Unite Your Team with Beautiful Questions
When a team explores a great question, it generates “more solidarity, engagement and progress.” When a leader delivers an answer, there’s little room for a conversation.
If you’re a business leader, it’s unlikely that you’ve made a habit of consulting poets and philosophers for advice on how to scale up your enterprise. And for the most part, that’s probably wise.
Poets might expertly critique your mission statement or eloquently polish off your presentation. But when asked to analyze your market shares, they may not execute the same level of insight (although a few might surprise you).
Philosophers may be passionate about inquiry into: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” or “How do we know what we know?” No doubt, they’ll inspire you to “think different.” But your mind may be on you stakeholders, who have been asking for hard metrics on your KPIs.
But poetry and philosophy may play more of a role in strategy and leadership than most people think.
Leading companies are now adopting “agile strategy”: They’re advancing prototypes, testing ideas, and iterating ad infinitum. And agility requires asking questions, thinking different, taking risks, and inspiring new directions.
Or to borrow the words of Austrian poet Rainer Maria' Rilke, great leaders and great teams not only “love the questions,” they “live the questions.”
Some company cultures discourage that full-bodied inquiry. Eager to act and do, their leaders may view questioning as inefficient. Employees may learn early that asking “why” will make them appear uninformed or insubordinate.
“Always the beautiful answer,” writes e.e. cummings in his introduction to his Collected Poems, “who asks a more beautiful question”?
Journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Warren Berger takes inspiration from that line of poetry. His blog, A More Beautiful Question, is dedicated to asking questions that inspire action and “shift the way we perceive or think about something."
Google runs on questions, Berger reminds us. Steve Jobs of Apple “made [his] mark by questioning everything.” Inquiry has the power to spark breakthrough ideas.
Polly LaBarre, senior editor and founder at Fast Company, reminds us that business culture classically “celebrates mastery, values decisiveness and reveres the person at the top.” But “genuine questions,” she writes, “unleash humility, curiosity, even vulnerability.”
Take Vineet Nayar, who took on the role as president and later CEO of HCL Technologies. Nayar questioned what it would look like to take “a chip out of the marble facade of the office of the CEO.” His management philosophy shifts power into the hands of the employees.
But does that strategy work?
After Nayar took on a leadership role in 2005, HCL Technologies’ revenue and income growth tripled.
Nayar shares what goes into the daily routine of the CEO, who prefers to call himself the “CQA,” or “Chief Question Asker.”
After getting up early, practicing an hour of yoga and driving to the office, Nayar reminds himself again and again that he doesn’t need to know all the answers to all the questions.
And so, as CQA, he begins by directing his inquiry inward. He asks himself 20 questions. Many of those questions address how to lead a more human-centred business and let go of the need to control:
Am I too focused on control? Am I obsessed with control? What things do I control that I should not control? Should people who create value be governed by people who control it? What rules could we get rid of today that would increase our ability to create value? By focusing on human beings, can I reduce the uncertainty in our business?
For La Barre, questions that begin with “why,” “why not” and “what if” not only fuel innovation and transformation, but trust and involvement in an organization. Those questions are “subversive, disruptive and playful,” she writes. When a team explores a great question, it generates “more solidarity, engagement and progress.” When a leader delivers an answer, there’s little room for a conversation.
“questions that begin with “why,” “why not” and “what if” not only fuel innovation and transformation”
And so whatever level of an organization you work for, invite the poet in you to play with the words and inquire into the message and the meaning behind the name of your new product. Encourage the multimedia artist in the design department to challenge how your team approaches storytelling. Ask the philosopher by the water cooler to apply the Socratic method to get insight into the company’s optics.
If you’re a leader in any capacity, what are your 20 questions? How do you disrupt the old way of leading and demonstrate your humility, curiosity and vulnerability?