Leaders, align your team through inspriring questions!

As a coach, I believe, it is through questions that we develop. Especially leaders, when you find yourselves in the midst of crisis and uncertainty, you should ask powerful and inspiring questions. Eventhough you might think that people look to you for answers!
Asking questions well can put you on the path to solving intractable problems and will also help you connect with your team and, counterintuitively, to earn their trust. Those questions should be big in scope: What new opportunities have emerged that we don’t want to miss? How might we use new technologies to change our business model? And you should involve others in answering those questions —employees, stakeholders, and even customers. Doing so can not only help you generate better answers, it can also help you to change your organization’s cult. The kind of questions leaders need to ask are those that invite people to come together to explore major new opportunities that your organization hasn’t identified yet. Rather than on the existing activities of the organization. Here are some examples:

• What is a game-changing opportunity that could create much more value than we have delivered in the past?
• What are emerging unmet needs of our customers that could provide the foundation for an entirely new business?
• How could we leverage the resources of third parties to address a broader range of the needs of our customers?
• How can we move from standardized, mass-market products and services to personalizing our products and services to the specific needs of each customer?
• How can we develop supply networks that would be more flexible in responding to unanticipated disruptions in production or logistics?
• How could we harness sensor technology to create more visibility into how our customers are using our products and use this information to deliver more value and deepen trust with our customers?