The Answer is a Question: The Missing Superpower that Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and Leader

By Laura Ashley-Timms and Dominic Ashley-Timms

The New Approach to Management Being Used in Over Forty Countries

“Redefines the purpose of management for the 21st century.” - Matthew Syed, Author, Journalist & Broadcaster

“For any leader or manager in business, you need this! It has truly changed the way I think about leadership, for the better!” - Nick Pointe

“I have transformed the way I communicate. One of the best investments in career learning that I’ve made. It serves as a daily guide to my success as a manager.” - Fadinding Darboe, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

"At last, a highly accessible read which opens up the benefits of coaching to the entire organisation. This book introduces Operational Coaching™ as a scaleable management methodology. Fascinating cases studies from all sectors as well as a critical tool for pushing up engagement and productivity. A must-read for all C21st managers and leaders." - C McLachlan, Programme Director

“STAR® has had a major impact on how I operate as a professional, it has completely changed the way I work, giving me the knowledge and skills to develop on a personal perspective and to develop my team.” - Carl Drinkel, Senior Quality Engineer, Hitachi Rail

With ever-increasing workloads, demanding schedules, and growing instability, it’s little wonder that our stress levels are rising whilst employee engagement everywhere is miserably low. The world has changed and impacted how we work, yet our management models have not kept pace; we’re still trying to manage as we always have—by simply taking on more and more.

• But what if instead of bringing your problems every day, those you work with started generating the solutions themselves?

• What if your team could step up and take work off you so that you got 20 percent of your time back?

• What if making one small change could transform not only your team’s engagement levels but also your career?

In The Answer Is a Question, multi-award-winning performance consultants Dominic and Laura Ashley-Timms set out a simple approach for rehumanising the practice of management.

In a step-by-step walk-through of their ground-breaking STAR® model (used by FTSE and Fortune 500 companies), they’ll show how you can develop a new superpower that’s been proven to work by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in a major academic study across sixty-two organisations.

This book is produced in stunning full colour and provides invaluable insights, examples, and mini-missions that will show you precisely how to make some immediate changes that will yield fast and exciting results and revolutionise how you manage forever.

This isn’t another post-pandemic management guide contemplating the nuances of remote work. The Answer is a Question is the distillation of hard-won insights into actionable, measurable steps.

The Missing Superpower that Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and Leader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TSO
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9780117093942

Book preview

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The contents in this Work and anything contained in it is distributed As Is, without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to implied warranties for its quality, performance, merchantability, or fitness for any particular purpose. Neither Notion Limited, Notion Holdings Limited, the authors, and/or the publisher, its employees, agents, dealers and/or distributors shall be liable to any end user(s) and or third parties with respect to any liability, loss and/or damage caused and/or alleged to have been caused directly and/or indirectly by the contents of this material or any parts thereof, and the aforementioned parties disclaim all such representations and warranties and assume no responsibility for any errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any other inconsistencies herein.

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Trademarks

Operational Coaching™, Quest-Gen®, STAR® and all of their related graphical representations (the Trademarks) are all trademarks of Notion Holdings Limited and are used under licence by Notion Limited. All rights reserved. Notwithstanding the copyright in this Work asserted by the authors Dominic Ashley-Timms and Laura Ashley-Timms, other linked materials provided to you by Notion Limited or its authorised partners are the copyright of Notion Limited. You are granted a free and non-exclusive, personal licence to use the Trademarks and the Copyrighted materials for your personal use only. The reproduction, publication, printing, copying or transmission by any other means of Notion’s Trademarks or their inclusion within other materials for public presentation or for wider training purposes, whether commercial or non-commercial, is strictly prohibited without the written permission from Notion Limited. A separate licensing arrangement will be required for such use. Please contact [e-mail] to discuss your licensing needs.

First edition 2022

ISBN 9780117093911 (paperback) | 9780117093942 (ebook)

To Amélie, Zack and Taya, who only occasionally rolled their eyes when we asked them questions and instead embraced the power of what they were learning as very young children by asking, "What would have to happen for you to want to buy us ice cream?"

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. OUR COMPLEX LIVES

2. THE STORY BEHIND STAR®

3. STOP…AND CHANGE STATE

4. THINK…IS THIS A COACHABLE MOMENT?

5. ASK…AND ACTIVELY LISTEN

6. RESULT…GET A COMMITMENT TO ACTION

7. PUTTING STAR® IN FLOW

8. MOVING FROM MANAGER TO ENABLER

9. THE ART AND SCIENCE OF ASKING QUESTIONS

10. THE POWER OF GETTING TIME BACK

11. CREATING YOUR BRIGHT SHADOW

12. DEVELOPING A STAR® CULTURE

13. TAKING ACTION

APPENDIX

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

WHAT'S NEXT

CHAPTER NOTES

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

—VIKTOR FRANKL

Austrian neurologist, philosopher, and author

You’re doing too much.

Take a moment to reflect on that.

In fact, you’ve never done so much.

As a manager and leader, you probably don’t realise that you’re also doing other people’s work too.

What if you could choose to do something about that?

Instead of being swept along by your career, doing your best, what if you could develop a new superpower that had the potential to change everything?

Thousands of managers around the world have already learned how to apply this superpower. As a result, they’ve been benefiting from consistent improvements as their teams solve problems more quickly and have stepped up to take work from them. Within a short period of time, these managers have become less stressed and more successful. They’ve transformed their own effectiveness within their roles, have been recognised earlier and promoted more quickly.

This proven superpower can transform you, too, and help you to achieve more while regaining control of how you spend your time. By practising some simple steps you’ll change the way that you work with everyone, which will make you more successful and less stressed too.

The world of work has changed dramatically and with it, the expectations placed on us are broadening still further. There probably hasn’t been another career-defining moment like this where a commitment to change how we work could also fundamentally change the nature of our workplaces. Now is the time to reinvent the purpose and practice of management.

And what is this new superpower of which we speak? It’s probably one of the most underutilised skills that we all have. The answer is a question. The humble, authentic, thought-provoking, stop-you-in-your-tracks, insightful, powerful and potentially life-changing question.

Learning how to retrain your brain so that it’s permanently on alert to incorporate more powerful questions into everything that you do will redefine you as a manager and leader and accelerate your career. It will also improve your relationships outside of work, making you a better friend, parent, partner and colleague.

If you’re a leader or influencer, there’s also the potential to transform your organisation’s culture surprisingly quickly and easily. Adopting the behaviours that support the asking of more powerful questions into the heart of an operation can underpin a culture that’s more collaborative, inclusive and innovative with measurable improvements in engagement, productivity and performance.

And all of this can be achieved in just a few months.

Sounds too good to be true? Groundbreaking research conducted by The London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) proves that it’s not. We hope that by the time you’ve read this book you’ll be as excited as we are about embracing the potential for the future of work and also understand exactly why The Answer Is a Question.

But first, let’s talk about you…

…and Frankenstein.

WE ARE ALL FRANKENSTEIN MANAGERS

Most people are familiar with the Frankenstein story. Dr Frankenstein built his creation from a variety of body parts and then brought it to life with a bolt of electricity. Despite his best intentions, Frankenstein’s creation was far from a perfect specimen. As managers, we’re all a bit like that too.

We’ve each been put together from an amalgam of the experiences we’ve had. We’ve learned from our mentors and those who’ve managed us. We’ve adopted tips and tricks from colleagues and the training programmes we’ve attended. We’ve learned about time management, negotiation, presentation and influencing skills, conducting appraisals, coaching and mentoring, employment law, leadership and communications—to name a few. We’ve picked up ideas from the books we’ve read, the conferences we’ve attended, and the videos we’ve watched. When we need a new skill, we simply bolt it onto what we already know. As such, we’re all unique creations—our own Frankenstein manager—and none of us is perfect.

We can forgive ourselves our imperfections though; what else were we supposed to do?

Each of us has had to build ourselves to become the leaders and managers that we are today without having been taught exactly what might make the most difference or exactly how we’re supposed to work with others to drive the best outcomes from our teams and those we work with. Instead, we’ve developed our own perspective on how we’re supposed to perform, built from the sum of our personal experiences and what we think good might look like. We’re all just doing our best in the absence of any unifying style or philosophy of management that might guide us.

The cold hard reality though is that nothing’s really advanced since the principles of scientific management were first set out by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911. Management at the turn of the last century regarded the human component of the production line as a resource and sought industrial efficiencies that would resolve the wasteful aspects of employed labour. And those considerations still hold powerful sway today in how we think within the organisations that we operate inside.

So much of the language that permeates the human side of work continues to reinforce those labour management principles—managing workflows, driving efficiencies, labour scheduling, reducing costs, delayering, automating. From human capital services (in consulting) to HR analytics (in software), we’re analysing performance, crunching the people in the machine down to a series of quantitative metrics. Human resources…?

Think about it.

REHUMANISING MANAGEMENT

While there’s been a rapid increase in employee expectations regarding respect, inclusion and personal well-being, management practice has been relatively slow to keep pace. One increasingly popular approach towards rehumanising management and bringing about a change in the people capabilities of managers is the idea of coaching. Believing in the principle that helping others to achieve their goals will transform how we work together is an attractive idea and has led many organisations to invest heavily in training their managers and leaders to conduct coaching sessions to help develop their employees. In response, a vast array of Manager as Coach–type courses have sprung up to meet rising demand varying in length from bite-sized ten-minute videos all the way up to programmes lasting for several days.

Despite this global investment, research (explored in Chapter 1) shows that employee engagement levels have continued to decline and, in many parts of the world, stand at an all-time low. Much of this is attributable, still, to poor quality management.

So how can we quickly and easily transform the capability of all managers? The answer to this question is the subject of this book. It’s not a book about coaching, or certainly not in the way that you’ve considered it before.

I HAVEN’T GOT TIME FOR THIS

A common complaint of all busy managers everywhere is I haven’t got time. Yet at most companies, managers are still being asked to do more and more. The managers at Royal Mail were no different.

In September 2011, our company, Notion, was brought in to work with Royal Mail, the United Kingdom’s postal service. At this point, they’d already put 2,800 of their managers through a two-day training programme to teach them manager as coach skills. The programme had received lots of praise from appreciative learners, but the organisation hadn’t detected any measurable behavioural or organisational change—no sustainable impact on performance, despite the significant investment.

When we conducted interviews across the organisation to understand what had prevented them from incorporating the skills they’d recently learned, the answer was unanimous: I’ve got no time for this. The course was great, but we’re busy, and we’ve got to get the mail out.

They were right, of course. As a specialist performance consultancy, we’d heard the same from managers across other corporate clients we were working with.

THERE WAS ANOTHER WAY

What would have to change to allow busy, time-starved managers the opportunity to develop their people?

Exploring the answer to this question and unpicking what was really going on had become the focus of our work.

Through months of painstaking research by our team of leading coaches, psychologists and consultants, we recognised that managers faced with different situations needed to be able to change their behaviour in a split second.

Instead of always reacting to situations and giving the solutions, they needed to switch to asking questions that would better engage the talents of those around them to step up to take on the problem-solving themselves.

To make this successful, any new approach would need to be usable by managers at any level, across all organisations, and in every sector.

Through our project work with a number of different clients, we codified the behaviours and skills that managers would need to adopt. The approach that we developed led to the creation of the STAR® model, the behavioural change model for managers—explored fully in the early chapters of this book.

TESTING STAR® AT SCALE

Royal Mail was in the middle of the biggest change programme in its history. They were redesigning the entire way the mail was going to get delivered. The scale of change would alter the job of every postal worker. If this transformation was going to work, everyone—the managers, the frontline workers, and the unions—would have to collaborate to implement wholesale changes to working practices. They needed a culture that would not only support the change being undertaken but also help Royal Mail thrive as a result.

Interviews with Royal Mail managers at all levels showed that they shared a habit of taking on all the problems brought to them by their team members, adding to the pressures they were under and to their already massive workloads. But what if they could flip that on its head and find a way instead to encourage their team members to find solutions themselves? What might that lead to? If they could get their team to take on more of the problem-solving work, could they generate greater engagement from employees and might that increase innovation and improve performance? Which behaviours would managers need to change? What would need to happen to sustain these new behaviours? Could this win time back for the time-starved manager?

The STAR® model was introduced to the managers in Royal Mail, who ranged from senior leaders to delivery managers. They noticed immediately that their fellow workers, when engaged in a collaborative and open way, came up with their own innovative approaches and took on accountability for carrying them out. The managers started sending us reports about how they were solving business problems, creating win-win scenarios with external suppliers, having better career development conversations with members of their team, strengthening working relationships, seeing their direct reports taking on increased accountability, improving communication in conflict situations and resolving ongoing operational issues.

In these early STAR® programmes with Royal Mail and other organisations, 100 percent of the managers that we worked with reported that they were more effective managers as a result of using STAR®. Their sponsoring organisations recorded improvements in safety, morale and confidence, an increase in the number of promotions, the retention of staff, increases in sales and year-on-year cost reductions. Managers were also reporting that they were doubling the amount of time they spent coaching their teams.

A NEW MANAGEMENT PRACTICE—OPERATIONAL COACHING™

Since establishing the impact that STAR® could generate, we’ve gathered data and evidence from managers working in over forty countries. As we continued to refine how to make the skills more accessible, we quickly found that we needed to describe what it was that managers were now doing that was leading to the changes we were seeing.

Managers were telling us that (by applying what they’d been learning), their overall management style had changed. As a result, we came to call this entirely new and innovative management practice Operational Coaching™—a term that we subsequently trademarked to clearly distinguish it from more formal and structured, one-to-one coaching sessions being taught as a part of Manager as Coach-type programmes.

Operational Coaching™ is a mindset and a style of engaging and managing others using an enquiry-led approach.

On the back of increasing awareness about the impact that STAR® was generating everywhere that it was being implemented, in 2019 the UK Government selected the STAR® Manager programme for a full-scale academic study, the largest of its kind ever undertaken. They wanted to learn whether Operational Coaching™ could improve the UK’s productivity. The results of the groundbreaking research (conducted simultaneously across sixty-two organisations) tell an incredible story that’s fully explored within this book. The research has also generated a number of academic papers, and STAR® programmes have received multiple awards for quality, innovation and learning design.

NINE REASONS TO READ THIS BOOK

We hope you’ll get significantly more than nine things from reading this book, but here are some of the key insights, activities and opportunities we’ll be exploring:

The impact we have on those we interact with

How you can develop a more agile approach that better supports the well-being of your colleagues in a fast-changing environment (which may also include having to manage multi-generational and hybrid teams)

Why the huge investment in coaching has not led to sustainable changes in engagement levels and what you can do to quickly change that

What the STAR® model is and how it can transform management

Exactly how you can apply STAR® in your everyday work and benefit from the changes that it will bring

How to use QuestGen®, a tool that will help you learn how to supercharge the questions you ask so that they really engage and develop those around you

How to stop firefighting, get a day a week of your time back, be less stressed and deliver higher-value work

Insights from research showing the impact Operational Coaching™ can have, at scale, across sixty-two organisations in fourteen sectors and how it can improve retention, engagement, and productivity

Specific activities you can do to further develop your skills (supported by a range of examples, case studies, and other resources)

HOW TO GET THE MOST FROM THIS BOOK

If you knew there was something you could easily do that would improve your results in a short period of time, then it becomes your choice whether to do that or not. This book is about offering you that choice. The skills and techniques you’ll learn will improve your performance. Don’t just take our word for this; you’ll read real examples shared with us from managers just like you throughout the book.

Our mission is to transform workplaces globally by developing a million STAR® managers able to create engaging, productive, inclusive and collaborative cultures. That’s our key motivator for writing this book and sharing not just what STAR® is but specifically how to incorporate it into everything that you do, bringing it to life in a way that’s pragmatic and useful.

To get the most out of this book, consider not only reading it but also completing the mini-missions that appear in some of the chapters and using the additional resources that we’ve shared in the appendix.

If you’re a manager with a team (or a soon-to-be line manager) consider how you can use what