7 Ways Leaders Can Ask Better Questions - L. David Marquet

This resource first appeared in issue #37 on 14 Aug 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Technical Leadership: Other

7 Ways Leaders Can Ask Better Questions - L. David Marquet

One of the things I continue to have trouble with is remembering that as a manager my off-the-cuff remarks can sometimes have an importance given to them way out of proportion than what I had intended. In particular, questions from managers are incredibly powerful, and that cuts both ways - they can help show interest and help you learn things about your team members and their work, or they can cause a flurry of counterproductive effort or even end up shutting people down.

Marquet writes about seven bad ways of asking questions we can try to avoid. It’s a short worthwhile read; some that stood out were:

• Question stacking - just ask one question then listen
• Why questions - this has come up before; at worst it can sound accusatory, and best we are all really good at coming up with plausible-sounding reasons for the “why” of things at the spur of the moment; ‘why’ doesn’t dig deep enough
• “Dirty” questions - frame the situation in an unhelpful way
• Binary questions - “Are things ready with X?” as opposed to “What more do we have to do/think about with X?”

Every now and then I catch myself doing one of these, which probably means there are more times that I don’t catch. I have a bit more to do on watching how I speak while still speaking freely.