Leading through Inquiry: Do Ask, Don’t Tell

Last week, I wrote about how to give your employees effective feedback. However, feedback is only a part of the bigger picture. Good communication is a hallmark of healthy organizations, but it’s often founded on the belief that employees thrive when given clear directions. In today’s increasingly complex organizations, it’s not enough to simply tell people what to do. Leaders who ask evocative questions instead of giving instructions set the stage for better communication, employee engagement and high performance.

How can you create a climate that encourages people to speak up, especially when input is crucial to the functioning of the organization? How do you convince your staff to correct you when you’re about to make a mistake?

Learn to ask the right questions instead of telling your staff what to do.

Questions should be genuine, based on curiosity and without an agenda. Effective leaders master the art of “humble inquiry,” says Edgar H. Schein, PhD, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor emeritus and consultant.

In his book, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013), Dr. Schein describes his title’s skill as “the art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.”

We live in a culture of telling, where conversations become opportunities to show how smart or funny we are. While we ask questions to show interest in another person, we just as often want to sway them to our viewpoint or get something from them.

When we tell, we put other people in a position of inferiority they come to resent. One-way communication implies that they don’t know what we’re telling them and that they should already know it. This approach provokes defensiveness. People stop listening to you so they can work on a snarky comeback.

In contrast, asking questions temporarily empowers your conversation partners, giving them an opportunity to share what they know. You deliberately put yourself in the inferior position: of wanting to know something about them. This technique opens the door to relationship-building.

Next week, I will cover the specifics of this technique of that will put you on the path to better communication within your organization.