Question-Centric Leadership: Fostering Innovation and Collaboration

The current world has begun to value good questions more than good answers, but many leaders haven’t adopted this new line of thinking. Leaders who have answers for everything are dangerous because they are probably guiding their company by luck.

Why is it dangerous?

First of all, answering questions without creating space for reflection about the problems that need to be solved can act as a barrier to building great questions and consequently good solutions. Therefore, if the leader answers everything, they convey the message that there’s no room for asking questions. A second point is that this attitude devalues your coworkers and prevents them from contributing to a healthy company culture.

So, how can we foster collaboration among people to generate great questions? And what are the benefits?

The first point is that every time you encounter a problem, transform it into a question that encourages people to engage in free thinking about potential solutions. This approach involves more people in generating possible solutions and also stimulates more discussion about the question at hand.

The second and final point is that when you have all the questions you need to answer, you will demonstrate to the possible futures that your team can collaborate effectively. This will invite the entire team to seek opportunities and experiment with various responses to arrive at possible variations.

Great questions have the power to focus the team’s efforts and involve everyone in exploring many different solutions until the best one is found.