"Asking to understand" is toxic and passive-aggressive. I have a hard time imagining a worse management technique than to put someone on the defensive without even telling them what the conversation is about. This is the opposite of openness and transparency and it is what is killing work culture.
Instead, you ask the employee why they did that thing when it goes against company policy. "What policy?" Oops, it turns out you forgot to go over this during onboarding and there was no negligence or ill intent on the employee's part, they simply did not know about the policy and are sorry and embarrassed for inadvertently violating it.
Aren't you glad you asked them about this before coming down on them with a reprimand, blindsiding and angering them and ultimately making yourself look stupid for blaming them for your mistake?
If it turns out the employee did in fact have a grudge or was negligent, there is still time to reprimand them after hearing "their side of the story." But if you never ask you will miss explanations and needlessly escalate conflicts.
An interesting counterpoint I've heard from respected management trainers: it _is_ impossible to correctly infer intent and motivation, but fortunately intent doesn't matter here. You don't need to know it, and it focuses on the wrong thing. You don't want to know _why_, and your intervention can easily assume positive intent. What you want is to change future behavior. So assume positive intent, and focus on what to do next time.
In your example scenario, where an employee has broken corporate policy you would just say something to the effect "I'm sure you meant well here, but our policy on this is X. What can you do differently next time?" That is the conversation you should be having, rather than the blame distribution game that 'why did you do that bad thing?' invites.
You explain what you see as the problem as clearly as possible, and you try to get the other person's view of what went wrong and why.
I use this often in a management role. You explain, explicitly, clearly, and carefully what you see as gone wrong, but not your perception of the intention behind it. In fact, you try to avoid having that perception or trying to guess the intention. That's management/working with other humans 101.
Then you ask probing questions to get at the why that choice was made/mistake happened.
The idea being that most people act in good faith and rarely make a complete fuck up out of maliciousness. They do it because of a lack of information or a lack or perspective or lack of training/knowledge, or because you as the manager lack one of those things and can't see the solution was actually a good solution.
You can fix the last four, you can't fix malicious. And asking questions reveals what the deficiency is.
If a manager makes that conversation into a 'gotcha' scenario without laying out what the issue is first and immediately, they're bad at their job.
And if an employee gets defensive about a fuck up, they're a bad employee.
X has a problem with something Y did.
X: "So... talk to me about what happened yesterday? Help me understand."
Y at this point knows the following things:
- X didn't like what happened
- X won't tell Y what the problem is
- X has been thinking about this
- X wants an explanation from Y
All of which is far too cloak-and-dagger for effective team-building.
Every scholar of leadership from Thucydides to Simon Sinek has come to the same conclusion: that successful organizations are built on trust. Using the power of a supervisory position to coerce your reports into tipping their hands without you tipping your own is bad leadership.
Is it possible to ask questions and seek understanding in a more productive way? Sure. But that's just genuine empathy, which can and should be used regardless of management technique.
It should start more like this:
conversation happens between manager/managed who have built up a relationship based on trust via transparency in action and word over more than the last 12 hours
X: So yesterday [bad thing] happened, and it seems to be based on choices you made. My perception of what happened was [perception here]. I wanted to talk to you to see what the reason was, and let you explain why we did [choices].
This is, as you point out, called genuine empathy. We have to label it as 'ask to understand' (side note, I fucking hate Steven Covey), because so much management literature since the 1980's told us to remove empathy/sympathy and emotion. Injecting it back in, appropriately, is difficult for some people without a matrix or checklist.
The problem is, that checklist is often used as a substitute for the real work of managers - building relationships and guiding people to see they can do better, even when performing at their best.
It is the opposite of those things. The label applied to the approach isn't putting the words in your mouth. You don't lead with the question "I'm trying to understand why you did this. Why did you do that?"
You ask questions about the context of the situation. You listen, a lot. Then, when you have sufficient information, you decide how to act, whether it be a simple direct communication to that one person, or a this-is-who-we-are / this-is-how-we-do-things communication to the entire team.
Listening, the real technique under examination here, is the opposite of toxic. It shines light on behaviors, and helps a manager achieve the true goals of what would otherwise be a mere surface-correction. Listening is ameliorative. Asking questions, gently, and listening to the person is also not passive-aggressive. Giving the employee a bad review for uncorrected behavior is. Inquiry is one of a set of tools that any good manager should use. Not the only one, to be sure. It is not passive, it is directly aimed at increasing the situational awareness to best support a manager's judgement (maybe there's nothing here, maybe it is small/medium/large).
What kills work culture is allowing a problem to fester then blindsiding the person with bad reviews and termination. Explaining to someone early a) what the expectations are, b) how they are doing in relation to the expectations, and c) if correction is needed, how to correct and how to measure, leads to a much healthier work environment.
What if the issue isn't a deficiency? What if it's a case of your employee understanding the problem better than you, and coming to a better solution?
Asking to understand is toxic if you're certain that there is something that needs correction. It's not toxic if you have an open mind and accept that the employee might have done the correct thing in a situation for reasons you don't yet understand.
But if you have a history of asking: "Hey, I'm curious about X? Why did you do that?" and you have a history of 25% of the time responding to their answer: "Oh! Cool! Great idea, I didn't think of that" and 75% of the time responding: "Ah, gotcha. I might've reframed it this way because of Y", then you'll have that trust.
The employee isn't a mind reader, but they are a behavior reader.
And if you really are asking with an open mind each time, then your past behavior will reflect that.
The reason for why you would want to "ask to understand" is to figure out the root cause of the issue that caused the mistake/bad practice you observed in the first place.
Finding the root cause will allow you to help them address the issue effectively, because otherwise, you will just be playing a whack-a-mole game of battling against symptoms instead of the disease.
Dictate how you expect an employee to behave. Sometimes they will strongly disagree. If you or they continue to disagree then either of you can part ways.
Explaining to them why you think they should behave that way is valuable, but expecting them to understand and feel that way themselves is too much. If they can act that way, it doesn’t matter how they feel... it’s a job, not a cult.
If they can’t I don’t think there’s a high chance of them actually listening.
Several years back I took a "Crucial Accountability" course on having accountability conversations. In their process there were four phases to every accountability conversation: 1) Reiterate the expectation 2) Describe the incident in question 3) Ask the employee to describe the gap between the expectations and their behavior in the incident 4) Have a conversation about what we're going to do about it.
I've used this model many times and it is very effective. Usually the employee leaves the conversation understanding what I expect and assures me that they will try to do better. Sometimes it requires follow-up correction, or further conversations, and sometimes it requires an action-plan that we work on together. Rarely does it lead to an untenable disagreement in how things should be done (and you can guess where that leads). Also rarely, the expectations will be amended or more clearly expressed to everyone.
I do think getting their perspective is necessary to understand if the expectations were incorrect, or if my understanding of the incident was incorrect. But it is essential that the conversation always start with reiterating the expectations.