In this episode, we're going to talk about physician leaders number one power tool.

This tool, mastery of this tool separates the excellent, productive leaders on the fast track from people who struggle through their leadership role.

You may be unsatisfied.

You may not feel particularly effective until you pick up this power tool and master it, show it to you.

It activates your team, it builds engagement, it gets the best solutions to the challenges that you face, and it doesn't demand that you work harder.

As a matter of fact, the more you know how to use this tool, the easier your role as a leader gets.

Yet your results skyrocket.

It's not magic.

It's powerful.

Questions.

Check it out.

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Stop Physician Burnout podcast, a physician leadership podcast where you will learn the skills so that we can join together and lead the charge to physician well being skills to earn the respect of your colleagues in the front line, skills to exercise true influence in the C suite and take back your job, your practice, your career, and your life.

All of these tools have been proven effective in my 40,000 doctor physician coaching and training practice.

And if I know one thing, I know you're super busy.

So let's get started.

So in the last episode, we talked about how a physician's top down command and control give orders and expect people to obey.

Skill set doesn't work outside the exam room.

And when you switch to your administrative role, you have to change your hat.

I'm taking my doctor hat off now and start asking questions rather than giving orders.

This switch is so important because think about it.

On the clinical side of the house, you got to work hard to get the diagnosis, gather the information.

You got to be right.

You carry the liability of your decisions right.

You're working really hard to lead the care team, but asking questions allows you to motivate the team to participate and engage.

It allows you to gather the information based on everybody's skills and experience to come up with the best strategies to address the challenges that you face.

It allows all that to happen, and you're only responsible for the quality of the question.

It's a real power tool.

You get more done, your teams are happier, you reach better strategy decisions without having to work harder.

But you know, not every question is a power tool, because you can ask crap questions or you can ask powerful questions.

And I know you've heard this before, but I'm going to teach you a secret agent to code your ring.

What is the most powerful type of a question?

And you've heard this before I'm going to say it, open ended questions.

And I know you may be sick and tired of hearing that, but do you know how to make an open ended question every time?

It's actually quite simple.

It all rests with what word you choose to start the sentence.

There's two words you can use to start a question.

It will always be open ended.

It will always be something where you can't answer it with a yes or no.

An open ended question is something that makes the listener think and then respond.

It can't be answered with a single word.

Yes or no.

They have to think and respond and contribute.

The two words you start your questions with are what and how, what and how.

So let's just.

Let's just compare a doctor who doesn't understand this, who leads in the same way on the administrative side that they do as a physician.

Let's just see how they would address the question of.

They realize that their team has started a project and forgot to associate a metric with the project.

They started a project, but they're not measuring anything, so they can't really tell whether they're making any progress.

This happens all the time.

I mean, if you're listening to me right now, where are you running a project where there's nothing being measured?

Because pretty much everybody's got a project like that somewhere.

So you realize we need to have a metric for this project.

Okay.

Old school doctor, without.

With their doctor hat on, would sit in their office.

This is lone ranger stuff.

Sitting in your office, trying to figure out what to tell the team to do.

You figure it out.

You give them orders.

You try to figure out what to tell the team to do, and you may have found yourself in this situation before.

Plenty of times in the past, when have you ever had a team that was facing a challenge, and you found yourself sitting alone in your office, trying to figure out what to tell people to do?

You may have been there before, right?

That is top down command and control, physician style leadership.

Here's the way I'm gonna encourage you to do it, as a servant leader who knows how to ask powerful questions.

First of all, if you were going to ask your team a question that would have the team come up with a metric or something to measure progress, what would the question be?

Notice I asked a question that started with what.

Give me a question just in your head.

Give me a question that would get you to a metric.

If you ask the team, if the team is sitting here and you ask them this question, it probably is only three or four words long.

Don't make it complicated.

In the end, you want to have agreement of the team on a metric.

What's your question?

How about this one?

What should we measure here?

How are we going to measure progress?

There you go.

Bang, bang.

Right there.

Those two will work just fine.

And as a servant leader, that's your level of responsibility, to pull the team together and to ask an open ended question, help the team address the team's challenges.

Now, you will walk into that meeting with an idea of what you would recommend.

Don't lead with that.

It'll shut your team down.

You walk in with an idea of what you would recommend.

However, listen to their ideas.

They'll probably have a better one than you.

And then make sure you run with one of their ideas because that will engage the team immediately in working together on their idea to address this issue of the missing metric.

So an open ended question.

Save your ideas until last.

Run with the best solution that they come up with if possible.

And if you do want to put your idea in at the end without squashing your team, really softball it like this.

Oh, those are great ideas, everybody.

But, you know, I was just thinking, and I'm not.

I'm not, like, attached to this or anything, but I'm just thinking, what if we did it this way?

What do you think about that?

Because it seems like it goes just a little bit farther than what you just said.

What do you think if we try to do it this way and be a participant in the discussion rather than somebody who just comes in and tops down on the team?

Yeah.

Now, here's another challenge.

If you don't lead this way right now and you start to ask questions to the team, what you may find is that they don't participate, and you may have tried this before a couple of times and given up on it.

That's because one of the other things that a servant leader must do is create a culture and a context of trust and support where people are excited to participate.

The more you ask questions, the more you run with their answers.

You will, over time, and it takes time, develop that culture of trust and support, and we're going to talk much more about that in future episodes.

But for now, your responsibility on the administrative side, in your leadership role is to create powerful questions and focus the team on coming up with the best strategy to address the challenges that they face.

You don't have to worry about getting it right.

You don't have to sit alone in your office and try and figure out what to tell them to do, because you're not going to give them orders.

This isn't the clinical side, and that gives you the power tool.

Once you've changed your hat, remember, I'm taking my doctor hat off.

Now.

Switch from orders to questions.

Ka ching.

And now you're a question machine.

And those questions are not that dissimilar to the questions that you ask a patient when you're trying to figure out the diagnosis in a difficult case.

Be curious, be open, be supportive, be enthusiastic.

Bring some energy, and watch how you can have more fun.

They can have more fun, and the results can skyrocket.

That's it for today.

Until I see you in the next episode.

You keep breathing.

Have a great rest of your day.