How Asking questions can improve productivity

Research studies reveal that our brains and particularly the part of our brains that works on complex problems (the Prefrontal Cortex) is stimulated when asked to solve meaningful business issues.

Well-formulated questions will naturally shift most people’s fearful mindsets to a mindset of curiosity and searching for solutions. In our brains, this means a shift from our brain stem (amygdala) to our Prefrontal Cortex, the part of our brain responsible for creativity, play and complex problem-solving among other of our more positive human qualities.

Here are two examples of well-formulated questions:

• What are some unmet needs our customers have that could become a new product line?
• What do you think may be inhibiting the productivity of people in your organization?

​The structure of these questions creates opportunities for successful transformational thinking. The leader who is asking these questions is being inclusive and is acting like a business consultant and requesting creativity.

I coached a CEO to ask questions like those above of her highly technical organization. She posed these 2 questions during a January 2023 all-hands meeting and asked everyone to anonymously post their answers on the internal Slack message board for everyone to read. She went on to further suggest reading the responses of others might stimulate additional new ideas. She also promised she would read the responses every other day and create a dialogue to inspire further creative thinking.

At the end of 2 weeks, she created a small team made up of people from different departments and levels of the organization to analyze what were considered the most viable ideas and report back to the company in an all-hands meeting convened for that purpose.

A month later, a survey was sent to all employees by the VP of HR, which revealed that the employee engagement scores had meaningfully improved. The top 2 ideas were being seriously studied for implementation in the 2nd quarter and the Senior Team was feeling more confident they had made a difference in supporting their CEO in her desire to impact the company by challenging the employees with meaningful questions.

What are the lessons to be taken from this short case study?

Every leader of any size organization can formulate meaningful questions to expand their thinking about their business. This includes sole proprietors thinking about your own business and its future.

The leaders’ active participation will help ensure the ultimate success of this creative idea-generation process. Full transparency of ideas and how they are ultimately ranked and acted upon is important to strengthen trust within the organization.

Research into organizations and virtual leadership development programs have shown that workers in the modern workplace have a shorter attention span than they did a decade ago. However, when a leader asks her audience a question, everyone in the audience immediately becomes an active listener. Nobody wants to be singled-out as not paying attention.

Discussing the answers to questions with others in a small group is a natural way to shift peoples’ thinking into a creative and collaborative mindset. Then, when they return to a larger group, individuals are more likely to speak up and engage with their leader.