Why Questions Matter

As a corporate consultant, I am often asked the following question by company presidents and managers: “I have an employee who asks lots questions on the job. What should I do?” My immediate response is, “Count your blessings. You have a great thing going.” Here is why: effective decision making is marked by meaningful questions. Numerous studies support this.

For example, Irving Janis’ (1982) analysis of events leading up to the Bay of Pigs fiasco established that too few questions were asked in cabinet sessions prior to John Kennedy’s order to invade Cuba. Later, Richard Nixon gave the go ahead for the Watergate break-in based on staff meetings where too few questions were raised. More recently, Randy Hirokawa and Dennis Gouran’s (1988) examination of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster revealed that Morton Thiokol engineers and NASA managers posed too few purposeful questions prior to approving the shuttle’s launch. The result was catastrophic.

If you are a company leader, and you have an employee who asks lots of questions, especially questions that challenge the status quo—permit this behavior. As long as the questions focus on the task, your employee is playing a vital role for your company. If, by chance, questions are noticeably absent when making company decisions, encourage your employees to ask them. By the way, research also establishes that question asking is a prime indicator of an employee’s leadership potential.