The Metiss Group's Blog

It’s a well known fact that 75% of business startups fail in the first year, over 80% fail in the first 5 years, and only 4% survive 10 years. Given these overwhelming odds, why do so many entrepreneurs risk their life savings and start businesses?  When most people anticipate future events, their initial reaction is to be overly optimistic.

We’ve all sat in meetings where the high influencers in the group persuade the team with the optimistic vision.  The opinions of the quiet realists are often overlooked or stifled by the enthusiasm created by the energetic influencers.  Good leaders recognize decisions can be hijacked by the overly optimistic vocal team members and go out of their way to extract the opinions of the less forceful deep thinkers.

One approach is for leaders to challenge their team to conduct a premortem when making important decisions.  When the team has almost come to an important decision, have the team imagine they are a year into the future. They implemented the plan as it now exists.  The outcome was a disaster.  Have them discuss what went wrong that created the disaster.  It’s amazing how engaged the introverted conscientious team members become and how better decisions are made using this approach.

Leaders who empower their decision makers to conduct premortems make more successful decisions.

When communicating and giving feedback, leaders should use questions rather than statements for a number of reasons.

When leaders ask questions and solicit solutions, they gain commitment to the execution of that solution since the direct report feels empowered. Secondly, they expand the direct report’s critical thinking ability when they ask questions, probe for answers, outcomes, and long term ramifications.

In Jim Collins’ book, “How the Mighty Fall,” he stresses the importance of a leader’s question to statement ratio suggesting they appoint someone in a team meeting to track how many statements they make and how many questions are asked.  Then he suggests leaders systematically try to increase the number of questions to double that ratio over the period of one year.

Leaders should empower direct reports by using questions to increase critical thinking and problem solving ability throughout the organization for more success.