An Effective Leadership Style Depends on Mastering One Important Skill:

Asking Questions

Instead of having all the right answers good leaders must learn to ask all the right questions in the right way...and plenty of them. This behavior alone will help you develop an effective leadership style. Why are questions so important?

If you are a manager or leader, you probably feel very responsible for your company or your department. You may even feel a great deal of pressure to “make the right decisions” and “take the right actions.”

If this is true of you, you may operate under the assumption that you have to have not only all the answers, but the right answers. But, unlike the multiple choice tests that you probably took in school., in real life there is rarely one and only one “right answer.”

It is possible in life, however, to uncover the “best answer,” and that comes from getting multiple heads on the subject. It requires a leadership strategy that many managers are uncomfortable with: letting go of “gotta have the right answer” and replacing it with asking a lot of questions and listening carefully to the answers others offer.

When seeking information managers often settle for the first and most obvious answer that appears (either from themselves or presented by someone else), not understanding that the best answers are often hidden and need additional prompting to surface.

If an answer to a thorny problem comes easily, this may be a clue that you haven't explored it fully enough yet. The solution is to ask more questions.

The easy way out is to "tell people" rather than asking them. When the manager gives out too many solutions, then employees never learn to think for themselves and stretch their capabilities.

The purpose of asking questions is to stimulate dialogue and exchange of ideas. Such activity prompts the other person to think and learn and increases his or her commitment to what is being discussed.

People feel valued when their manager asks them a question and seems interested in their answer. Self-esteem and commitment are improved.

Even if you can answer the question as well or better than they can, ask it anyway. By actively involving them, it adds to their buy-in and performance quality.

When you ask, then be sure you listen well. Good listening shows respect for their opinions and greatly increases the trust between you and another. With any questions you ask, you need to really care about the answer. To ask the question and then fail to hear or appreciate the answer you receive is worse than not asking.

Sometimes, however, asking questions can lead to a shut-down in dialogue. No one likes to be interrogated. The attitude of the questioner, then, will determine whether or not this method is successful. The manager must approach the questioning with curiosity and genuine interest in the opinion of the other person.

It may be fun or helpful when trying to master the art of good questioning to think of yourself as an investigative reporter, wanting to know as much as possible about what your employee or colleague thinks, feels, and believes about the topic under discussion. You honestly want to get to the bottom of the issue.

Conventional wisdom on questioning may be helpful. It says: in order to uncover root issues or causes (including false beliefs, sacred cows, and plain old bad habits, like “that’s the way we do it around here”), ask “why” five times. Such questioning can greatly expand the dialogue between the manager and the other.

To be effective questions should be open-ended, nquestions that can be answered with a yes or no, or any other one-work answer. Look at the following list to get your creative questioning juices going:

How do you plan…?

What do you think about…?

How do you feel about…?

How much time…?

How does this relate to…?

What would you do…?

How else could we…?

If you could change…?

How can you…?

What did you learn…?

What’s most important about this…?

Everyone is a leader; we all influence one or more other people. We don’t get to choose whether we will lead, we only get to choose HOW we will lead.

To return to effective styles page and learn more about effective leadership styles, click here.

To return to homepage, click here.