Aug 17, 2024
6 min
Active Listening
Psychological Safety
Decision Making
Questions
Organisation
Table of Contents
Why aren’t we better at asking questions?
The Western world have transitioned from doing work with our hands to primarily doing work with our brain — often referred to as knowledge. However, most organisational systems and structures haven’t followed that transition. They are stuck in old industrial management ideas and systems that are designed for a world where work is predictable and can be controlled. In today’s complex world and systems we live and work in, prediction and control mechanisms aren’t going to make your people and organisation thrive. The result is often slow bureaucratic processes and hierarchical bottlenecks.
A result of this way of structuring organizations is a culture that supports behaviours where people are “ talking more to prove more instead of asking more to learn more”.
This ultimately feeds an environment with pointy elbows, where you focus more on the “HiPPOs” in the room rather than surfacing the best ideas by taking advantage of every voice in the room.
Old habits die hard
This behaviour is something we’ve taken with us from the school system where most are taught and acknowledged by having “the right answer” rather than asking the right questions. Most of us have also been discouraged from asking questions by either our parents or teachers – as well as other elderly role models who became tired of our curiosity.
What does neuroscience claim? It’s apparently more rewarding to our brain to have (or give the impression of having) the right answers rather than asking questions. We see this every day at work, where people fight to win arguments that are completely pointless for the challenge or task.
Learners Mindset vs Judgers Mindset
Judger’s mindset
If you go into a conversation with a “judger’s” mindset, your aim is to leave as the winner of the conversation. Your focus lays in making the other person lose in order to look smarter in the eyes of others as well as yourself. When you go into a conversation with a “judger’s mindset” you tend to do one or more of the following:
Ask questions you already know the answers to (often a behaviour we see from “less great” leadership). It’s a rather weak attempt to involve people that leads to others feeling stupid instead of included.
Ask questions that are experienced as threatening and blaming the other person. This results in defensiveness from the receiver and you getting the answers that you want to hear instead of those you need to hear.
Ask lazy questions where you expect the other person to give you the answers you’re looking for without giving them an honest chance in hell to understand what type of information you are after. This makes the other person feel like they are the problem when in reality…it’s you.
Learner’s Mindset
If you instead go in with what’s called a “learner’s mindset”, there’s no winner and loser — there are only winners.
With a learner’s mindset, you ask questions that are empowering to the other person and help them think deeply and clearly. Questions that are precise and concrete, making it clear to the other person, why you’re asking them and what you want to know more of. With a learner’s mindset, you ask empowering questions that aim to:
Create a deeper reflection
Challenge taken-for-granted assumptions
Generate courage and strength for the receiver
Enable people to understand a situation by seeing other perspectives
Cause individuals to reflect on and understand their own behaviour better
Is asking questions a “leadership skill”?
Good news! Being able to adopt a learner’s mindset and design empowering questions is something you can develop no matter where in the organisation you sit. When studying material on asking great questions, the skill is often referred to as something that is important for leaders only. Sure, leaders should ask more questions, but I would argue that everyone in the organisation needs to ask questions and feel supported when doing so. Especially because their hands-on experiences and knowledge around the organisation's problems simply enable them to ask better questions.
The results of asking great questions
There are many benefits of asking great questions on an individual, team, and organisational level, here’s our top three.
With great questions, you get great answers
And we need new answers, different answers, tough answers, and complex answers to navigate in the environment of today. However, getting the right answers is only one of the benefits of asking great questions — it also enables deeper connections between people.
“If we ask profound questions, we get profound answers. If we ask shallow questions, we get shallow answers. If we ask no questions, we get no answers at all.”
Build Inclusion, Innovation and Safety
When we ask empowering questions, we build psychological safety and stronger relationships. We inevitably make people feel safe, heard, and included. When we ask other people empowering question, we are indirectly saying:“I am listening to what you say because I care about what you think and value your opinion.”
Identify organisational debt and development
Another important result of asking questions is the being able to identify and challenge the status quo simply by asking “why are we doing the things, we are doing?”
In our teams and organisations, we usually have meetings, rules, protocols, governance etc. that no longer brings value, but still carried out because “that’s what we’ll always done”.
Often the people who initiated these rules aren't in the organisation anymore or the needs or systems have changed and thereby making old rituals useless.
If organisations don’t build a capability of asking themselves, “what are we doing and why are we doing it?” we will continue on doing rituals that simply are a waste of our time, energy and resources.
