comes from high-powered questions.
The least used and one of the most productive tools for professional conversation is high-level questioning. But for a number of reasons, questioning has always gotten short shrift. Traditionally, asking questions is thought of as revealing your incompetence, which is then rewarded with a loss of influence. Even today, when the need for intelligent questions ought to be obvious, I meet very few who actually use questions strategically, much less effectively. Furthermore, even fewer professionals, including yesterday’s traditionalist or today’s knowledge worker, understand that questioning is a linguistic device that can make great contributions to the organization—and grant profound influence and power to the individual. In more than 20 years of consulting hundreds of high-powered executives, I have heard no one asking or talking about questioning unless I initiated the subject.
All questions are speech actions that affect the way individuals and teams organize their thinking about people, problems, and processes. And in effective teams high-powered questions are a--and sometimes the--major element of the conversation. The better questions can often positively impact personal influence, relationships, team focus, team organization, problem solving, strategies, priorities, motivation, and decision making. In short, higher order questions can have a huge role in shaping both our thought and our behavior.
Not all questions are created equal. John Hagel has written that the greatest value and personal power in today’s environment comes from questions that no one had even thought to ask but that help to focus attention on promising but previously ignored areas. Although such questions often require more complex, critical thinking and very thoughtful formatting, let’s begin with the basics.
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