Developing Intercultural & Collaborative Intelligence

How should the leader inspire great ideas from the team?

Being part of @Palitra Media Holding, the strongest Multimedia Holding in Georgia, for more than 10 years have given me a broad experience in management. With the increasing responsibilities, the biggest challenge for me is to make the right decisions, based on the high performance of the team. So, in this article, I would like to introduce you to the Socratic method in leadership.

Building a successful business requires being good at making the right decision. There are always options and challenges around us, especially in the highly competitive century, when people are not competing only with each other, but also with AI, becoming smarter from day to day. So, how to make good decisions?

First, to make good decisions, the leader should be surrounded by great ideas. In an effective team, great ideas come from the employees. ?However, it leader who should stimulate and support the open mindedness among the teams to express the ideas.

What role does the leader play in inspiring great ideas from the team?

The key is asking great questions. In the technological era, people have easy access to a huge amount of information, which limits the urgency of thinking. So, the great questions are those questions which prompt critical thinking, stimulate analyses and challenge assumptions. To dig dipper and get the idea of the techniques used in management within this context, we should look back to Socrates.

Empowering leadership though Socratic Open-Mindedness

Principles of Socratic Method

Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 BC), was probing his ‘students and colleagues' by asking continual questions until inconsistensies were revealed, thus demonstrating the falsehood of the initial assumption. This method became known as the Socratic Method and is regarded as Socrates' timeless contribution to philosophy.

According to @Fred Clay, Executive Fellow of FUSE (the company specialized in accelerating progress and inspiration of systemic change at government and business communities in California, USA), Socratic method is a powerful method to encourage dialogue, critical thinking, and problem-solving in the communities. Fred Clay explains how the Socratic method can be utilized by managers and directors to drive innovation, enhance team engagement, and optimize decision-making. In his article Fred emphasize four main points to implement Socratic-method successfully, these are following:

Asking Powerful Questions: The questions should be provoking, to stimulate critical thinking of the team members.

Active Listening and Probing: The role of the leader in this kind of discussion is active listening, to catch the smartest ideas.

Encouraging Dialogue and Collaboration: Managers should encourage open discussions among the team members.

Guiding without Imposing: When the manager guides discussion without imposing own opinions, the team tends to perform better, as they arrive to their own conclusions, thereby achieving a diversity of ideas on the specific topic.

"Remember that your goal is to find the best answer; not to give the best one you have," -?Ray Dalio - the founder of the world's biggest hedge fund firm, Bridgewater Associates, which manages $124 billion.

In the article, published at Forbes by @Michael Lindenmayer, we can find some more tips of implementing leadership skills of Socrates in daily processes.

Being Humble – managers often fail to admit they do not know something, leading to the discrimination in the workplace, so Michael recommends us to ‘check our ego at the door’, before we go to work.

Benjamin Franklin for example, often opened his argument with the words: ‘I could be wrong’, thus giving others a chance to share their different point of view.

Method of 3 P’s is also part of Socratic Leadership techniques - possibilities, probabilities, and priorities. As concentration on the topic is important, to get rid of negative impact of multitasking and outside noise, Michael recommends implementing 3 P’s method: To explore the possibilities, there are certain type of questions needed to generate the ideas. Other questions encourage the team to assess the probable outcomes of potential decisions. The third type of questions help decision-making, in terms of prioritization.

Famously quoted, Socrates states "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing."?While the leader is open to innovations and changes, Socratic method stimulates an open-mindedness for the team and manager also.

In conclusion, Socratic Method drives to the diversity of the ideas while stimulating the employees to open mindedness that obviously drives to innovations. However, according to studies of conversations by Harvard Business School, the researchers arrived at a foundational insight: People don’t ask enough questions.?There are many reasons, of why people do not ask questions, such as egocentrism, apathy, or shyness. However the good news is that asking questions naturally boosts intelligence. And to succeed, we should definitely begin something!

Socratic Method of questioning may be a great start for any manager to try within the team. And when you start, gradually you will notice that the questions posed will become more powerful and the open-mindedness within the team will grow. Open-mindedness and diversity in the organization is what the contemporary business world is looking for to thrive in the highly competitive business environment.

So, if ‘Genius is in simplicity’, just start asking questions thoughtfully and get ready for discoveries.

#FutureofWork #CollectiveIntelligence

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References:

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/socratic-method

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/unleashing-power-socratic-method-guide-managers-fred/

https://www.forbes.com/profile/ray-dalio/?sh=7bbce95f663a

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellindenmayer/2013/06/18/ask-great-question-leadership-skills-of-socrates/?sh=119b9f059879

https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-surprising-power-of-questions

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