President Kennedy once said "leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." I find this to be a helpful reminder that as a leader one of my duties is to approach leading through learning. That learning can take many forms, it can be about the need of the cause, the resources required by my team, or obstacles that may stand in the way of progress. If learning is important to leadership, then one of the essential tools for leaders is the questions that they employ to learn, as the quality of the question can have an impact on the quality of the response and in turn the quality of the learning for the leader.
So how then does one ask better questions?
In a recent interview, leadership author and former US Navy Captain David Marquet pointed out several ways. One of the first is to stop what I would call leading questions. I find this can be an easy one to fall into. Leaders are often putting together a working theory or narrative to help make sense of a situation. So it can be tempting then to ask a question with a part of the theory or narrative attached. For example "How does that work, is so and so involved, does such and such a team participate?" In this case, the question is leading whatever response follows, which can limit the learning to the part of the theory or narrative being tested missing out on broader learning that may reveal something that hasn't yet come up for the leader. So here, the remedy is to simply ask the question, full stop: "How does that work?" This can require a small shot of courage in some cases as it sets aside the leader's attempt to show they have a working understanding of the situation, but it may improve that understanding in the long run.
Marquet also pointed out that question asking can be improved by moving past the binary. Again, it can be easy to ask yes no questions. But in some cases these may be hard for people to answer, as the question topic may lead to a high bar in answering one way or the other. For example, in a risk management setting the question of "Is it safe?" might come up. An important question, but it might be tough for someone to definitively say yes it safe or no it is not. This question requires more details that cannot be effectively achieved in a binary set-up. This can be addressed by asking "How safe is it?" A way to preserve the binary's efficiency, but promote more detail could be to ask "On scale of 1-5, how safe is it?"
Finally Marquet suggested that questions at the operations level avoid "why." While starting with why at the strategic level is a good practice, why at the operational level can trigger defensiveness in those being asked the questions, which then presents a barrier to learning. Leaders may take this why approach as a socratic tactic to open the door for a coaching moment. However, Marquet argued that if one's purpose is learning, then coaching should be secondary to the learning. This warrants a different approach than a why question that gets at the process used by the individual the leader is trying to learn from. For example, asking "Why did you choose this action?" puts the responder on the defensive, particularly when followed up by advice from the leader. Instead, a leader can ask "How did you arrive at this action?" or "What was your process to make this choice?" Both of these questions give the learner space to outline what their decision making was to help the leader understand what went into the action, without requiring the justification of a why.
These techniques of avoiding leading questions, not using binary questions, and reframing why questions can help the leader learn more, which can improve leadership effectiveness.
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