Don't give your team pop quizzes

I’ve seen a pattern recently that really grinds my gears and I’d love to root it out.

The pattern is: “Pop quiz!”

These are masked rhetorical questions, asked by a leader, to a team or team member to gauge the quality of the work or the approach.

Pop quizzes sound like questions, but they’re really not. They’re really an impromptu test. Did you get the right answer? Or did you get the wrong answer?

An earnest question is approached with genuine curiosity. As the leader, I have in my head a scenario I’d like to make sure is covered in our solution. Instead of pop-quizzing and asking the team “hey, what should happen in scenario X?” (which is a pop quiz), I asked “Can you tell me about scenario X?”

It seems like a small change but I argue the difference is massive.

The way you can tell if you’re imposing a pop quiz is whether or not your response to their answer is “yes”, “that’s exactly right” or some variant thereof. It implies there is a right answer and a wrong answer.

If, instead, your answer is “that’s interesting”, or “I didn’t know that”, or even “wow, they haven’t thought this through, we need to course correct” - congratulations, you asked an actual question.

Why are pop quizzes bad?

Pop quizzes are an insult to the team. It demonstrates that you don’t trust them, and that rather than judging based on the results they deliver, rather than approaching from a place of curiosity, you approach from a place of “I already know the answer”. If you already know the answer, why didn’t you give it to them already? It’s a double bind.

Real questions are way better. They sound more like: “how are you thinking about the problem?” If the answer is “we aren’t” - then great, you’ve highlighted the issue and can now help them work through it. If the answer is “here’s a solution”, they have demonstrated that they’ve thought through the problem at least enough to have solved it. (If you disagree with their solution, consider again whether this is a form of a “leader knows best” or if you’re actually genuinely curious to hear what they have to say.)

The great thing about real questions is that everyone learns - you get to learn about how your team solves problems, what their level of scrutiny and depth is, where there are gaps, and potentially even better solutions than you would’ve thought of. The team gets an authentically curious leader who reinforces their strengths and shows them with their words and actions that they’ve built credibility to solve problems.

Pop quizzes imply that you’ve already got the answer, they need to just listen to you, and by the way if they didn’t get the answer right, they got the answer wrong.

Pop quizzes encourage the team to turn their brain off, avoid speaking truth to power, do the bare minimum, wait for you to have all the answers to everything.

Genuine questions encourage the team to engage their brains, tell the truth, go above and beyond, and make better decisions while you go have dinner.