Think about the last obstacle your company overcame. Now think about the last opportunity your company seized effectively. What do they have in common?
The answer could be any number of things really, but I would bet that one key similarity is how decision-making was approached in both scenarios.
Whether it’s making decisions to meet challenges or capitalizing on new prospects, asking the right questions plays an integral role – who you talk to, what you ask, how and when you ask, what the communication loop looks like as the topic is discussed, and what the outcome is after asking.
Questions play a vital role in every facet of an organization. Whether it’s marketing, sales, forecasting, finance, product research and development, operations, or overall strategic planning, questions are the cornerstone of running a successful business. Let’s discuss why and what you can do to improve your question asking to be a better leader!
The Importance of Asking Good Questions
Leadership knows where they want to go, but asking the right questions helps them figure out 1) how to get there and 2) how to convince everyone else to contribute to getting there. If someone isn’t on board or there’s an obstacle in the way, you can only solve that by asking good questions to make sound decisions.
As John Coleman explains when discussing critical thinking and decision-making, “At the heart of critical thinking is the ability to formulate deep, different, and effective questions.” And while this has always been true to some degree it has, perhaps, never been more important than it is right now!
A Harvard Business Review interview on asking the right questions summarizes how today’s business needs have changed in saying,
“The complexity and uncertainty around business today demands a different skill in leaders, namely the ability to ask illuminating questions. Jensen Huang, the CEO of chip maker NVIDIA has said that over time, his job has become less about giving answers to problems, and more about asking questions… he wants his team to join that exploration with him.”
Regardless of who is asking, from a Sales Manager to the CEO, if you don’t get to the root of the challenge or opportunity or situation, you cannot properly address it.
Taking a Strategic Approach to Question-Asking
It’s clear why asking questions is so important, but how do you strategically ask the right questions to drive the company forward?
Corinne Dauger, offers a helpful reminder on the art of asking smarter questions, “It’s not a matter of asking lots of questions in hopes of eventually hitting on the right ones. In a one-hour meeting, there are only so many questions you can ask. So where do you want to spend the time? When you’re asking one question, you’re not asking another.”
Superficial yes/no questions aren’t going to help you evaluate the situation and gain enough information to be able to propose the best solution. Instead, you must ask questions at varying levels to get to the true pain point.
And, most importantly, you need to be willing to address the elephant in the room!
You need to be self-aware of the types of questions you’re worried about asking and then push through and ask those questions anyway. Tackle the sticky topics like money and ask the hard questions around things like job satisfaction – ask the unasked questions. When you get your answer, don’t take it personally. Learn from it and keep moving forward. Remember, the questions you don’t ask can be dangerous to avoid!
The Secret to Asking Better Questions
The thing that no one really talks about is that your mindset is the key to success when asking questions. To be successful you need to be curious and genuinely want to know the answer. If you don’t have a truly curious mindset going into it, you won’t ask the right questions.
If being curious in this way doesn’t come naturally to you, you can learn this skill by being mindful of the situation you’re going into – doing your research about who is involved, ensuring you’re talking to the right people to get the perspective you’re seeking, fully understanding the product or idea, etc. Then, you need to be willing to slow down and fully seek to understand where others are coming from when they offer their input. This is where the adage, “Listen more than you talk” is important to lean on.
Critical Questions for Leadership to Ask
Good leadership requires asking good questions!
Rupal Patel, a former CIA Analyst turned CEO explains, “What I often talk to other leaders about is this idea of being a learning leader and being not the oracle, but the orchestrator of the experts around you. You don’t have to be the expert at everything—you can’t be.” The best way to do this is by asking five key kinds of questions:
- Investigative – these questions go deep to get to the heart of the matter (ex. “What is and isn’t working?”)
- Speculative – these questions go wide to understand the situation more broadly (ex. “What if we did this differently?”)
- Predictive – these questions aim to understand what should happen next (ex. “Should we accelerate or slow down?”)
- Interpretive – these questions address the reasoning or the “why” behind an action or decision (“How does this fit with the goal?”)
- Subjective – these questions are related to how you feel about the situation (ex. “Have we consulted with the right people?”)
Developing A Question Framework
Don’t script your questions but go into every situation with a framework that you’ll use to facilitate helpful dialogue. Depending on the situation, this may be a broader framework like the one identified above, or it might be a more specialized framework meant for use in a distinct area of the business. As an example, Neil Rackham’s “SPIN Selling” sales approach asks questions in a specific order around the Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need Payoff to help sales teams sell better.
The more questions you ask, the more information you’re going to generate and that’s how you come up with the best solutions. If you take that curious mindset in asking your preliminary questions and then really listen to the answers, you can get better at the question-asking process, and it will yield better results.
Remember, you should be doing more than just seeking to validate your assumptions when asking questions. You also need to be open to looking at things differently and going back to the drawing board based on what you’re hearing. Asking good questions with this approach is important at every level!
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