Leadership and Coaching is About Asking Better Questions

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.
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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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