Be Careful About Setting the Agenda Rather Than Eliciting It

Leaders are accustomed to setting agendas. We identify priorities, define problems, establish objectives, and determine what needs attention. In many situations, that is precisely what leadership requires.

But there is a subtle leadership danger here: If I always set the agenda, I may spend a great deal of time solving the problems I see while never discovering the problems my people actually have.

There is an important difference between setting the agenda and eliciting the agenda.

That difference can profoundly affect the quality of leadership.

The Problem With Always Setting the Agenda

A leader usually sees the organization from a different vantage point than the people doing the work. That broader perspective is valuable. It is one reason organizations need leaders.

But every vantage point has blind spots.

The CEO does not see everything the front-line employee sees. The principal does not experience the classroom exactly as the teacher does. The department head may understand the strategic objective without understanding every obstacle encountered by the person responsible for accomplishing it.

Yet leaders can easily enter a conversation having already decided what the problem is.

We prepare our questions. We organize our talking points. We determine the priorities. Then we invite people into a meeting that is supposedly intended to help them while leaving very little room for them to tell us what they actually need.

We have set the agenda before we have listened.

And because positional authority carries weight, people often accommodate us. They answer our questions. They discuss our concerns. They respond to our priorities.

The meeting may even appear successful.

But we may leave having discussed the wrong things exceptionally well.

Eliciting Before Directing

Eliciting the agenda requires a different posture.

Instead of beginning with everything I want to discuss, I might begin with questions:

Then comes the difficult part for many leaders:

Listen.

Do not immediately correct. Do not redirect the conversation toward the subject you wanted to discuss. Do not begin formulating your answer while the other person is still talking.

Listen long enough to discover the agenda before assuming you know it.

This does not mean the leader has surrendered leadership. Quite the opposite. Good elicitation is an exercise of leadership because it gives the leader better information from which to lead.

The Leader Still Has an Agenda

Eliciting the agenda does not mean leadership by committee.

There are times when a leader must set direction. Some matters are not optional. Strategy must be communicated. Standards must be maintained. Decisions must be made. Problems that others cannot see may need to be addressed.

A leader who never sets an agenda is not necessarily collaborative. He may simply be passive.

The issue, therefore, is not setting versus eliciting.

The issue is knowing which should come first.

Ask what others see. Understand their perspective. Connect what you have learned with the organization's larger objectives. Then provide whatever direction leadership requires.

The first approach does not diminish leadership authority. It improves the information upon which that authority is exercised.

Elicitation Creates Ownership

There is another advantage.

When people help identify a problem, they are usually more invested in solving it.

Consider the difference between telling a team:

“We need to improve communication.”

and asking:

“What is making your work unnecessarily difficult right now?”

The first statement gives them the leader's diagnosis.

The second may reveal that communication is indeed the problem—but it may also reveal something entirely different.

Perhaps responsibilities are unclear. Perhaps two processes conflict. Perhaps an approval bottleneck is slowing everything down. Perhaps employees have been quietly working around a broken system for six months.

The leader who entered the room determined to improve communication could easily have launched an initiative that solved nothing.

Elicitation exposes reality.

And once people have helped articulate the problem, they can participate meaningfully in solving it. The resulting ownership is considerably stronger than compliance with somebody else's solution.

Beware of the Leader's Assumptions

Experience creates judgment, but it can also create assumptions.

The longer we lead, the easier it becomes to believe we already know what people are going to say.

Sometimes we do.

Sometimes we are spectacularly wrong.

One of the disciplines of mature leadership is therefore maintaining enough humility to ask a question to which we think we already know the answer.

That requires resisting the temptation to demonstrate expertise.

Leadership is not proved by being the person in the room who already has all the answers. Sometimes leadership is demonstrated by asking the question that allows someone else to identify the answer.

This is especially important for senior leaders. The greater our authority, the more carefully we must create room for people to tell us things we did not expect to hear.

Otherwise, our authority can unintentionally become an information filter.

People learn what interests us. They learn which subjects receive attention. They learn which answers produce approval. Eventually, they may begin giving us exactly what our agenda has taught them to give us.

Then we become increasingly confident because everything we hear confirms what we already believed.

That is a dangerous place for a leader.

Pull Before You Push

Leadership certainly involves pushing an organization toward its mission, standards, and objectives.

But before pushing, wise leaders frequently pull.

• They pull out concerns.
• They pull out ideas.
• They pull out obstacles.
• They pull out disagreements.
• They pull out information that might never surface if the leader begins by talking.

Only then do they determine what leadership requires.

There will always be occasions when I need to walk into a room and say, “Here is what we need to accomplish.”

But there should also be many occasions when my first responsibility is to ask:

What do you think we need to talk about?

The distinction is small enough to overlook.

Its effect on leadership can be enormous.

Do not become so accustomed to setting the agenda that you lose the ability to elicit it.