(Don't) Start With Why

Picture yourself standing in front of your team. You ask a question that you think is so easy to answer that your mind is already thinking about what you’re going to say next.

Then, you hear it.

The earth shuddering silence.

A void of nothingness that, in the blink of an eye, makes you doubt everything.

If you’ve coached, you’ve experienced it.

Eventually, the silence is broken by one of your players imploring you to just tell them the answer. “It would be quicker if you just told us,” the player bemoans.

For former All Blacks head coach Wayne Smith, the earth shuddering silence became a moment of quiet for him to reflect on his craft. And what he realized can benefit us all.

Lead With Better Questions

“Sometimes I’d ask players, ‘Why did you do that?’ which would create conflict because then you get a rationalization from the player,” Smith says.

Despite being well-intentioned and wanting to elicit first-hand knowledge in order to teach the other players, Smith was told that the tone of the question lead to a player defending their gameplay.

Smith adds: “I learned that I was creating confrontations through the way I was questioning, rather than the questions themselves.”

To get more descriptive answers, rather than defensive answers, Smith changed the line of his inquiry to include more ‘What’ questions.

An exchange might look something like this:

Coach: What did you do on that play?

Player: I passed the ball.

Coach: So, what did you see that made you choose that option?

Player: I saw their winger come in…

Coach: Brilliant! That’s a great cue to read in that situation.

Not only is it harder to come across as judgmental using a ‘What’ question, they also help you stay curious a little bit longer. Ultimately, they are a fast-track to the truth. And in elite sport, speed is a valuable commodity.

Fascinatingly, Smith’s discovery isn’t just relevant when we’re questioning others, it also aligns with prominent research into what’s most effective when we're questioning ourselves.

Start With What

In her TED talk, self-awareness expert Dr. Tasha Eurich explains that asking ‘Why’ questions is a poor way to self-reflect, and leads us further from the truth about ourselves.

Eurich gives two primary reasons that ‘Why’ questions are ineffective when we’re self-reflecting:

1. Because so much of our thinking is outside of our conscious awareness, we end up inventing answers that feel true, but are often wrong.

2. We disproportionately weight recent events over past events, clouding our self-perception.

These skewed perspectives can snowball into self-loathing (I’m useless, why am I like this?) or self-aggrandizing (I’m perfect, why is everyone always against me?). Neither is helpful for anyone in an elite leadership position.

Had Wayne Smith asked himself why his players were reacting poorly to his coaching questions, he might have come up with a rationalization of his own. He likely would have concluded that his questions were brilliant, the tone of his delivery was perfect, and his players were just lazy.

Instead, ‘Why are they not responding positively?’ was replaced with ‘What else can I ask to understand what the player saw’.

It changed Wayne Smith’s coaching, and it can change yours too.

Cody’s Notes

• Don’t eliminate ‘Why’ questions entirely, as they do offer value. Rather, use them as part of a broader inquiry process, like in my post about Coach K.

• “What can I do…” or “What could I have done…” are solid opening lines that can help you stay action-oriented with any line of inquiry.

• My favourite set of reflective questions — courtesy of Jerry Colonna — are as follows (you’ll notice a theme):
  
  1. How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?
  2. What am I not saying that needs to be said?
  3. What am I saying that’s not being heard?
  4. What’s being said that I’m not hearing?