Welcome back to the Look and Sound of Leadership, an ongoing series of

executive coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace

the way you want to be perceived. I'm Tom Henschel, your executive coach,

and today we're talking about questions as leadership. Roger is a scientist.

When he became a team leader, he knew he would need to develop his people skills.

After observing him with his staff, I suggested we focus on his skills as a questioner.

Being a scientist, he wanted to know why.

I told him he often asked questions that stifled rather than encouraged interaction.

He found this delightfully curious,

so we explored how to ask questions

so he'd get the results he wanted.

One of the first things I did with Roger was to ask him to just sit back and

react to a question of mine. I then said, do you have any questions? For just a second,

imagine I'm speaking directly to you. I'm going to ask you that same question.

Do you have any questions? What's your automatic response?

If you're like most people, you your head indicating nope no questions here

While we're still in elementary school we learn that that's the safe answer the answer. I wasn't surprised when Roger automatically

shook his head no in answer to my question. Then I asked Roger this question. What questions do you have about this? He did as many people do upon

hearing that question. He disengaged his eye contact and looked up at the

ceiling. Suddenly he was turned inward, accessing his own

thinking. It was a quite different response to what essentially is the same

question. When I pointed out his widely differing reactions to the same question, the scientist in Roger

...