How to Develop Leaders: Stop Giving Answers, Ask More Questions

In 2023, a poem changed my leadership. Let me share the poem with you—and don’t worry, it’s a haiku, so this will be brief:

Talk less and ask more.
Your advice is not as good
as you think it is.

That poem, from Michael Bungay Stanier’s book The Coaching Habit got stuck in my head. It was easy to memorize and hard to forget; as a consultant and leadership coach, I found myself thinking of the poem again and again as I spoke with clients. They would present a problem, and I’d open my mouth to share a solution. And then I’d stop myself, take a deep breath, and ask a question instead of giving an answer.

What I discovered was remarkable: one of two things almost always happened. Either by asking a question I learned some new piece of information that made my original advice irrelevant, or by asking a question of my client, it led them to a new awareness that was helpful in addressing the situation. It turned out that my questions were often more powerful than my insights.

Stop Giving Answers

As executives, we’ve been trained to have all the answers. As leaders, however, often the best thing we can do is ask questions instead.

Dwight Strayer is now the Chief Strategy Officer for data center company Service Express. But when a research team I was part of interviewed him a few years ago he recalled when he first took over the company’s service group.

This article was originally published on the Ad Lucem Group blog. Continue reading …