Questioning - The Unused Management Tool

Why leaders are hesitate to ask questions:

1. Leaders are perceived to be decisive, bold, charismatic and visionary to know all the answers even before others have thought of the questions.
2. From an early age, people are discouraged from asking questions, especially challenging ones, as they are considered rude, inconsiderate, or intrusive.
3. Afraid of asking dumb questions, but what they don’t realize is that the dumbest questions can be very powerful. They can unlock a conversation.
4. As we ask fewer questions, we become ever less comfortable and competent in asking questions.
5. When we become leaders, we feel that it is important for us to have the answers rather than questions.

Seek to understand first before lead:

1. When the people around us clamor for fast answers, we need to be able to resist the impulse to provide solutions and learn instead to ask questions.

Learning Organization:

1. A growing number of organizations recognize that their success depends upon creating a learning organization, an organization that is quickly adapt to the changing environment, where every engagement becomes a learning opportunity.
2. Learning, questioning and business objectives are necessarily interlinked.
3. Leaders need to create a questioning climate where employees feel safe and able to trust the system and the people involved. Without this level of safety and comfort, people are generally unwilling to be vulnerable, and to be comfortable answering questions that might seem threatening.

Leading from Good to Great:

1. Collins is his book “Good to Great” tells us, leading from good to great means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.

Reference:

1. Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions By Knowing What To Ask
2. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't