 In our previous blog we discussed Leadership and the Beginners Mind. We concluded that senior leaders who are open to being changed by living into the questions themselves and leading with a beginner’s mind, are often more successful solving the complex business problems they face. They also create organizational cultures of learning and growth, where people thrive, take risks, learn, and evolve themselves.
Questions do more than open the aperture for potential innovative solutions and new possibilities required in volatile, constantly changing, uncertain business environments. The questions themselves build leadership capabilities such as self and social-awareness, interpersonal sensitivity, collaboration, influence, and accountability; create greater efficacy of personal and professional impact, and hone reflection-in-action skills that improve strategic thinking abilities. Richard Strozzi (a thought leader in Embodied Awareness and Executive Coach) said, “we are what we practice.” In other words, if we practice structured reflection by asking open-ended questions more often, as leaders, we build the capacity for reflection and learning. The questions are the gateway for reflective practice, which can and should take place before key decisions or actions (forecasting, planning), during the execution of work (adjusting and adapting our approach), and after the work is completed (post-mortem, hindsight learning) (McKinsey 2020). The challenge for leaders is they are not trained to ask many questions. Their expertise and sense of knowing the answers, which has helped them to move up the corporate ladder into more senior roles, can become a barrier to this type of continued exploration. Expertise becomes a sort of confirmation bias that makes it difficult for leaders to entertain big questions before a big decision, or in the moment (especially when they perceive urgency) to make important decisions. It is the very closing down of inquiry due to the discomfort that questions can pose to leadership that prevent them from being asked in the first place. People learn to interpret the perceived openness of leaders to the asking of questions that creates safety and allows for adequate and necessary exploration. If a leader is open, curious, and transparent, people around them will feel free and comfortable to ask questions, whereas, if a leader is so solutions-oriented that they fail to prompt a conscious effort to explore alternatives, people will stop asking questions essential for business success. “Team members may fail to share misgivings simply because no one else is doing so – a social dynamic known as pluralistic ignorance, Harvard Business Review (May-June 2024), The Art of Asking Smarter Questions. In this HBR article, one CEO stated his leadership stye has evolved from primarily giving answers to asking questions most of the time. He said, “I now help my leaders explore ideas they didn’t realize they needed to explore.” The article’s focus is on the categories of questions leaders can ask of their teams including investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. Even if we are question askers, we tend to ask certain kinds of questions, so it’s good advice to become versed in all categories of questions as they serve different purposes. “We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience,” John Dewey. For example, as executive coaches, we may tend to ask more speculative, interpretive or subjective questions, such as: What else might be true? or What else might you propose? (speculative); What are you trying to achieve? or What did you learn from this new information? (interpretive); How did you feel about the decision? or What aspect most concerns you (subjective)? We too would foster better reflection from the leaders we coach by broadening our repertoire of questions. In this respect, we are in the perfect position to model question asking and reflective learning. Reflecting about our reflection process or the questions we ask will make us better coaches.
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 “Try to love the questions themselves, like locked living rooms or books that are written in a foreign tongue. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. You will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way some distant day into the answers.” R.M. Rilke
I love the dissonance this poem creates in the mind. Leaders are supposed to know the answers, right? That’s why they made it to the top of the organization. Being a CEO or senior leader is confirmation that he/she has acquired the most knowledge or leveraged a variety of experiences to arrive in this privileged place of knowing. This statement may be true if the problems that leaders face in business today were less complex, and say, more purely technical. That is, if business problems looked like previous ones; more straightforward, could be data verified, where the deeper you go, the more you know. However, the senior leaders I work with are faced with far more complex problems in constantly changing workplaces, environments that are volatile, and industries that are experiencing disruption. Many of the problems they face have not been solved before, and as such, require a different kind of engagement, new skills, and capabilities that elicit vulnerability in the leader. To say, I don’t know the answers, is the only place to begin. As Rilke said, one must “live into the unknown, the questions themselves.” These are not questions with simple yes or no answers. The questions that must be asked in today’s business context are open-ended and require the leader to put aside their assumptions, opinions, beliefs, experiences, or preconceptions (Shunrya Susuki Roshi). Roshi said, “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the experts mind there are few.” Staying with what you know is a sure-fire way to play out predictable solutions. The essential questions that are open-ended, create awareness, and spark new discoveries. By taking a fresh look, leaders can draw upon the power of the organization, industry, or other industries, to reveal new ways forward. This is the only place where innovation and disruption happen. When leaders demand instant, clear, or expedited answers before they have fully engaged with the important questions, they will fail. It is the leader’s curiosity and openness that provides new contextual awareness. “When our contexts shift in this powerful, fundamental kind of way, it reveals paths across terrains that have previously seemed forbidding and impenetrable,” (Wellwood). This scenario, where novel solutions can be discovered, requires the leader to change his/her understanding. This is a place of business growth and transformation that is most challenging to navigate, but worthwhile. By bringing the beginner’s mindset, and opening more deeply to the questions, we walk the essential ground of the new business leader’s path. Acknowledging uncertainty undoubtedly elicits anxiety and fear in the face of the unknown. This is the place where the coach with his/her discipline to ask the big questions can foster a mindset of growth in the leader. The coach helps the leader to hold the space between, thus harnessing the possibilities where success is much more likely. The art and science of living into the beautiful questions is as much about the personal transition and growth of the leader as it is the complex problems they face. This practice of being in the unknown must be honed and cultivated. New competencies must be developed, such as curiosity (awareness), compassion (connection), and courage (resilience).
Senior leaders who are open to being changed by living into the questions themselves and leading with a beginner’s mind, are successful solving the complex business problems they face. They also create organizational cultures of learning and growth, where people thrive, take risks, learn, and grow themselves. These are the best places to work where people can learn to live into the questions themselves.  Having a sense of meaning in life has a powerful impact on the quality of our lives, and a significant positive impact on others. Richard Leider, founder of Inventure – "The Purpose Company" says, “Purpose is our aim to live a life that is meaningful and makes a positive contribution to the world,” and “it’s living a life of our own choosing,” versus a “default life” that was chosen for us. Leider and his co-author David Shapiro, propose that “everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put into every heart.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about meaning and purpose lately. One reason is the impending death of my 99-year-old father, who has always had a deep sense of meaning and purpose in life. From a very early age (according to my grandmother), my father wanted to be a doctor. He says his desire to become a surgeon was born out of a significant loss he experienced early in his life when a close school friend died at the age of seven. From the time he went to medical school at age 19, until he retired from surgery and teaching at age 87, my father’s life revolved around this core desire to save people’s lives and to make them well again. This unique ability to listen to his heart, understand what motivated him, and sculpt the values he wanted to live by, created a light and energy that was undeniable. He has always been growing and giving, which became synonymous with happiness, not only for himself, but for tens of thousands of others. As we say our goodbyes to him over the next several days, I feel appreciative of his singular focus and commitment to serve others. Now, just three months shy of his 100th birthday, he is surrounded by a community of people, friends, former students, and patients who have all received from him in some way. Quite simply, he is surrounded by love, because he loved so fiercely. How does one find Meaning in life? It takes some (most of us) much longer to figure out our purpose for being in this world. What gives us meaning comes from a collective of influences in our lives, such as our experiences from the past and our present moment experiences. A sense of purpose can evolve from our own gifts and talents, the ones we were born with, or those gifts nurtured in us by the adults in our lives when we were just children. The ingredients are latent in us all - a compilation of our beliefs, values, and the unique patterns in our lives. To know what has meaning to us requires us to be present and intentional in our lives, and nothing short of clear-eyed and focused. What’s Purpose got to do with Leadership? Leaders with a sense of purpose demonstrate a passion for what they do every day. They lead from a place of an internal values alignment, that fuels their mindsets, behaviors, words, actions and decisions. Employees like to be around leaders with a sense of purpose, as their actions and words create greater clarity for all. They are what they practice, as it is not about a goal or role for them. As such, they are free to ask questions of others, listen deeply, and demonstrate a natural sense of curiosity, without carrying the burden of external expectations. Leaders with a purpose know why they come to work every day, which is a WHY that goes beyond themselves to self-transcendence (Victor Frankl and Maslow). A sense of clarity, courage, curiosity, confidence, and authenticity inspires well-being, healing, longevity, and superior performance at work. Purposeful people exhibit the following characteristics:
I will miss my father very much and will be forever grateful that he showed me how important having a purpose in life can be, as a guidance system we can live, continue to grow, and die by. *Richard Leider is the author of eleven books, including three best sellers about purpose; Repacking Your Bags, The Power of Purpose and Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? The Path of Purposeful Aging. |