As a leader, how do you become a better leader? If you’re like me, you probably read a lot of books, listen to podcasts, and attend a few conferences. But one of the best ways to grow is to ask other leaders questions.

Anytime a person must gather information, there is no substitute for asking the right questions. Asking the right questions means asking someone to teach you things you do not know, or correcting you if your knowledge is distorted. We see forms of questions all around us: a manager interviews a job applicant, a detective talks […]

Curiosity starts early. Children throw cups from highchairs over and over, testing gravity and their parents. They repeat the same noises and ask the same questions, exploring sound and language. When everything is new, there are countless experiments to run. The answers are awe-inspiring: sunsets, gravity, hula hoops, and bugs. As more and more questions […]

Eight years ago, Craig Ross achieved a career milestone. He became the majority owner, CEO, and president of Verus Global, a leadership development organization based in Littleton, Colorado. There was no time to celebrate because of declining profits and growth. “For the first time in my career, I was asking questions I’d never asked,” Ross says. […]

I am good at a few things. But waiting is not one of them. In this post, I share five strategies I am currently using to cope in those situations where I don’t have a choice.

Good conversationalists have great influence. In this post, I share five strategies I have learned for having better conversations.

When I started in my career, the key to success was having the right answers. Now it’s more about having the right questions.

We are almost in the holiday season, and that means a lot of great things: fun memories, good food, and more. But it also means a few challenges. You know one of my big ones? Let’s visit the Honest Planet for a minute. It’s awkward conversations. You probably know what I mean. With all the […]

I love a good conversation. When I think to the most meaningful moments of my life, many of them have happened around a table, talking with the people closest to me. But we all know some conversations are better than others, right? Maybe you’ve had conversations that felt more like competitions. Everyone around the table […]

Questions are powerful tools. They can ignite hope and lead to new insights. They can also destroy hope and keep us struck in bad assumptions.

The incarnation is the Christian teaching that God became man. This teaching is beginning to have an enormous impact on my practice of leadership.

What he did have was a strong sense of who he was, and a caring spirit about him that made me want to follow him, listen to him, be in his space as much as possible. … For two reasons: First, it was abundantly clear in our conversations that he cared about me, and second, he lived the kind of life that I wanted to live.

Over the years, my wife, Gail, and I have developed a set of conversational rules that we use at the dinner table. We have ever written these down. They are largely unarticulated. However, over the years we have done our best to maximize these opportunities and to make eating more about the discussion than the food. Here are eight things we do to create engaging dinner-time conversations.