“Judge a man by his questions, not his answers.”  -  Voltaire

Does your team ask a lot of questions, or do people just wait for you to come up with directives? Do you ask questions? I mean questions such as “How could we do….” “Why are we doing this?” “What if we were able to start from scratch?”

If you ask more questions, you will get better results. The more questions your team asks, the better the outcome will be. There will be more interaction; the idea will be refined and improved. If you can foster intellectual curiosity, you will have a more innovative team.

I recently witnessed my operations team conducting their daily production meeting. The meeting compares the previous day’s plan to how we actually performed. It was interesting how many questions people raised. Everyone participated by asking questions. The questions allowed them to get at root causes rather than just the effects. They weren’t able to answer everything, but the questions led either to action plans or to more questions to be asked later. 

What if we could get all our employees to ask more questions? I can’t imagine how powerful that would be.