Alive and Well at the End of the Day, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 9THE POWER OF QUESTIONS

Ask questions when you don’t know the answer, and sometimes when you do.

—Malcolm Forbes

Peter Drucker described leadership as “making common men do uncommon things.” When it comes to safety, that uncommon thing is getting people to work far more safely than they would do if left on their own. Achieving that level of performance is hard work, requiring a huge investment of the time and effort on the part of the leader. One way to reduce the amount of leadership effort required—or to get better results for the same effort—is to look for leverage. Mechanical advantage is one of the oldest and most basic principles of physics. One management application of that principle is asking questions.

Leaders ask their followers questions all the time. “How much did we produce?” “Why is Line 6 down?” “When will it be re‐started?” “Has the order been shipped?” Questions like those have two things in common: they’re all questions, and they’re all questions in search of information.

Most of the time, when a leader asks a follower a question, the objective is simply to get information. There’s not a thing wrong with that. Leaders need information and when the follower has it, by all means, ask. But there can be an entirely different purpose for a question posed to a follower: not to gather information, but to gain influence.

Asking questions as the means to influence followers is one of the oldest leadership practices on the planet. The philosopher Socrates ...