Ask, Don't Tell
Somebody puts their head round your door with a problem. You already know the answer, because you have solved this exact thing forty times. Telling them takes eleven seconds and they go away happy.
Those eleven seconds are the most expensive habit in owner-managed business. Not because the advice was wrong. It was almost certainly right. Because of what it teaches the person to do next time.
What each one produces
Telling and asking both resolve the problem in front of you. They produce completely different businesses over three years.
The top flow is a loop. The bottom flow is a line. That is the entire model.
Telling closes the item. It also confirms, quietly, that this category of problem belongs to you. Nobody says that out loud. It simply gets learned, and the learning is very efficient, because you have just proved you will answer if asked.
Asking is slower on the day and does something different. The person has to form a view, which is uncomfortable, and then defend it, which is more uncomfortable. What they leave with is not just a solution. It is the experience of having produced one, which is the only thing that makes them able to produce the next one without you.
Why telling is so seductive
It is fast, it is accurate, and it feels generous. You are not being lazy when you tell somebody the answer. You are being helpful, and you are demonstrating that you are still the most capable person in the building, which after fifteen years is a hard thing to give up voluntarily.
There is also a decent argument on the other side. Sometimes the answer genuinely is in your head and nowhere else, and letting somebody spend two days rediscovering it is not development, it is waste. That argument is sound. It just gets used to justify about ten times more telling than it actually covers.
The arithmetic
The figures are illustrative and worth running with your own. Take an owner with eight people. Each one brings, on average, three questions a week that they could have answered themselves with a bit of thought.
That is 24 interruptions a week. Say each one takes four minutes, plus five minutes to get back into what you were doing, because the second number is the one everyone forgets. Call it nine minutes. That is around three and a half hours a week, or the better part of twenty working days a year.
The twenty days is not the real cost. The real cost is that the number 24 does not fall. Next year it is 24 again, or 30, because you have hired two more people and trained them the same way. Telling has no compounding effect at all. It buys today and nothing else.
Now assume asking takes twice as long in the moment, so nine minutes becomes fourteen. If that removes even a third of those questions permanently within a quarter, you are ahead inside four months and a long way ahead by the year end. The point is not the precise numbers, which will be different in your business. The point is that one of these approaches compounds and the other does not.
When to tell
This is not a rule against ever answering anything, and coaches who imply that are being unhelpful. Tell, without hesitation, when there is a safety or legal consequence, when it is a genuine emergency, when the person is missing a fact they had no way of knowing, or when you are teaching something technical for the first time.
The working rule is simple. Tell facts. Ask judgement. "Our margin floor is 34 per cent" is a fact and you should just say it. "Should we take this job at 31 per cent?" is judgement, and if you answer it you have kept the judgement.
A worked example
Illustrative, and the shape will be familiar. A supervisor comes in: "The Kendal job is going to overrun by two days. What do you want me to do?"
The telling version takes forty seconds. "Move Dave off Fairfield tomorrow, tell the client Thursday instead of Tuesday, and get the materials ordered tonight." Correct, efficient, and the supervisor will be back with the identical question on the next job, because he has just been taught that overruns are the owner's problem.
The asking version takes about six minutes and goes something like this. "What are the options?" He offers two. "What would you do if I were on holiday?" He picks one, and it is not the one you would have picked. "What is the risk with that?" He identifies it himself, which is the moment the conversation earns its keep. "What would make you comfortable enough to just do it?" He says he wants to know whether he is allowed to move somebody off another job. That is the actual blocker, and it was never the overrun.
Now you have two things. The job is handled. And you know the real constraint was authority rather than judgement, which you can fix permanently in one sentence: anything under a day of labour, move it and tell me after.
Telling would have solved the Kendal job. Asking solved the category.
How to apply it this week
- Count for two days. Every time somebody brings you a problem, note whether you told or asked. Do not change anything yet. Most owners find the ratio is somewhere near nine to one.
- Learn four questions. "What do you think we should do?" "What have you already tried?" "What would you do if I were away?" "What are you worried about here?" Four is enough for almost everything.
- Add the follow-up. After their first answer, say "and what else?" The first answer is the obvious one. The second or third is usually where the thinking starts.
- Hold the silence for seven seconds. This is the hardest part and it is where most owners fail. Count it if you have to. The urge to fill the gap with your own answer is enormous and the silence is where the work happens.
- Announce the change. Tell your team what you are doing and why. Otherwise the first few weeks read as you being evasive or testing them, and people find that unpleasant rather than developmental.
- Let one good-enough answer stand. This week, accept a solution that is about eighty per cent of yours and say nothing. That single act does more for ownership than any conversation about empowerment.
The mistake most owners make
The fake question. "Don't you think we should just move Dave?" That is not a question, it is an instruction with a question mark stapled on, and everybody in the business can identify one instantly. Do it a few times and people stop answering honestly, because they have worked out that the game is to guess what you already think.
The second mistake is asking and then overriding. If you ask for a view, get one you disagree with, and immediately reverse it, you have run the slow version of telling and lost credibility as well as time. Either let it stand, or be clear from the start that you are consulting rather than delegating, which is a perfectly honest thing to say out loud.
The third is impatience. Owners try this for a fortnight, find that people are slow and their answers are worse than the owner's, and go back to telling with the conclusion confirmed. Of course the answers are worse at first. They are meant to be. You are watching somebody do reps.
The questions to sit with
- Out of 10, how often do you ask rather than tell when somebody brings you a problem?
- How many of the questions that reached you last week could the person have answered themselves?
- What would happen to your business if you were genuinely uncontactable for a fortnight?
- When did you last let a good-enough answer stand instead of improving it?
This is the foundation of 5 Star Coaching in The Leader Programme. Being asked good questions rather than given good answers is also, incidentally, what makes coaching work at all. If it did not change how people think, it would just be advice, and advice is cheap and everywhere.
