The Metiss Group's Blog

When communicating and giving feedback, we encourage leaders use questions rather than statements for a number of reasons.

When leaders ask questions and solicit solutions, they gain commitment to the execution of that solution since the direct report feels empowered.   Secondly, they expand the direct report’s critical thinking ability when they ask questions, probe for answers, outcomes, and long term ramifications.

In Jim Collins’ new book, “How the Mighty Fall,” he stresses the importance of your question to statement ratio suggesting you appoint someone in a team meeting to track how many statements you make and how many questions you ask.  Then he suggests you systematically try to increase the number of questions to double that ratio over the period of one year

Empower your direct reports by using questions to increase critical thinking and problem solving ability throughout your organization.

This entry was posted on June 11, 2011 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Leadership, Performance Acceleration. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.