“A major stimulant to creative thinking is focused questions. There is something about a well-worded question that often penetrates to the heart of the matter and triggers new ideas and insights.”

Brian Tracy

I once heard Jim Collins speak and he was relaying a lesson taught to him by Peter Drucker. The essence of the lesson was that if one wanted to become truly impactful as a leader they must change their focus and truly be more “interested than interesting.” The key here was that when one is focused on being interesting they are about themselves and what they want to say and do. When they are interested they are focused on the other person and how they can help them.

The next part of the lesson was on how to accomplish being “interested vs. interesting.”  If one wants to convey interest, then one must change the questions to statements ratio. Ask three, four, five times or more questions for every statement one makes. That conveys focus on the situation and the other person, not that you are only interested in being heard…

It has been at least 10 years since I first heard this and it has really stuck with me over the years. It is an area that I continually have to remind myself to work on and really focus on enhancing my questions to statements ratio. (I wrote a little bit about this (at least tangentially) back in August in this post.)

Take stock of your leadership words today. Are you asking more questions or making more statements? Are you focused on being interested or on being interesting? One side is about others, the other side is all about you…