Why you should lead through questions

How you can become a leader by leveraging questions

The best leaders don’t tell people what to do.

Why? Because that doesn’t work nearly as well as guiding people to do the things they need to do in order to get to where they want to go.

Instead, there’s one thing I’ve found that all great leaders do well: they ask the right questions.

In fact, you could say they lead through questions.

Leading through questions helps in 3 ways:

1. It helps leaders understand the situations their teams face since leaders typically aren’t in the weeds the same way their team members are.
2. It often helps their team members come to their own conclusions even when the leader knows the right answer to begin with.
3. It generates trust in a team when team members feel that they are collaborative with their leaders rather than directed by them.

Leading through questions is a skill that I’ve found great leaders possess and almost anyone can learn.

At first, it may seem odd to always be creating a dialogue through questions, especially when you know the answers to your questions. However, creating a dialogue through questions fosters collaboration much more than directing others through personal opinions.

In fact, you’ll find that you can often convince someone of an opinion you have if you are really good at leading through questions.

This is part of the magic of leading through questions which is why all great leaders have honed in on this skill.

Not only does it help them obtain buy-in on their opinion, but it helps shape their opinion when they can gather information they wouldn’t have had unless they asked.

You’ll find the power of leading through questions can help your career and make work much more enjoyable for you and your team.

Without the ability to lead through questions, our leaders would be nothing but dictators trying anything to push their opinions on us, correct or not.

Understanding what your team faces

As a leader, you should always know the obstacles your team is facing in order to effectively lead your team.

That’s obvious.

However, a lot of leaders assume they know what their team is facing because they have been in similar situations before and they believe they know all of the answers.

As a leader, YOU DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ALL OF THE ANSWERS.

(I put that in all caps because that is a big assumption that most team members have and can become hard for new leaders to overcome)

Instead, as a leader, you are tasked with trying to figure out the answers to your team’s problems.

This can only happen if you ask questions to the only people who will know exactly what problems your team faces: your team members.

Only they can give you insight into what challenges they face on a day to day basis because they are living through them.

Of course, there are times when leaders have to zoom out at a larger level to understand the complexities of what their team is telling them. However, this comes after leaders actually listen to their team members.

The only way to really understand how you can best help your team is by asking them the right questions that will help you understand their challenges better.

Once you have done this, that is when you can use your influence to help guide them where your team is looking to go.

Help them come to a conclusion

Often times, as a leader, when your team has questions, they also are the ones that hold the answer.

However, because your team can be in the weeds of their work, the answer may not be obvious to them.

Asking the right questions to either 1) get them to see the answers or 2) identify the gaps that will supply them with answers, is a big responsibility that all leaders have.

The most helpful leaders are the ones that can use questions in order to get their teams to look at a problem in a different way in order to come up with a solution.

In addition to being able to find the answers their team is looking for, leaders who lead through questions also develop more influence over their teams because it is their team that is ultimately coming up with their own answers instead of their leader telling them what the answer is.

Leaders who are just directive and do not collaborate with their teams may find they have a harder time convincing their team that one direction is right when team members feel they didn’t provide any input to arrive at a decision.

Using questions to help a team derive their own answers helps leaders and their teams on multiple levels that will pay dividends in the team’s results and will create a more collaborative and trusting environment that makes their work much more fun.

Generating trust

Trust is earned, not given.

There is no better way to earn trust as a leader than by being a team player and collaborating with your team.

Leading through questions does exactly that.

Teams are brought through the thought process of how a decision was derived which helps them trust their leaders.

If they can understand how a leader came to their conclusions, it will be much easier to trust that those conclusions are correct.

Often times, bad leaders make decisions they feel are best for the team. However, if the results do not follow, it will be harder to trust the decisions that leader is making since the team was not brought along for the ride yet their reputation is on the line.

Even when results do follow, it’s only a matter of time before that team’s leader makes a bad decision and those results reflect poorly on the team.

If a team achieves poor results, it will be much easier for them to continue to follow their leader if they understand and agree on where they went wrong in the decision making process and how to change it.

Without that transparency, it’s hard for teams to trust their leaders, especially when the going gets tough.

In conclusion

Obviously, there are a lot of benefits in leading through questions.

With that said, it’s much easier to see those benefits in writing than actually develop the skill of leading through questions and seeing results in your day-to-day work.

Try leading through questions in your next conversation.

Start a conversation with your team by asking a question and continue it, not by providing your opinion, but by digging deeper and continuing to ask questions to uncover your team’s challenges.

You’ll find that your team holds a lot of the answers you may not have and by using their input, you’ll be more trusted as a leader in return.