ask this question you force the other person to remember at least 1 thing, which makes it more likely for them to act on it.

7. And What Else?

8. This question can be applied to all 3 above. “And what else is on your mind?” or “And what else is the real challenge for you?” or “And what else was most useful for you?” It forces the other person to extend the number of possibilities. A study conducted by Paul Nutt looking at 168 decisions made within organizations. He found out that 71% of choices preceding decisions were binary. It was simply: Should we do this? Or should we not? Nutt found out that decisions made from these binary choices had a failure rate greater than 50%. He then looked at the success rate of decisions that involved more choices. For instance, what would happen if you added just one more option: Should we do this or this? Or not?. Having at least one more option lowered the failure rate to 30%.

How Leaders Set Up Their Teams for Success

Kory Gorski, a product lead and and Amy Smidutz, director of engineering both say “One of the most important parts of my job is to give people context.” Context as in why what they are doing is important, mapping out what good looks like. To take that 1 step further, Jocko Willink (a retired Navy Seal officer)suggests that you ask the person how they initially plan to approach the task or problem. This is good because the person who is doing the task can get feedback on their thought process, potential issues that will come up, etc. All of which is meant to reduce friction for action through having direction.