The Beauty of Questions – How can I develop my team?
Ever notice how a quick fix from the top can feel like a shortcut, but it ends up stunting your team’s growth?
When managers rush to answers, they inadvertently:
- Undermine critical thinking
- Reduce team ownership
- Signal that questions slow things down, leaving the impression that the team shouldn't question things
Instead of supplying the solution, great leaders ask insightful questions. Over time, your team learns to recognize your inquiry patterns, anticipates them, and comes primed with data, options, and creative approaches.
Questions like:
- “What outcomes are we really chasing here?”
- “What assumptions are we making?”
- “How might we validate that idea before building it?
They shift the expectation from “Here’s the answer” to “Let’s uncover the answer together.”
When managers have all the solutions, team members may hesitate to speak up (even if they have better ideas or new data). Psychological safety is fragile. It thrives on encouragement, not directives.
Next time you’re tempted to swoop in with your own fix, pause and ask yourself:
- What am I assuming?
- What questions could help my team discover a better path?
- Am I inviting dissent, or shutting it down?
Cultivating curiosity through questions isn’t just a leadership nicety, it’s a game-changer for innovation, ownership, and team confidence.
What’s one powerful question you’ve used to unlock new thinking in your team?
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
Does your team struggle to deliver the kind of rapid and effective problem-solving your business requires? Can you really afford the unhappy customers, wasted engineering hours, cost of poor quality, and lost opportunities? Use the Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ approach by CAEDENCE.
