Leading with Questions

How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask

Michael J. Marquardt

• Editorial: Jossey-Bass
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118830109
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Leadership

Many leaders are unaware of the amazing power of questions. Our conversations may be full of requests and demands, but all too often we are not asking for honest and informative answers, and we don't know how to listen effectively to responses. When leaders start encouraging questions from their teams, however, they begin to see amazing results. Knowing the right questions to ask—and the right way to listen—will give any leader the skills to perform well in any situation, effectively communicate a vision to the team, and achieve lasting success across the organization.

Thoroughly revised and updated, Leading with Questions will help you encourage participation and teamwork, foster outside-the-box thinking, empower others, build relationships with customers, solve problems, and more. Michael Marquardt reveals how to determine which questions will lead to solutions to even the most challenging issues. He outlines specific techniques of active listening and follow-up, and helps you understand how questions can improve the way you work with individuals, teams, and organizations.

This new edition of Leading with Questions draws on interviews with thirty leaders, including eight whose stories are new to this edition. These interviews tell stories from a range of countries, including Singapore, Guyana, Korea, and Switzerland, and feature case studies from prominent firms such as DuPont, Alcoa, Novartis, and Cargill. A new chapter on problem-solving will help you apply questions to your toughest situations as a leader, and a new "Questions for Reflection" section at the end of each chapter will help you bring Marquardt's message into all of your work as a leader.

Now more than ever, Leading with Questions is the definitive guide for becoming a stronger leader by identifying—and asking—the right questions.

Part I

The Power of Questions

Chapter 1

An Underused Management Tool

We live in a fast-paced, demanding, results-oriented world. New technologies place vast quantities of information at our fingertips in nanoseconds. We want problems solved instantly, results yesterday, answers immediately. We are exhorted to forget “ready, aim, fire” and to shoot now and shoot again. Leaders are expected to be decisive, bold, charismatic, and visionary—to know all the answers even before others have thought of the questions.

Ironically, if we respond to these pressures—or believe the hype about visionary leaders so prominent in the business press—we risk sacrificing the very thing we need to lead effectively. When the people around us clamor for fast answers—sometimes, any answer—we need to be able to resist the impulse to provide solutions and instead learn to ask questions. Most leaders are unaware of the amazing power of questions—how they can generate short-term results and long-term learning and success. The problem is, we feel that we are supposed to have answers, not questions.

I interviewed leaders around the world about their use—or avoidance—of questions. This comment by Gidget Hopf, president and CEO of the Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired—Goodwill Industries, is typical: “I just automatically assumed that if someone was at my door with a problem, they expected me to solve it.”

Hopf thought it was her job to provide answers. Then she realized that there was another way: “Through coaching I realized how disempowering this is, and how much more effective I could be by posing the question back to the individual with the problem. . . . What I came to realize is that solving others' problems is exhausting. It is much more effective to provide the opportunity for them to solve their own problems.”

Unfortunately, from an early age we are discouraged from asking questions—especially challenging ones—be it at home, school, or church, as this is considered rude, inconsiderate, or intrusive. Thus we become fearful of asking any questions. As we ask fewer questions, we become ever less comfortable and competent in asking questions.

And then when we become leaders, we feel that it is important for us to have answers rather than questions. We feel that asking questions—or being unable to answer questions addressed to us—may show that we are somehow lacking as leaders. But this attitude leads to inertia. Consider what Jeff Carew, a vice president at Collectcorp, told me: “The easy way to lead, particularly if you are competent at your job, is to tell people how to do things in the way you have been successful.” Usually, as Jeff has observed, people become successful either through a very capable boss who taught them the ropes or through their experiential learning that resulted in a successful track record and steady career advancement.

Successful executives think they know the answers. “The problem with this,” Jeff noted, “is if you do not create and maintain a working environment where you are always asking questions of your employees and forcing them to think, then you will probably never be any better tomorrow than you are today. Yesterday's solutions will not solve tomorrow's problems.

“I learned that you need to get to a different level of thinking if you are going to tackle tomorrow's problems—and who else is better to teach you how your environment is changing than the managers on the floor or in the trenches?”

Like Jeff Carew, a growing number of leaders recognize that their organization's success, if not its very survival, depends on creating a learning organization, an organization that is able to quickly adapt to the changing environment, where every engagement becomes a learning opportunity, where learning and business objectives are necessarily interlinked. The ability to ask questions goes hand in hand with the ability to learn. A learning organization is possible only if it has a culture that encourages questions.

Gary Cohen, author of Just Ask Leadership, rightly observed that it is not possible for leaders in the twenty-first century to be a know-it-all, nor is it in their or the organization's best interest to try.¹ It is more important that leaders ask questions that move others to action and answers. We should recognize that the employees that work for you today probably know more than you do about their job. And as leaders move up the ranks of an organization, they will undoubtedly end up leading people who perform tasks that the leader will not understand. Mike Stice, CEO of Access Midstream Partners, said to me, “I need to continually ask questions to become part of the organization. Questions enable me to increase alignment, engagement, and accountability. And it is not simply asking more questions. It is asking more and better questions.”

Do you ever feel defensive when people ask you questions? Do you ever hesitate to ask a question, fearing it may reveal ignorance or doubt? If so, you are closing off the free flow of information and ideas your organization needs and potentially undermining relationships with those around you. In fact, avoiding questions can cause serious harm—and even disaster.

What Happens When Leaders Do Not Ask Questions

History is replete with tales of dire consequences experienced by leaders who did not ask questions. Recent disasters at Lehman Brothers, Barclays, WorldCom, Enron, and Arthur Andersen can be attributed to the lack of inquiring leaders. Historians who carefully examined the events and details behind the disasters of the Titanic, the Challenger, and the Bay of Pigs have determined a common thread: the inability or unwillingness of participants and leaders to raise questions about their concerns. Some group members were fearful that they were the only one who had a particular concern (when, in fact, it was later discovered that many people in the group had similar concerns). Others felt that their question had already been answered in the minds of other group members, and if they asked the question, it would be considered a dumb question, and they would be put down as being stupid or not going along with the group. Because people did not ask questions, people lost lives when the Titanic sank, when the Challenger crashed, when President Kennedy authorized a covert attack on the Bay of Pigs in Cuba.

Sinking of the Titanic

Why did the Titanic sink? When the luxury ship went down, on April 14, 1912, more than fifteen hundred passengers perished. Afterward, many questions were raised on both sides of the Atlantic. How could the allegedly unsinkable ship go down on its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic? What had gone wrong? Why couldn't the planner and builders have foreseen such a tragedy? Upon investigation, it was discovered that several of the planners and builders of the ship had indeed been concerned, though none of them had ever raised their concerns in the company of their colleagues. Why not? Because of their fear of appearing foolish by asking dumb questions. If no other “expert” seemed unsure about the structure and safety of the ship, then everything must be OK. Once the voyage was under way, many reports came in from nearby ships describing icebergs around them. “Titanic received many incoming messages warning of ice,” Robert E. Mittelstaedt writes in Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal?, “but there is no mention of her inquiring of others for updates or more information. What if someone was curious enough to ask for more information from the ships in the area?”²

The Explosion of the Challenger Spacecraft

The Space Shuttle Challenger was launched on January 28, 1986, and exploded seventy-three seconds after liftoff. Much of the research into what went wrong with the Challenger launch focuses on the lack of communication between NASA, Morton Thiokol, Inc. (MTI), and the Marshall Space Center. MTI, the contractor responsible for the component that failed during the launch, depended on Marshall for the contract, and Marshall in turn depended on NASA for funding and support. Almost two years before the fatal launch, MTI became aware that there could be a problem with the O-ring, a sealing component that prevents hot gases from escaping the solid rocket booster and burning a hole in the fuel tank (the physical cause of the Challenger disaster). The engineers at MTI documented this problem and insisted that further testing needed to be done to determine the reliability of the O-ring. On further testing, they confirmed that the O-ring was not reliable, particularly when the temperature dropped below fifty-three degrees. Why then was the Challenger given the go to launch on January 28, 1986, when the temperature at launch time was thirty-six degrees, well below the safety margin? The people around the table were afraid to express their doubts or even to ask questions that they had determined, before entering the room that morning, that they would ask.

The 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion

Fears of shattering the warm feelings of perceived unanimity—fears of rocking the boat—kept some of Kennedy's advisers from objecting to the Bay of Pigs plan before it was too late. “How could I have been so stupid?” President John F. Kennedy asked after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

What happened? In 1961, CIA and military leaders wanted to use Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro. After lengthy consideration among his top advisers, Kennedy approved a covert invasion. Advance press reports alerted Castro to the threat. More than fourteen hundred invaders arrived at the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) to find themselves vastly outnumbered. Lacking air support, necessary ammunition, and an escape route, nearly twelve hundred surrendered. Others died. Top CIA leaders blamed Kennedy for not authorizing vital air strikes. Other CIA analysts fault the wishful thinking that the invasion would stimulate an uprising among Cuba's populace and military. Planners assumed the invaders could simply fade into the mountains for guerilla operations. Trouble was, eighty miles of swampland separated the bay from the mountains. The list goes on.

Groupthink is the term Irving Janis coined for this phenomenon: the kind of flawed group dynamics that lets bad ideas go unchallenged by questions and disagreement and that can sometimes yield disastrous outcomes.³ Kennedy's top advisers were unwilling to challenge bad ideas because it might disturb perceived or desired group concurrence. Presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger, for instance, presented serious objections to the invasion in a memorandum to the president, but suppressed his doubts at the team meetings. Attorney General Robert Kennedy privately admonished Schlesinger to support the president's decision to invade. At one crucial meeting, JFK called on each member for his vote for or against the invasion. Each member, that is, except Schlesinger—whom Kennedy knew to have serious concerns. Many members assumed that other members agreed with the invasion plan. Schlesinger later lamented, “In the months after the Bay of Pigs, I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the cabinet room.” He continued, “I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone ...