The Leadership Pipeline

are met?” or “How well do your people understand the quality standards and what are you doing to assure they meet then?” These questions elicit quite a different response and help the manager of others to focus on the right work. Failure to ask them the right question inhibits their development.

Learning to ask the right questions is an especially tricky skill for managers of managers. Most likely they have been asking production or quality-oriented questions to their “manage self” people, such as “When will you be finished with the project?” or “Why is quality slipping?” When they ask those same questions to managers of others, these people will take personal responsibility for getting things done; they will assume from the questions that this is what their manager wants in order to speed things up or improve quality. Managers of others who were selected based on their technical prowess will frequently revert to type and become “manage self” employees. Managers of managers, therefore, should ask management and leadership questions. For example, “What should you do to your organization to assure that due dates

Observations from the Field