7 Ways Leaders Can Ask Better Questions

Collaborative bosses can use curiosity to escape the echo chamber of their own ideas

Photo: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

Many of today’s business leaders want to be collaborative. They want to harness the skills and independent thinking of the people on their teams to make intelligent business decisions. And yet, in my work with leaders around the world, I’ve noticed that when they attempt to collaborate with their teams, they often end up skipping the divergent part (“What does everyone think?”) of collaboration and jump straight to the convergent part (“Here’s what I think. Does everyone agree?”).

This represents the language of too many brainstorming and decision-making meetings, where the boss states an opinion and others fall in line. They ask leading and self-affirming questions. They suppress dissent and push for consensus. In short, they are compelling instead of curious. This is not collaboration. This is all coercion disguised as collaboration.

Coercion, as I am using it here, means using my influence, power, rank, talking first, talking more, or talking louder to bring people around to my way of thinking.

Here’s what we don’t want as a decision-making model: The boss decides and seeks validation from the group. Those kinds of meetings exist only so that the boss can say…