In the end, high quality partnerships come down to trust. But if you rely on blind trust, you’re probably in for a rude awakening.

If you are responsible for signing up a new vendor, these 14 questions will significantly increase your likelihood of a great partnership experience and reduce the many business risks of a poor one. Some questions you can and should ask the vendor directly. For others, you will need to do your own homework. Here they are.

1. What is their core product or service?

For any new solution you are considering, it’s important to know if this is their core service (e.g. their “Big Mac”) vs. their new flavor of the week.

2. What results have their solutions produced?

Ultimately, you will be judged by the results YOU produce, with the assistance of your vendor partner. Don’t just research their offerings, research the outcomes as well.

3. How long have they provided the desired service?

It’s also important to know how much experience the vendor has. Are they “tried and true” or are they looking to get their big break by working with you?

4. What other work have they done with clients in your industry and in your situation?

Many business issues are similar across markets, but still – if your vendor has worked with similar clients and situations, they may come in with more familiarity.

5. What is their market position?

Is this vendor at the luxury or discount end of the market spectrum? Adjust your expectations accordingly.

6. What have other clients’ experiences been?

Don’t just take the sale rep’s word for things. Inquire of past clients – the more detailed, the better.

7. Do they have the capability/capacity to complete this work?

This is especially important if you have a lot of work to offload. The last thing you want is to sign a large contract and then have the new vendor struggle to staff it.

8. How will you partner throughout the project?

This speaks to the accessibility and flexibility the vendor will provide. Will you work together or will the vendor perform all the work? Will they be available if you want to meet? If you want to provide input, will they be open to it?

9. Can you contract for multiple phases instead of one full body of work?

If this is a new project, a new relationship or a mission critical assignment, it may be less risky for you to pursue a phased approach vs. shooting for the moon.

10. What is the price range for this type of service?

Price should never be the first, or only, consideration (there are much higher costs than price), but don’t wait until the last minute to inquire. Ask for a typical price range and then talk specifics once you think there may be a fit.

11. If it’s evident the solution isn’t working midway through, how will you course correct?

This conversation is less uncomfortable to have before an agreement than halfway through a contentious project.

12. If the solution doesn’t produce the anticipated results, will you have any recourse?

Again, you are being judged on results. Expect the vendor to hold you accountable (as they should). Do the same with them. Remember, the responsibility for performance oversight is yours.

13. If the solution produces results beyond your expectations, how will you scale it for additional capacity?

It’s important to risk manage for success, not just failure. If you may want to build bigger down the road, design the infrastructure with the potential to add-on vs. starting over from scratch.

14. If you love the service and want to extend, will there be any significant changes in personnel, accessibility or pricing?

If you are signing up with a new vendor, you may get the benefit of reduced pricing or special attention for the first contract. Then if you want to continue, the pricing may change or your favorite liaison may get reassigned elsewhere. Once again, it’s better to inquire about this upfront than be surprised down the road.

For those of you with significant partnership experience, what other questions would you add?

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website or   follow him on Twitter.

Over the years, I’ve adopted a simple definition of coaching: “To coach is to develop another person by listening and asking questions to clarify ideas and commit to action.”

If you look closely, you’ll notice five key characteristics. I’ve listed each of them out below:

Developing Others

To coach is to play a development role. It’s focused on growing the competency and capacity of the employee. Consider the difference between a directing approach (“Here is what I need you to do”) and a coaching approach (“Let’s think about how you might address this challenge”). Both are appropriate at times, but the coaching approach is explicitly developmental.

Active Listening

Active listening requires some of the most discipline of any skill there is – but the dividends are enormous. It’s impossible to coach effectively without it. Quite simply, active listening seeks simply to understand the situation and delay the need to formulate a response or craft a solution.

Asking Questions

Asking powerful, open-ended questions goes hand-in-hand with active listening. It’s the perfect antidote to giving unsolicited advice or providing explicit direction. (Those responses are necessary in many management scenarios, but tend to ruin a coaching-rich opportunity). The more input an employee provides, the more he’ll own the solution.

Clarifying Ideas

Clarifying ideas is an extension of both active listening and asking questions. Without this clarity, employees may be unclear about the ultimate desired result – and managers may be unclear about key nuances of the situation. Adept coaches resist the urge to solve the problem until they have understood the situation and taken the opportunity to explore a variety of options together.

Commiting to Action

The last thing coaching leaders do is elicit a commitment to action. Otherwise, the conversation may be positive, but it won’t be productive. Coaching leaders are sure to ask the employee to commit to following through on the agreed upon action.

My favorite conversational “formula” for holding a coaching discussion is the GROW model, which stands for Goal, Reality, Options and Will (or Way Forward). It incorporates each element into a simple framework that can be completed in just a couple minutes.

Coaching employees is hard work – it takes a lot of practice and discipline to develop and use the skills. But the rewards are enormous: a more capable staff, more buy-in, and more capacity for you as the leader, to name a few. Give it a try and keep at it. In the end, everyone wins on this one.

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website or follow him on Twitter.

You don’t have to be special to be a leader and you don’t have to be an expert to help other leaders succeed. You can start right now, right where you are.

Trusted Leadership Advisor is a compilation of some of my previous posts on this topic. In the ebook, I show you how to think about your role as a trusted leadership advisor, what to say and how to get started. Take a look – and if you find it helpful, please share it.

I’d also appreciate your feedback. This is my first ebook and I want to know if the format, structure and ideas prove to be helpful for you. You can leave me a comment below or contact me directly.

There’s so much work to do – let’s work together!

The interesting thing about coaching is how dynamic of a leadership role it is. Supervisors can coach. Mentors can coach. Peers can coach. Executive coaches can coach (obviously). Just about anyone can coach at one time or another.

Whether you have the opportunity to be coached or to be a coach, let’s take a look at six things coaching leaders do that set them apart.

Coaches Don’t Set the Agenda

Leaders must be proactive, which means taking responsibility to set the agenda in leadership situations. But coaching leaders are most concerned with the developmental process of the leader he or she is supporting. That means allowing the the other person to take responsibility for determining the desired outcomes – and then working together to create a strategy to reach them.

Coaches Focus on the Future

Counselors often focus on understanding or interpreting the past. Coaches, on the other hand, focus on helping to create the future. The past is over and done with – it can’t change. Coaching leaders don’t get sidetracked wading through past experiences of others. They help them focus on the future they want to create.

Coaches Listen

Listening is hard work. If you don’t think so, practice active listening the next time someone walks into your office. In most conversations, we either don’t pay attention, listen with preconceived biases or simultaneously try to come up with solutions while the other person is talking. Coaching leaders have mastered the art of listening for the sake of understanding so in order to maximize the quality of their dialogue.

Coaches Ask Questions

Questions are the anecdote to unsolicited (or in some case, solicited) advice. It’s not that advice is bad, it’s just that advice often short-circuits the development process in others. Following someone else’s advice is a lot easier than exercising critical thinking. It’s also easier to avoid taking responsibility if the advice doesn’t work. Even when they have great advice, coaching leaders start by asking powerful, open-ended questions to give the other person the chance to come up with their own best solution.

Coaches are Action-Oriented

Nice conversations are nice, but ultimately fruitless. Action-oriented conversations drives change. Coaching leaders demonstrate value to others by helping them take their ideas and translate them into action items. They do this by helping them make a decision or choose a direction among multiple options. Another way is by helping to craft SMART goals and clarify next steps.

Coaches Give Responsibility

Taking responsibility is Leadership 101. Giving responsibility is Leadership 102. Think about the difference. When we take responsibility, we develop ourselves. When we help someone else take responsibility, we develop them. It’s often easier to take responsibility for outcomes by providing quick direction and then moving on to the next thing. Giving responsibility – and supporting the other person along the way – takes more time and more effort, but that’s where true leadership growth happens.

If you want to help others succeed, you’ve chosen a noble pursuit. But that’s not enough. You’ve got to work at it – and it’s hard work! But the reward is always worth it – especially when you find that the leaders you’ve coached start coaching others.

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his new ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website  or follow him on Twitter.

Why Ask Questions?

Many leaders hesitate to ask questions because they fear it will make them appear weak. Leaders are suppose to have the all the answers, right? Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the world we live in has become so complex that it is simply not possible for anyone to have all the answers, no matter how tenured he or she is. But there are all kinds of benefits to asking questions, regardless of how much you know. Here are a few:

Great questions lead to great discoveries. Author and consultant Bobb Biehl likes to say, “If you ask profound questions, you get profound answers. If you ask shallow questions, you get shallow answers. If you ask no questions, you get no answers at all.”

Great questions are the antidote to advice. Our own advice can be intelligent and fitting sometimes, but lousy or misinformed other times. Giving advice is easy and costs little, at least on the surface. In organizational settings however, a leader’s advice can quickly gets translated into a “direct order” with no room for further discussion.

Great questions develop the critical thinking skills of others. If you’re a leader, the critical thinking skills of your team will likely determine how far you go. When you give answers, you get followers. When you give questions (and coach through the process of determining the best answer), you develop leaders.

Great questions delegates responsibility. At the end of the day, if you’re the person everyone comes to with every problem, your leadership bar will remain low. Leaders need followers who can solve problems on their own. And keep in mind that a person is always more motivated to act on and own a solution he’s come up with himself than to follow the guidance of someone else.

What do Great Questions Look Like?

It’s true that most leaders don’t become great at asking questions until they become great at listening (something that should cause each of us to pause and consider). There’s a learning process for everything. But in the meantime, let’s consider some examples of what great, powerful questions look like.

Leading vs. Non-Leading Questions: A leading question proposes a solution in the form of a question. A non-leading question opens up the possibility for multiple solutions. Consider the differences between these two examples.

• Leading: “What would happen if you tried having training meetings on Tuesdays?”
• Non-Leading: “What are some different options for conducting training?”

Closed vs. Open-ended Questions: Closed questions require a “yes” or “no” answer while open-ended questions can have many outcomes.

• Closed: “Have you thought about creating a new task force?”
• Open-ended: “What are some ways you could approach this challenge?”

Advice vs. Possibility Questions: An advice question is basically just implied advice in the form of a question.

• Advice: “Couldn’t you address that situation with the sales rep directly?”
• Possibility: “How could you address that situation?”

Why vs. “Tell Me More” Questions: Why questions can feel abrasive and accusatory, regardless of intent. No one likes being interrogated. Using a “tell me more” approach opens up the dialogue.

• Why: “Why did you decide to ship only seven orders?”
• Tell me more: “Can you tell me more about the thought process for this shipment?”

Learning to ask great questions instead of giving advice is probably one of the hardest disciplines leaders encounter. (It’s right up there with active listening!) I know by personal experience and from conducting training with seasoned leaders. The first step is to stop yourself from giving unsolicited advice. The next step is to respond with a question. The final step is to make that question a powerful one. My encouragement is to give it a try and stick with it. Ask someone to give you feedback on your question-asking ability. It’ll be slow at first, but eventually start becoming natural. And the leaders you serve will develop right along with you.

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his new ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website  or follow him on Twitter.

What is your process for determining which projects get priority and which ones either get saved for later or dumped altogether?

Add your thoughts in the comments section below!

View the rest of the Powerful Questions series by clicking here.

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his new ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website  or follow him on Twitter.

Several years later, I got a lead role on a consulting assignment to develop a plan to significantly improve an organization’s corporate culture. In fact, I was told this was my chance to “really shape the project.” I spent the next few months analyzing employee survey data, referencing strategic plans and carefully crafting a solution. Finally I got to present my plan to a senior client in a boardroom meeting and was thrilled when he accepted it. Now it was time to get to work. But much to my chagrin, a bigger problem soon emerged: no one wanted to take responsibility for seeing the plan through.

These experiences confirmed for me a simple but poignant lesson: you can’t want something for other people more than they want it for themselves. It doesn’t matter how much you care if they don’t.

This seems to go against the nature of empathy and basic altruism. But as a leadership principle, it’s proved to be true for me.

So what do you do when you do care? Here is the approach I’ve learned to take:

Inquire About Priority

When you talk, coach or consult with others, hopefully they trust you enough to share their challenges with you. I always try to ask three specific questions to quickly understand where another leader is coming from. But just like our own thoughts or mindless complaints, at any given time their concerns can range from short-term or inconsequential to long-term, significant or overwhelming. Not every problem carries equal weight and requires an immediate solution – or even any solution at all. Instead of assuming that a person is looking for answers, try to get a sense of the priority the challenge represents. There is a big difference between a level 1 “would be nice to fix” challenge and a level 5 “front page headline” challenge.

Understand Commitment

If I had to do the culture transformation project over again, I would have asked a simple question before I even got started: who from the client team will be the executive sponsor for this solution after the planning phase is finished? Not understanding local commitment was an oversight on my part. You can avoid that mistake by pressing the issue upfront. The perfect plan with no commitment provides no benefit. It’s a complete waste of time and effort. Not only will commitment help you manage your expectations, it will help the other party decide if a solution is worth pursuing in the first place.

Ask the Ultimate Question

I mentioned above how I used to take the responsibility to try and solve the leadership challenges I encountered. I don’t do this anymore. It was hard to resist at first, but I’ve learned a much better way. It comes in the form of what I call the ultimate leadership question:

How would you like me to support you?

This question almost works like magic. It leaves all the responsibility where it belongs: with the party who has a challenge. But it communicates that you are willing help. And it gives the other person a variety of choices to make: do they prefer to tackle this challenge on their own, would they like a helping hand or do they prefer to leave it be for another day?

Jack Welch said that if you don’t like people, you should find another job because leadership is 70% people development. If you’re going to be a leader, you need to care about other people. But caring about them shouldn’t supersede the principle of boundaries. To empower others to drive change, you must keep your initiative in check. If you find that you care more about their outcome than they do, you may be headed for trouble.

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his new ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website  or follow him on Twitter.

What I’d like to do in this post is show how the 34 StrengthsFinder themes neatly divide into four specific leadership styles – and I’ll explain what difference this makes for you and your team. In the next post, I’ll share some ideas for building a strengths-based leadership development program for your organization.

The 4 Distinct Strengths-Based Leadership Styles

In his follow-up book Strengths-Based Leadership, Gallup writer Tom Rath describes four distinct leadership styles that StrengthsFinder themes fall into.

Executing: Individuals with the majority of their strengths in the leadership style are adept at making things happen. They “catch” ideas easily and naturally make them a reality. They tend to be the ones who implement specific solutions.

Influencing: Individuals with influencing strengths help their teams reach a broader audience. They are the salespeople for a team’s ideas. Not only that, they naturally tend to “own” the responsibility for getting the message across.

Relationship Building: Individuals with relationship building strengths are the human glue that holds a team together. They take a group of individuals and create synergetic groups that work better together than they could apart.

Strategic Thinking: Individuals with strategic thinking strengths essentially keep everyone focused on what could – and should – be. They use information to help the team make informed decisions.

What Difference Do Leadership Styles Make?

At this point, you may be thinking that these distinctions sound nice but wonder how to determine which leadership style you lean toward as well as how it affects your team. I’d like to answer both questions using this table I created for a 20-person project team.

As we learned previously, the StrengthsFinder assessment gives each person a set of their Top 5 Signature Themes from list of 34 possibilities. You can see from this table which strengths fall under which themes. If two or more of your “Top 5” lie within one of these categories, you are likely strongest in that particular leadership style. Since this team was made up of 20 individuals, that means 100 strengths were represented in the sum of everyone’s Top 5. The totals for each theme are listed below.

Without knowing anything about the team itself, I’d like you to consider the following questions:

• What does this team likely tend to do well?
• What does this team probably tend to struggle with?
• How closely would you predict this team works together? With customers?
• In what areas would this team be most likely to enlist outside help?
• Given the profile, how might individuals with strengths in the “Influencing” theme best support the group?

None of the answers are cut and dried. Individual strengths reach their highest potential only when they are part of a collective group (tweet). There’s incredible value in taking StrengthsFinder 2.0 on your own to increase your personal insight and effectiveness. But the benefit multiples exponentially in a group context.

The good news is that you don’t have to come up with all the answers on your own. Each assessment comes with a Strengths Insight Guide to help understand your specific themes as well as an Action Planning Guide with tips on how to apply them. It even tells you how to work most effectively with people who have different strengths.

If you have not had the opportunity to complete the StrengthsFinder assessment, I suggest that you purchase the StrengthsFinder 2.0 book and use the code to complete the assessment online. If you have and it proved to be a valuable experience, invite your team to complete the assessment together. To increase the impact, many consultants, coaches and trainers (including myself) are available to facilitate a StrengthsFinder breakout session and build a team profile for you. I would be glad to help you find one – or you might even decide to give it a try on your own.

What is one way you know your team could benefit from a StrengthsFinder exercise? What types of leadership assessments has your team completed together in the past?

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website or   follow him on Twitter.

What’s one piece of advice that’s stuck with you through the years? What’s the key to giving great advice?

Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

View the rest of the Powerful Questions series by clicking here.

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website or   follow him on Twitter.

Who is one person who has applauded you in a significant way?

Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

View the rest of the Powerful Questions series by clicking here.

Nathan Magnuson is a leadership consultant, coach, trainer and thought leader.  Receive his ebook Trusted Leadership Advisor by subscribing to his website or   follow him on Twitter.