From Start-Up to Scale-Up: How Leaders Thrive by Being Curious

“A prudent question is one-half of wisdom”

Francis Bacon | Philosopher

When we are working with teams, we’re really interested in the pattern of communication between team members. This is especially true in teams that are involved in problem solving. As well as the network pattern[1], which is important for the collective IQ of the team, we are interested in the ratio between advocacy and enquiry when individuals speak. This data helps illuminate a lot about the team’s performance.

You might assume that teams solving novel problems would tend to ask a lot of questions, but we tend to see that quite rarely. Typically, there is more advocacy, and it is often more noticeable with leaders and more senior people, who often also have a disproportionate share of voice.

Asking Not Answering Questions

We often notice that many leaders tend to be strongly opinionated and used to being right. They’ve been successful by correctly answering questions. The more senior a leader is, the less useful this is. The adaption I notice in the best senior leaders is that increasingly they ask questions rather than answer them.

At a more junior level, a crucial part of a leader’s credibility is what they know. For senior leaders it is often more valuable to be clear about what they and the organisation does not know and who might help to resolve that?

This can be a difficult transition to navigate successfully, especially in scale up organisations. Here, the acceleration from the informal collegiate leadership of a start up to the more complex demands of a growing organisation with multiple teams and departments can happen very quickly. You have senior leaders by appointment who are relatively inexperienced and who can easily get trapped in the habit or assumption that what made me successful to date will also be what continues to make me successful.

Listening Carefully

Good leaders tend to ask more questions and to listen carefully to what they hear back. That’s important for any leader but crucial for senior leaders where this habit builds trust, empowers others, improves problem solving and challenges everyone to notice more – to be on the job not just in the job.

James Thurber, author and cartoonist noted, ‘it is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.’ With that in mind here are a few questions that can get the discussion going:

1. What don’t I know about this?
2. Is this a what or a who problem?
3. What perspectives are we missing?
4. If this fails or goes wrong, why would that have happened?
5. Who can help with this?
6. If I gave you more time to do one thing, what would that be?
7. If I could do one thing to make your job easier, what would that be?
8. What is the problem we are solving?
9. Is the task work we are all so busy on geared to solving the problem?
10. How might this be different so that we…?
11. Is this the most valuable use of my time?
12. What’s the question I should have asked?

For help in asking and answering these and other questions, get in touch.

[1] Arslan, F. (2016). Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread-The Lessons from a New Science, by Alex Pentland: New York, NY, The Penguin Press, 2014.