Creating a Culture of Asking the Right Questions

It is a misconception that leadership means providing the answers.  A leader who always has the answers sets his team up to fail.  He blocks their thinking.  He stops their growth.  Instead, a leader facilitates growth by asking the right questions.  If a leader stays the source of every answer, he becomes the limit on the organisation’s own growth.  Decisions bottleneck at him.  As the team grows, as projects grow more complex, he gets overwhelmed, and decisions grind to a halt.  Management ossifies.  People stop making decisions at their own level, afraid to act without him.  This kills agility.  One person only has so many hours in a day.

Empowerment Starts With a Question

Great leadership is sown by empowerment, and empowerment starts with asking the right questions of peers and subordinates.  Rhetoric persuades through questions as much as statements.  A question that shifts the frame gets people to buy into a decision.  A statement rarely does the same work.  Most modern leaders can already ask good questions.  That skill is why they hold their positions in the first place.  Their real problem is different: they cannot resist answering their own question the moment they ask it.  Do that, and the team never reaches its own realisation.

William Vincent Campbell Jr., the Silicon Valley executive later known as “the Trillion Dollar Coach,” built an entire coaching career on this restraint.  In 2001, he sat down with Sheryl Kara Sandberg, then working at Google, and asked her a single question: what do you do here?  She answered.  He rejected the answer.  She answered again.  He rejected that too.  He kept refusing every response until she could explain, in plain terms, the actual value she added every day.  Campbell went on to coach Steven Paul Jobs at Apple, Lawrence Edward Page and Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin at Google, and Sheryl Sandberg herself at Facebook, helping build companies worth a combined trillion dollars in market value.  He never once wrote a line of code.  He asked questions, and refused to let people off the hook until they answered honestly.

Giving Answers Costs the Organisation Later

Giving others room to learn and grow builds job satisfaction, because they feel like a real part of the process.  People committed to a decision that way stay committed to it.  They identify with it.  It sharpens their own capacity to think and decide.  This also means tolerating genuine mistakes.  If a mistake traces back to a failure of principle, that failure sits with the leader.  Those values should have been instilled before the person was given room to act.  A culture built on asking the right questions is what makes an organisation scalable.

What the Right Question Actually Looks Like

The next question is what counts as the right question.  It starts when we can stand in another stakeholder’s shoes and look past our own frame.  It starts when we can trace a decision’s consequences across several levels.  It starts when we try to understand how others feel about a business decision, a product design, a campaign, the words we choose, and the values those words carry.  It is not enough to ask whether a policy works by our own measure.  We have to ask who the stakeholders are, internal and external, and how the decision looks from where they stand.  Only then do we reach an answer worth having.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code