July 22 2026
Eric Douglas

Asking Powerful Questions: A Key To Your Success as a Leader

Asking Powerful Questions: A Key To Your Success as a Leader

I had the pleasure of knowing and working with Reg Murphy, the former CEO of National Geographic. Reg scheduled a weekly meeting with his executive team on Friday afternoons. At this meeting, Reg would ask two questions: “What did we learn this week that we didn’t know last week? And what are the implications for National Geographic?” One person would share, for example, changes in newsstand sales. Another leader would share the national advertising trends. A third would describe changes in upcoming editions of the magazine. Reg encouraged team members to ask challenging questions and, in the process, continually assess the company’s business strategy and tactics.   

Asking powerful questions is an important key to executive leadership. It builds a culture where people “learn how to learn,” as Reg put it. By asking powerful questions, people have to think on their feet, process new information, and generate creative ideas about what the organization should do. This culture of learning, Reg maintained, was one of the keys to National Geographic’s success.    

Asking powerful questions is not, however, something most of us are trained to do. Our culture encourages us to express ourselves, to speak our opinions, to say what we feel, without stopping to ask powerful questions. Social media has not been helpful in this regard – it rewards people for broadcasting their opinions endlessly. 

But think about it. How do people learn? And from a leadership perspective, how do people learn to be leaders – to take responsibility for leading a department or an entire organization? I think the answer is: By framing questions that get people to think deeply about what the organization needs – and their part in meeting that need.

One of my favorite maxims is this: “You can’t tell people what to do and expect them to assume responsibility for it.” To get people to assume responsibility for leadership, you have to ask good questions and engage them in thinking deeply about their role as a leader – and their commitment to that role.  

For example, let’s assume you are the leader in charge of a medical practice. And let’s assume one of the goals is to reduce the number of errors in coding and billing. The old way of managing would be to gather the team and say: “We need to reduce the error rate in our billing department. From now on, we’ll be looking at each member of the team, identifying error rates, and discussing your performance with you individually.”

The “powerful question” approach would be to gather the team, lay out the problem, and ask: 

  • “What ideas do you have that would reduce the error rate?”  
  • “What would be the single most important thing we could do in the next 2 weeks?” 
  • “What do you think we could achieve in one year?”
  • “What feedback loops would be helpful? What reports do we need that we’re not getting?” 

The beauty of this approach is that it engages people in the billing department in addressing the problem. For people who are more error-prone, it gets them to reflect on what they could be doing differently. For the group as a whole, it sets a new tone of collective responsibility and devising solutions together. By asking powerful questions, you’ve gotten them to take a leadership step that will have lasting impact.

Reflect for a moment on what this implies. If asking powerful questions is a key to leadership, then ask yourself: “How can I start modeling this? How can I do a better job asking questions instead of telling people what to do? And how can I create a forum where leaders across our organization ask each other powerful questions?” (Back to the Reg Murphy example.)

By the way, when I say: “ask powerful questions,” I mean questions designed to evoke genuine reflection and thought. Asking someone: “Do you like my idea?” is not a powerful question. It’s a binary question, designed to yield only a yes or no answer. Powerful questions are always open-ended, requiring a thoughtful answer.

Here are more examples of powerful questions you can ask. Each is tied to one of the leadership competencies I describe in my book The Leadership Equation.  

1. Align the Core Values: 

  • “What would it take for everyone in our company to share a deep understanding of our organization’s core values?”
  • “What if everyone regularly discussed the meaning of our core values and how to translate them into practice? What might that do to improve the dynamics in our team?”

2. Sharpen the Focus:

  • “How can we get our entire organization united around a single mission?”
  • “What would happen if we truly focused on achieving just a few well-defined priorities?” “What would that do for our performance?”

3. Lead Through Others: 

  • “What if we focused on getting the right people into the right roles each and every time – what would that take?”
  • “How can we improve our onboarding of new employees?”

4. Manage Decisions Well: 

  • “Where does decision-making in our company break down – and why?”
  • “What could we do to better clarify decision-making roles across the organization?”

In conclusion, I urge you to ask yourself:

  • “How can I ask powerful questions more frequently? What are the best opportunities for me to do that?”
  • “How can I encourage other people to ask powerful questions more frequently?”
  • “If I were to redesign one of our meetings to be more interactive, what would that look like?”

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