Questioning Leaders

Contents

1 Introduction 3

2 The Power of Questions 3

2.1 Questioning's strength 3

2.2 Benefits of a questioning culture 5

3 Asking the right questions 5

4 Creating a Questioning Culture 6

4.1 Strategies that can build a powerful learning in questioning culture 6

4.2 Probable resistance 8

5 A guideline on using questions 8

5.1 Managing people by asking questions 8

5.2 Building team by using questions 10

Conclusion 11

References 13

1 Introduction

In this paper we want to ask about questioning leaders, and we would like to show how questioning can help a leader or a person or how can it be helpful for an organization.

Leaders asking questions in their company give confidence in their team and give the chance to team members to think further and try to discover things.

By questioning they can connect team members to work together, think together and solve problems together.

"The most successful leaders lead with questions, and they use questions more frequently".

M.J. Marquardt, (2005), Leading with questions.

Successful leaders make an atmosphere in the company that people feel good about answering questions and also they don't feel shy about asking questions even from their leaders or their bosses.

Questioning can be really helpful for people to reach new thoughts and learn the different way of their job or their life, they can change the way of their decisions and however they can change their life style. As humans we have to be sure that there are lots of things that we do not know and sometimes we don't have any ideas or knowledge about theme, if we believe this fact we can feel better and ask without any fear because all of the humans are like that.

If you really like to improve your life in your job or in your living style you have to become more powerful and strong and how can it be happen? Of course it can happen by improving your knowledge and ideas and that is not only by going to university but via asking people the things you don't know. When you want to ask you have to listen to answers and try to find new answers don't think that you have to hear the answers that you want to hear or you already know.

We will continue with the ways of questioning and how making a questioning culture in an organization and after that you can see how it can be positive and helpful for your career and your life to ask and to be asked.

2 The Power of Questions

2.1 Questioning's strength

We are living in a world of technology and each day is new day for new things and new events in human's life. In this world you can reach lots of information through internet, books, magazines, TV and also from your friends and relatives. But there are still so many answers that you have to look for it with asking them.

When we say the word leader, we think automatically that this person should know everything but that's completely wrong, because leaders are also humans and not excepted from others. With questioning they can find a key or a solution for their organization and they can learn more and become more powerful.

We can all think about our childhood moments or we can see our children that when they start to talk and grow up they start to ask questions, such as "what is this and why this is red?" in these questions sometimes we don't know the answers and it helps us to really think about it and try to find the correct answer and teach correct things to our child. In this case you can see that even a question from a child can help you with new ideas and it can improve your life and this child will grow up with knowledge that he/she needs for basic living. When we grow up we start to ask fewer questions this can effect negatively on us and we will feel bad about asking more questions.

When we have an important role in life like a leader or a father or a manager we start to think that we shouldn't ask questions we have to know all the answers, and that is totally wrong and can cause many problems in our life or it can stop us from improvement.

We have to create a life or an organization which can spread knowledge among members and make a learning atmosphere, this organization can get use to all the new aspects and changes, when you can adapt to any change you can be successful in your life and not stick to old style of life and organizing.

Do you know that not asking questions can hurt a leader and an organization? You can just search the history of the leaders who didn't ask questions and didn't try to make this culture for their organization. By asking questions we can learn correct way and we can stop doing mistakes because some people did mistakes already and they can give their experiences to us and this can help us to survive in this organization, become more powerful and grow faster and safer.

We can differentiate leaders and managers with the way of using questions, as leaders always want to have the correct questions but manager's point is to find answers for those questions.

If we are asking questions it doesn't mean that we have to also have the answers but it shows that there is still something that we do not know and we are not complete yet and we can still learn and find new things.

Leaders should make a questioning environment for their employees to give theme good feeling in their organization and make theme trust and feel connected if they don't feel in this way they cannot answer your questions or their answers will be wrong and they will feel very bad about the organization.

2.2 Benefits of a questioning culture

Leaders are responsible for making questioning culture for their organization and in this case they have to be open for all kind of answers and suggestions, if they can do that, they can create the organization that people learn from each other and improve faster than other organizations without this culture. In Michael J. Marquardt book which is "Leading with questions" (2005) he