How to Build a High-Performance Team: Stop Answering Every Question
The Counterintuitive Leadership Skill That Changes Everything
In this post, you will discover a little-known and slightly controversial leadership skill set that goes like this:
- Do not answer every single question your team members bring to you
- AND do not say yes to all of their requests for your help
Let me show you how to avoid the trap of making your team dependent upon you - by not answering all the questions they bring to you. It'll free up your day. It'll help you be more effective. It'll help increase the initiative and capabilities of your team overnight, all of you will get home sooner without working harder when you pick up this habit—and it's totally against typical doctor programming.
Check it out.
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The Hidden Cost of Always Being the Answer
Let me teach you a hugely important lesson that is never taught in medical education. It's NOT a clinical skill. It IS a crucial skill when you step out of the exam room, or the O.R. , or the hospital - when you have completed the direct patient contact portion of the encounter(s). The patients have been seen, but the real work is only just begun.
- How do you interface with your team on the administrative side of your practice - coordinate your actions to get the schedule completed and all the documentation done
- OR if you're a senior physician leader, how you interface with your dedicated administrative team(s).
As a doctor leading a clinical team, you are always the place where the buck stops. People ask you questions all the time about your clinical expertise, and you answer them—rightfully so. Clinical questions that demand a doctors expertise should absolutely be answered by you, especially if the need is urgent.
Let me be clear: clinical questions with an urgent need—staff asking, "what's the dose of this medicine?" or "this person's in Afib, what should we do?" etc.—you answer those immediately. But what about all the other questions?
What about all the administrative questions your team brings to you in the hallway between patients—things about filing reports or workflows you didn’t create? Questions your team could find answers to on their own but ask you simply because you're the quickest way to an answer.
Why Answering Everything Undermines Team Performance
Quick example:
I had a dermatology client who ran a busy rural dermatology practice—she was the only medical and esthetic dermatologist for 100 miles in any direction. Her and her team saw about 60 patients a day. She came to me because her staff constantly interrupted her with questions, which overloaded her day.
I asked her a simple question: "What do you do when they ask you a question?"
She looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Well, I answer it, of course."
I told her: "Well, you have to stop doing that."
Her eyebrows snapped up into her hairline, her mouth dropped open and she stopped breathing for 30 seconds before I could explain my recommendation.
If you answer every team question - even the ones that do not require your level of expertise - they will bring every question to you. It's just like Pavlov's dogs. They know at a subconscious level, you are the fastest path to the answer for any question they might have - the path of least resistance.
As a result, this answer-every-question habit makes your team completely dependent on you. They can function only with your answers, even when they could easily find the information themselves.
One day, a teachable moment appeared
9:30 AM. Tuesday. She was rushing between rooms, already 15 minutes behind schedule.
Her brand-new, fresh faced medical assistant stopped her in the hallway and asked,
"Dr. Smith, the flu vaccine’s in—what’s the dose?"
My client regained awareness to find yourself striding down the hallway to her office to look up the answer on her computer. In a flash, my previous advice made new sense.
She turned on her heel, the MA was walking right behind her, and said, "You know, Shirley, that’s a great question and we all need to know the answer. Why don’t you look that up and teach all of us at lunch?"
Then she moved on to her next patient. BOOM
Build Initiative by Asking a Better Question
To build a high-performing team, you must continuously increase their capacity to solve their own problems.
So when you’re asked a non-clinical, non-urgent question that doesn’t require your expertise—take a breath. Don’t waste your time. Build their initiative by turning the question around. DO NOT answer their question. Reply by asking one (or two) of your own
"That’s a great question, John. How are you going to find that out? When you do, teach all of us at the next break."
This simple habit rewires your team’s behavior and encourages independent problem-solving.
Yes, this goes against your doctor programming.
- You were trained to have the answer—quizzed and harassed about it in residency.
- Plus, there’s an ego boost when people rely on you. It feels good to be asked a question and have a real answer 95% of the time. It's like a dopamine drip straight to the amygdala.
- But knee-jerk answering everything will drive you crazy, and your team will use you as a shortcut for every tasks they should handle themselves.
Don’t Let Their Monkey Become Yours
Let’s go a level deeper. Sometimes your team makes requests for help, asking you to take responsibility for a step in a process that’s really on their to-do list. This is another area where doctors struggle with saying no—some of us are world-class people pleasers. (you know who you are ;-)
Harvard Business Review wrote a classic article on this in the '90s: "Who’s Got the Monkey?" When someone asks you to take on a task and you say yes, the monkey jumps from their back to yours. Suddenly, their job becomes your responsibility. Multiply that by 10 people on your team and you’re buried under a pile of monkeys, well your team members walk away unburdened.
If you don’t screen these requests and keep the monkeys where they belong—on your team members’ backs—you’ll be overwhelmed. Everyone else will be having a great day while you’re drowning in tasks.
There’s nuance here, so click that link and grab your own copy of the article. It should be mandatory in any position leadership development program. You will see yourself in the article and a direct path to becoming a more effective leader building high performing teams
The One Simple Habit That Transforms Your Day
The next time someone asks you for help or an answer:
Pause for a heartbeat. Take a breath.
Ask yourself: Am I the only source of this answer?
Is there an urgent need and a downside if I do not answer immediately?
Is the person asking me the question capable of finding the answer for themselves?
If not, turn it back to them.
- Ask them how they will figure it out.
- Ask them to teach the team what they learn.
Just like my dermatologist client learned: when people constantly ask you questions, your first impulse might be to answer. But you’ve got to stop doing that—at least not all the time. Take a breath. Put it back on them.
Believe in their ability. Be curious about what they’ll discover.
When you do this, all roads stop leading to your desk, and your team grows their initiative—the ability to do what needs to be done without being told.
With every question they answer for themselves they grow their capacity to solve their own problems. They grow their own sense of efficacy and agency and expertise.
That’s the definition of a high-performance team.
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PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT
What happened when you practiced your new "monkey management" skills with your team?