I’m going to share two leadership secrets with you.
Secret one: questions are more important than answers.
Secret two: WHAT and HOW questions are better than WHY questions.
Let me explain secret one first and quickly.
When you’re the leader and you have a meeting with the team, do you already know the answer to the question you’re discussing? If the answer is yes, then why are you having the meeting?
A better strategy would be to get people together and ask them what they think.
Maybe you’ll hear your answer.
Maybe you’ll get to an even better one.
This leads to the second secret: ask better questions.
Specifically, open-ended questions.
Why open-ended questions?
Here’s a wee-bit of science.
Your brain engages and gets stimulated when asked an open-ended question. And by “open-ended,” I mean a question in which the answer is beyond “yes”’or “no.”
In fact, when asked a question that requires more thought and explanation, the brain releases a natural chemical called seratonin.
Seratonin helps the brain relax and reflect. And in so doing, the brain gets creative and gathers intelligence. Metaphorically, the brain starts to see “dots” and starts connecting them.
An open-ended question “hijacks” the brain and focuses it on finding an answer. It’s a brain reflex called “instinctive elaboration.”
Examples?
“How can we improve our new business process?
Or…
“What can we do to make this presentation stronger?”
These are questions the brains of the people on your team like to figure out.
WHY questions are good. WHAT and HOW questions are even better — especially for team building.
What they don’t like to figure out is WHY questions.
“Why did we lose the pitch?”
“Why did you present the pricing like that?”
“Why do we keep doing things this way?”
When you hear those questions, do you immediately feel defensive?
Prosecutors and journalists love WHY questions because they force a “confession.”
A WHY question will invariably put your team on the defensive and force their brains to defend, rather than expand.
Take that WHY question above: “Why did we lose the pitch?”
If I was asked that question, I would come up with defenses and excuses.
But what if the question was: “What could we have done differently to win the pitch?”
Or “How can we win a pitch like this next time?”
Well, you just released some seratonin that wants to inspire the brain to gather a lot of information.
It’s positive, it’s open, it’s a question that stimulates creativity.
Of course, sometimes you have to ask WHY. In fact, you sometimes have to go deep into a “root cause analysis.” And, well, that requires drilling down with a lot of WHYs.
But that kind of analysis aside, I’d like to offer up that the majority of your questions should be WHAT and HOW questions.
Now, strategist, thinker and TEDTalk rockstar, Simon Sinek who inspired us all to get obsessed with WHY might think otherwise. And indeed his WHY TED Talk is important to watch.
But let me sum things up like this:
WHY questions are good.
WHAT and HOW questions are even better — especially for team building.
So how about you experiment this week.
Replace your WHYs with WHATs and HOWs.
See what these open-ended questions unlock.
Take some notes.
What do you have to lose?
Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.
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