7 Ways Leaders Can Ask Better Questions
Collaborative bosses can use curiosity to escape the echo chamber of their own ideas
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 later on, “Well, you all were there. You could have said something.”
When I hear bosses say things like “get everyone on board” or “build consensus,” that’s coercion. That’s trying to convince people that “I’m right, and you need to change your thinking.”
We don’t need anyone in the group to change their thinking. As long as the group supports whatever decision comes out of the meeting with their behavior, leaders are happy if individuals think differently from them. Otherwise, they’re just in an echo chamber of their own ideas. There is power and resilience in a diversity of ideas.
Stephen R. Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, considered this concept of “curiosity first” so important that he titled his fifth habit “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
