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# The Question You Don’t Ask Is Costing You More Than You Think
- URL: https://watsonleadershipgroup.com/the-question-you-dont-ask/
- Published: 2026-10-30T12:43:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-30T12:43:13.000Z
- Description: The questions leaders avoid carry a real cost, from stalled initiatives to teams that stop bringing their best thinking. Here’s what makes a question powerful, and how to find the one you’ve been leaving on the table.
- Author: Brant
- Tags: Leadership, Powerful Questions, Coaching Mindset, Team Leadership

You’ve probably sat in a meeting where the plan was decided before anyone spoke, or watched a project miss badly because nobody pushed on the assumptions underneath it. Most of us have also handed our team an answer when what they needed was a better question.

Here’s what most leaders miss: the questions you don’t ask carry a price tag. Stalled initiatives and teams that stop bringing you their best thinking usually get treated as execution problems. More often, they’re question deficits.

**Not All Questions Are Created Equal**

Leaders ask questions all the time. The problem is usually quality rather than frequency.

Most of the questions we ask are transactional. What’s the status, and when will it be done? Those questions are necessary, but they extract information rather than generate insight.

Powerful questions do something different. They give the person across from you room to think at a higher level than they would have without you in the room. They surface the assumptions underneath a conclusion and open up options that weren’t visible before.

Gallup has measured the engagement of 27 million employees over two decades and estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement across business units. When I look at the managers who move that number, what they do looks a lot like coaching. They ask and listen far more than they direct. Hal Gregersen at MIT interviewed more than 200 of the world’s most creative leaders for his book *Questions Are the Answer*, and what set them apart was less the answers they had than the questions they were willing to ask.

That makes this a retention and performance story as much as a leadership one.

**Three Qualities That Make a Question Powerful**

Not every open-ended question is a powerful one. Here’s what separates the ones that land from the ones that don’t.

1. **It opens rather than closes.** “What else might be driving this?” opens the conversation. “Don’t you think we should...?” already has the answer baked in.
2. **It challenges the frame.** The best questions make people examine the assumptions underneath their conclusions. “What would have to be true for this not to work?” will get you further than “Do you think this will work?”
3. **It creates productive discomfort.** A powerful question isn’t always a comfortable one, and that’s part of its value. “What are you tolerating on this team that you shouldn’t be?” can surface more useful truth in a minute than a month of status reports.

**The Question You’re Not Asking**

Think about a challenge you’re navigating right now, whether it’s a stalled initiative or a working relationship that feels stuck.

Now ask yourself what question you’ve been avoiding. I don’t mean the easy one, or the one that confirms what you already believe. I mean the one that might change how you see the situation if you actually asked it.

That’s usually the powerful one, and it’s usually the one leaders leave on the table.

**Your Spark:** In the next 48 hours, take the question you just named into a real conversation, whether that’s a 1-on-1 or a team meeting. Keep it open and let it be a little uncomfortable. Then do the hardest part, which is to stop talking and listen. What surfaced that you wouldn’t have heard otherwise?

Sources:

- [Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement (Gallup)](https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance-employee-engagement.aspx?ref=watsonleadershipgroup.com)
- [Hal Gregersen says questions are the answer (MIT News)](https://news.mit.edu/2019/hal-gregersen-says-questions-are-answer-0517?ref=watsonleadershipgroup.com)
- [The underused power of catalytic questions (Roland Berger Think:Act)](https://www.rolandberger.com/en/Insights/Publications/The-underused-power-of-catalytic-questions.html?ref=watsonleadershipgroup.com)