I’ve been thinking a lot about questions. The questions I ask, the questions I encourage others to ask.
Do the best leaders ask the best questions?
I’m beginning to think so.
Questions are rooted in what is called “cognitive empathy” — the ability to understand another’s perspective or mental state.
For five years, a counselor helped me (tried to help me?) develop “empathy”—which was, in his definition, a movement away from providing the “right answer” to “feeling what the other feels.” He said over and over again: “Jay, you’re not the answer man; as a leader (husband, father, discipler, or human), you should see, feel and draw out the potential in others.”
My Favorite Questions
In our Gettysburg discussions of “Foresight—the ability to see the future and to know what to do,” we talk about asking the following questions:
First, as leaders, we ask: What is?
Current reality is our friend. We confront, face, embrace the status quo. To do so, we need to constantly ask “What is?”
Because — What is, is!
Second, leaders ask: “What could be?”
If we don’t dream, believe, hope, we’ll be buried by the weight of “what is.”
As a friend of mine says: yes, reality is my friend, but it can’t be my only friend. We need to imagine a preferred future. We need to see over the horizon to what could be.
Asking “what could be” becomes the energy that drives our team and us forward. Thus, we constantly ask: What could be?
Because — What could be, could be.
[I recently read of this tool: Explore the tension between the “what is” and the “what could be” by making a two-column list, in which you and your team contrast the current state of the organization and the preferred new state.
/Hint: place the bulk of your energy effort into imagining and describing “what could be.”*/]
As one person wrote:The leader’s job is to bridge the gap between the concrete present and the ambiguous future.The leader has to help people move out of their comfort zone and into the learning zone.
Now, I love this idea of a *learning zone.*
It’s a new idea for me, giving rise to another favorite question.
As leaders, how might we move others out of their comfort zone into a “learning zone”?
What questions might help us move toward a preferred future?
Questions rooted in “how” seem to rob everyone of “learning and dreaming and imagining.”
But what if we asked and trained “leaders in making” to constantly ask “What if?”
“What if” keeps creative juices flowing.
So, practice using these three questions often:
What is?
What could be?
What if?