The Power of Questions

Leaders Need to Ask More Questions

In the process practice giving up being the go to person...the answer provider in chief.

Ask questions to:

1. Evoke
2. Provoke
3. Elicit dialogue.

Ask questions that nature inquiry for the respondent, not answers for the questioner. 

A leaders job is to make people think; to encourage and support people to use their own best intelligence; to create an environment of autonomous decision-making.

Asking questions is an access to continuous learning. Especially questions that expose us to the risk of discovering invalid, even limiting, beliefs. And, questions that expose our areas of ignorance – the ancient Greeks considered ignorance to be a sacred space...it was the access to learning, growth, and discovery.

Great leaders relish questions, especially questions that:

1. Uncover our ignorance so we can replace not knowing with discoveries
2. Questions that reveal the faulty foundations of our decisions and actions
3. Questions that unconcealed the elephants in the room so that they can become topics of inquiry and new insights.