Tell me more: how to boost your leadership skills by learning instead of directing 

Checklist of questions

• Is most of your time spent giving advice, offering pointers, suggesting different approaches, and making recommendations?
• Is your modus operandi to ask: “Why not try this?”, or “Have you considered doing that?”
• Do you seldom invite input from your team?
• Do you know little about your team members’ needs and perspectives?
• Do you see questions as an admission of weakness or sign of vulnerability?

Using questions to grow your leadership toolkit

If you answered ‘yes’ to most of these questions, it sounds like your focus on being solutions-focused – although genuinely intended to support your team – is having the opposite effect to the one intended.

By framing advice as questions, you are effectively telling your reports what to do. Such advice-giving is a form of “helicoptering”: controlling or micro-managing that only serves to stifle autonomy, decision-making, and creative thinking. Telling and not asking is a hard habit to break. Here’s how to switch modes from directing to learning:

• Ask genuine questions that invite input from your team and seek out their views.
• Keep questions short and leave a little silence after a reply to allow others to process, think, and respond.
• Role-play with your peers and frame all your interactions with your partner as questions (the key is to formulate open questions that seek to understand what the other person thinks or feels).
• Use words such as “how,” “why,” or “tell me about this” that are geared to learning instead of directing in your interactions with your team.

Three tips to ask more questions

• Attach a sticky note to your desk, laptop or device with three words written on it: “Tell me more”.
• Make space every day for 15 minutes of journaling to capture thoughts and feelings. This exercise will fuel your curiosity and the desire to find out more.
• Make a habit of asking trusted people for feedback.

Further reading

The importance of asking questions

Good Leadership Is About Asking Good Questions

From micromanagement to leadership: How coaching helped a CEO empower her team

Growing beyond your skillset

Trial our Leader’s Question Mix for more insights on the art of asking smarter questions.