20 Questions to Help You Inspire Your People to Reach Their Highest Potential

The following is adapted from a new best-selling book, The Habit Mechanic, by Dr. Jon Finn.

If you are a leader, one of your responsibilities is to communicate with your people in a way that encourages them to be their best and fulfill their roles within the team. The best way to do that? Become an Action Communicator.

Action Communicators help others take positive and helpful action because of how they communicate with them. To do this, they consider both their verbal and nonverbal communication with people. They also build trust with people via their verbal and nonverbal interactions.

An effective Action Communicator will make their team feel confident they can achieve their mission. They will make deliberate attempts to gain a thorough understanding of how individual team members are feeling and create different ways of effectively communicating with different people.

Good Action Communicators regularly discuss their team’s mission, and also connect this to the team’s immediate daily priorities. Ultimately, successful Action Communicators also make people feel safe and tell them that they care about them and believe in them. In turn, this makes it easier for people’s brains to work properly.

Recognize That Language Matters

To help you understand what makes Action Communicators so effective, let’s look at a few examples of great Action Communicators.

In 2015, Eddie Jones took up the head coach position of the England rugby team. Shortly afterward, he formally changed the name of players who were selected on the bench from substitutes to “Finishers.” He explained that he viewed players on the bench as being pivotal to a successful result in any game.

By doing this, Jones elevated the perceived importance of these players, both within the context of the whole squad and in the eyes of the public. This is a great example of building confidence by changing the way messages are communicated.

If a player is not selected to start the match, their morale and confidence may drop. But, by categorizing these players as the group who will successfully conclude (and hopefully win) the match for the whole team, their importance is significantly enhanced.

Lead From the Front

Like Eddie Jones, Sara Blakely is another great Action Communicator. Blakely is a self-made billionaire and the founder of the undergarment brand Spanx.

She regularly stages meetings during which team members are encouraged to highlight their own mistakes. These events are known as “oops meetings,” and Blakely leads from the front by regularly highlighting her own mistakes and failings.

These meetings have several benefits. First, they remind everyone it is okay to make mistakes, as long as they learn from them. Second, they create trust in the group by showing that everyone (even the boss) wants to get better.

Trust makes it easier for people’s brains to work properly. Blakely realizes the immense value trust and learning from mistakes can bring for her leadership and the performance of her business.

Engage in Grounded Positivity

Sir Alex Ferguson was also a great Action Communicator. Ferguson said the most important phrase in soccer is “well done.”

He recognized the importance and necessity of constantly building his players’ confidence, and their sense that they were valued and valuable. Ferguson balanced this approach with a strong focus on regularly communicating major goals, to prevent complacency from creeping into team environments.

Ferguson’s biographies show that he was highly skilled at successfully balancing the reinforcement of competence and challenging his team to improve. This is closely connected to what I describe as grounded positivity.

The Action Communicator Self-Assessment

To help you analyze your current Action Communicator strengths and areas for improvement, you can use the Action Communicator self-assessment tool. This is an intelligent Self-Watching tool. It helps you understand much more about being a good Action Communicator.

It is highly unlikely you will be a perfect Action Communicator. The important thing is that you are thinking about your Action Communicator habits and identifying your strengths and areas for improvement. If you revisit this process every four to six weeks, you will gradually improve your Action Communicator habits.

To complete the self-assessment, read each of the below statements, then select the option about it that best applies: Not a priority, Something I already do well, or Something that I need to do better.

20 Action Communicator Self-Reflection Statements

1. It would be helpful to be more aware and purposeful with my body language when communicating different messages to people in different contexts, for example, face-to-face, via videoconferencing.
2. It would be helpful to communicate my own weaknesses to others more regularly.
3. It would be helpful to help the team understand what it is capable of achieving in the future, both individually and collectively.
4. It would be helpful to say “thank you” and “well done” to people more often.
5. It would be helpful to know the name of every person who directly and indirectly helps me do my job.
6. It would be helpful to accentuate the positives and give people feedback at a minimum ratio of 3:1.
7. It would be helpful if I approached the communication of important expectations with a significant piece of marketing activity that gets people’s attention and has lasting impact.
8. It would be helpful if I delivered negative news face-to-face.
9. It would be helpful if my feedback was less brutally honest (personal and judgmental) and more focused on working well together to get the job done.
10. It would be helpful if I used shared language to trigger helpful behaviors and habits in my colleagues.
11. It would be helpful if I used phrases or slogans to remind people of essential behaviors and habits that underpin the team’s and/or organization’s success, for example, “Let’s do our best to be our best.”
12. It would be helpful if I helped people feel like they were up to the task before asking them to do something difficult.
13. It would be helpful if I asked people to actively agree to my requests, for example, “Will you let me know if this piece of work is going to be late?” instead of “Please let me know if this piece of work is going to be late.”
14. It would be helpful if I reminded people about our organization’s short-term priorities and long-term objectives (mission) more often.
15. It would be helpful if I had a list of helpful and positive things I could communicate to people daily.
16. It would be helpful if I stopped telling people what to do without first asking for their opinion or rationalizing my decision.
17. It would be helpful to be less predictable in how and when I praise people’s efforts.
18. It would be helpful to place a verbal warning shot “across the bow,” or give a “slap on the wrists” before properly punishing people.
19. From time to time, it would be helpful if I publicly praised those who were doing a great job.
20. It would be helpful to be more mindful that written communications can have a more negative tone than if the message was delivered face-to-face.

Reflect on Your Insights

Now that you have gone through the statements to find your current strengths and weaknesses as an Action Communicator, write down some reflections about your insights. It might be helpful to give each area you think needs work a priority score (1 = most urgent; 10 = least important).

Once you’ve spent some time reflecting on your insights, consider which small new helpful habits you can build to help you become an even better Action Communicator. Make a plan to practice implementing those habits every day, and before you know it, you’ll be able to help your people reach their highest potential.

To help you build new leadership habits, I have created a range of over 30 “Habit Mechanic Tools”. They are tried and tested in helping leaders and managers use the new science of leadership to build better habits in the following areas: Action Communicator; Cultural Architect; SWAP Coach; Role Model. You can learn more about them in my new best-seller book, The Habit Mechanic.

For more advice on how to be an outstanding leader and manager, you can find The Habit Mechanic here.