10 Great Questions for Leaders to Ask
One of the easiest and most effective ways to become a better leader is to ask better questions. These questions allow you to form a stronger relationship with your team members and improve performance. They can lead to higher levels of engagement, morale, and retention.
Become aware of how many questions you are asking throughout the day and look to ask more questions and higher quality questions. These can be asked in a formal meeting or in informal conversations that arise throughout the day. Use your social awareness to understand what questions are best to ask.
Asking open-ended questions starting with “what” and “how” will allow for more thoughtful answers. Questions starting with “why” are also open-ended but can lead to defensiveness.
Here are 10 excellent questions that you can ask:
What is your vision for yourselves professionally? Or what are your long-term goals?
How do you work best? (If you want to be more specific you can ask, what motivates you or what allows you to be the most productive).
How can I best support you?
What is something we could be doing better? This can be in general or about a specific project.
How do you like to be appreciated? Another option is, how do you like to receive feedback?
What is another way to look at this? This is a great one when looking for new ideas or to shift perspective.
How are you doing? Use this to check in and find out how they are genuinely doing.
What obstacles are holding you back?
What skill are you looking to develop?
What are your current priorities? It is important to make sure there is alignment with the team and company goals.
Two important points with this:
Look to ask a follow-up question based on their answer. Follow-up questions show that you are interested and it allows the person to go deeper with their answer. Ex: They say that they are looking to develop their communication skills. Follow questions may be what specifically within your communication skills are you looking to develop? Or what is the main reason that you want to focus on this?
Practice active listening by listening to understand rather than respond. Be curious and give the person your full attention. The questions above are only effective if it is done with active listening.
Start to be intentional about increasing the frequency and quality of your questions. Then become aware if there is a shift within the relationship and the performance of the team members.
