As a leader, your job is to ask the best questions: Rick Williams

Rick Williams, a leadership expert, speaker and author 

Rick Williams is a leadership expert, speaker, and author of Create the Future: Powerful Decision-Making Tools for Your Company and Yourself. In an interview with Forbes India, he discusses the nuances of the Create The Future framework—a continuous Ask, Discover, Learn, and Decide process. Edited excerpts from the conversation:  

Leaders create the future for the organisations they lead through the decisions and choices they make. During my management consulting career with Arthur D Little, I saw that leaders of large private and public organisations brought us in to help them through the decision-making process when they faced an important challenge. 

I wrote Create the Future as a guidebook for leaders of mid-size and smaller organisations— private companies, non-profits, and government agencies. Before making an important decision, I encourage leaders to turn their leadership team into an advisory and consulting team. And I offer them the processes and tools they need to make critical decisions without hiring a consultant. 

Q. Please outline the CTF paradigm and its relevance to decision-making.

Underlying the decision-making process in Create the Future are three Convictions: As a leader, I can create the future. I can learn from others. My decisions can express my goals, risk preferences, and values. 

Building on these three Convictions, my leadership decisions are guided by three Principles: I will create the future. I will decide. I am not the company. 

These three Convictions underlie my belief that I create the future for the organisation I lead through the decisions and choices I make. Every decision I make is guided by the Principles of a determination to act and recognition that my responsibility for the organisation I lead is separate from my responsibility to myself and my family.

Q. “All ideas are good ideas”—what’s the competitive edge this approach brings?  

Leaders who believe they know all the issues, have all the relevant information, and know the best way forward without getting input from others are sure to fail in the long run. As a leader, you will make better decisions when you take down your shield of invincibility and be open to learning from others. A successful leader’s competitive advantage is believing that “all ideas are good ideas”.    

Create the Future includes leadership team whiteboard exercises for each step of the decision-making process, from defining the challenge to making the final choice and selecting the company’s best path forward. My guidance to leaders and their leadership team is to take down the barriers to creativity. Get lots of ideas on the whiteboard, even the crazy ones. And discover the great ideas from those. 

Q. How does being in a Zone of Leadership improve performance?

Your Zone of Leadership is where you will be successful—when your job’s requirements draw on your professional strengths and you are passionate about what you are doing. 

You may be the company’s COO and are great at directing internal operations. When the CEO moves on and the board of directors appoints you to be the CEO, you find yourself in a job requiring you to work with customers, investors, and the public. That is not where your skills are, and you don’t like doing it. Then you are not in your Zone of Leadership. When you are in your Zone of Leadership, you are the right person for the job and the job is right for you.

Q. You talk about three leadership roles—Decision Maker, Company Leader, and Team Leader. Why is differentiating these roles important?

If you are the president of a smaller company and you are taking your leadership team through the whiteboard exercises mentioned earlier, you are probably wearing several hats relative to the team exercises. The leadership team needs leadership to get its work done.  

You are probably acting as both the Decision Maker (the president) and the Team Leader (managing the leadership team plus advisors). These are two different roles. You must make sure both jobs are done well. 

The leadership team acts as a consultant or advisor to the Decision Maker. When the leadership team is doing its work as an “advisor to the Decision Maker”, I recommend that you, the Decision Maker, take your Decision Maker hat off. Participate and think like a “consultant” to the Decision Maker. Become part of the advisory team creating new ideas and learning from each other.

Q. Why is listening important to find creative solutions?

Successful leaders must be strong and determined but also be open and vulnerable. Too often, leaders believe they are the only ones who fully understand the facts and issues at hand. Leadership vulnerability includes being open to hearing and understanding different points of view and learning from the experiences of others. It’s about acknowledging that you might be wrong.  

Ask questions. Seek out all available information, opinions, and perspectives. Opening yourself to new information and other points of view is fundamental to smart decision-making. Don’t dismiss ideas and points of view different than yours. 

Too often, leaders believe that asking questions is a sign of weakness. In fact, it is a sign of strength. As the leader, being the smartest person in the room is not your job. Your job is to ask the best questions. 

Q. What does a risk assessment checklist look like?

I don’t outline a risk assessment checklist in the book, but I encourage you to be clear about where risk and uncertainty are coming from and calibrate your risk tolerance when making a decision.  

For example, we often make assumptions about what will or will not happen—what others will do or the success of an essential step in our execution plan. We do not explicitly include the possibility that these assumptions will not happen. 

Avoiding risk is not the goal. Managing risk is the goal. Is failure okay, or must we stay within the financial bounds set by our lenders or by owner expectations? 

Q. In these volatile times, how close can we get to shaping the future?

We do not completely control the future of the organisation we lead. But we can choose a path towards the future with the best potential for achieving our goals, reflecting our risk tolerance, and expressing our values. The future we experience will be determined by the choices we make along the path and by events beyond our control. That is the nature of life. 

The leadership team’s work analysing the execution barriers and key assumptions gives us a guidebook for monitoring progress as we execute our chosen plan. Something will go wrong. Something we assume would not happen will happen. We need to highlight those risks, set up a feedback system during execution, and have a headstart on revisions to the execution plan. The Create the Future approach is a continuous Ask, Discover, Learn, and Decide process for building on the past, learning from the present, and anticipating the future.