Tom Peters is on the money again.
He tweeted:
“Leaders do not earn their pay by having the right answers. They earn their pay by (1) pulling together a great group of people … and then by (2) asking the most probing questions.”
The inference here of course is that by asking your team questions, you may come up with better answers than you could come up with all on your ownsome.
But I think that’s only a fraction of the value to be gained here, if we focus – as I think Tom probably intended us to – on the word ‘probing’.
So probing questions would be that second, third and fourth question a Smart CEO asks after they’ve had an answer to their initial question.
And if we assume that the initial question is posed to establishes ‘what’ someone thinks …
Then I’m going to propose that the probing questions that follow are used to get at the ‘why’ behind the thought someone expressed with their answer to your initial question.
Which is where I see the ‘higher value’ behind asking probing questions.
Because done correctly, probing questions will take you on a journey to the heart of why someone answered your question the way they did – their beliefs.
And (check this out) …
How you ‘feel’ when someone expresses their beliefs is the ONLY time that you really ever get a glimpse of your own subconscious beliefs.
And because it’s those subconscious beliefs that determine how you would have answered the same question (potentially) differently …
Asking those probing questions will have created an opportunity to get a clearer understanding of your own beliefs.
And you see why that might be important as a leader, don’t you?