I got my first senior leadership role because I was good at solving problems. Not managing people. Not building culture. Solving technical problems.
For years, I ran my teams like a live help desk. Someone had a problem, I had an answer. Someone got stuck, I unstuck them. Fast. Efficient. Reliable.
What I thought was leadership was closer to an expensive search engine.
The Expert Trap
Here's how it works. You start your career by being good at something. You get promoted. Then promoted again. Each time, the signal is clear: your knowledge is the asset. Your brain is the product.
So you keep selling it. You walk into meetings with answers ready before anyone has finished speaking. You review work and tell people what to fix. You sit in planning sessions and outline the approach before the team has had a chance to form one of their own.
And then one day you notice something. Your team has stopped thinking.
Not because they're lazy. Because you've trained them not to bother. Every time they brought a half-formed idea, you replaced it with a finished one. Every time they came with a question, you answered it. They learned: bring the problem, get the answer back. No assembly required.
I had built a team of order-takers when I needed a team of thinkers.
The worst part? I'd been measuring the wrong things. I measured how quickly I resolved blockers. I measured how often my solutions worked. I wasn't measuring whether my team was growing in their own capacity to solve problems. They weren't. Because I was solving everything for them.
What the Research Shows
Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School surveyed more than 3,000 employees and found only one in four felt curious at work. Seventy percent said they faced barriers to asking questions.
Seventy percent.
And here's the part leaders need to sit with: research published in Harvard Business Review found 83% of C-suite executives believe their organizations encourage curiosity. Only 52% of employees agree.
Leaders think they're creating curious, questioning cultures. Their teams think they're working somewhere questions are discouraged.
Not a communication problem. A leadership behavior problem.
The gap exists because leaders don't stifle curiosity through grand gestures. They do it in one-to-ones. In quick messages. In the moment they respond to "I'm not sure what to do here" with "Here's what you should do" instead of "What are your options?"
Death by a thousand answers.
Why Leaders Stop Asking
Asking questions when you know the answer feels inefficient. It feels like holding back on purpose. And there's something else: it feels vulnerable.
If you're the boss and you're asking your team member for their view, what does asking say about your expertise? What if they think you don't know?
The fear is: authority comes from knowing things, and questions are a confession of ignorance.
Edgar Schein, who spent decades studying organizational behavior at MIT, wrote an entire book on this. Humble Inquiry makes one core argument: when leaders ask sincere questions instead of issuing directives, teams become empowered to surface hidden problems. The problems nobody mentions to the boss. The problems brewing for months before they blow up a project. The problems your best people are watching you ignore until they decide to leave.
Asking vs. Interrogating
One thing I had to figure out early: there's a difference between asking questions and interrogating.
A question you ask without genuinely caring about the answer is an interrogation. "What do you think?" asked with your own answer already formed in your head ... where you're waiting for the person to land on your view ... isn't curiosity. It's a test. And people pass it by agreeing with you.
Real curiosity means asking when you genuinely don't know. Asking from a place of wanting to understand, not wanting to confirm.
In practice, this means slowing down. Before I ask a question now, I remind myself: I don't know what this person is dealing with. I don't know what they've tried. I don't know what they're seeing from where they stand.
When I approach a conversation from there, the questions come out differently. Less "here's what I'd do, what do you think?", more "walk me through where you've got to."
What I Changed
The shift wasn't dramatic. No retreat, no consultant, no personality overhaul.
I started with one rule: ask before I answer.
In any one-to-one, before I offered my view, I'd ask: "What are you thinking about doing?"
And then: "What have you already tried?"
And then: "What's the obstacle you're not getting past?"
The answers surprised me. Not because they were wrong. Because they were often right. And because the thinking my team members had already done ... thinking I was about to bulldoze with my own answer ... was solid. Sometimes better than what I would have said.
More than this: when someone arrived at a solution through their own reasoning, they owned it. They defended it in meetings. They executed on it with a confidence "because Ken said so" never produced.
I also started ending meetings differently. Not with "here's what we're going to do" but with "what are you taking away from this?" Small shift. The difference in follow-through is not small.
The Curiosity Gap Is a Leadership Gap
Research from Egon Zehnder shows curiosity is the strongest predictor of success in senior leadership roles. Stronger than intelligence. Stronger than experience. Stronger than confidence.
Leaders who stay curious stay close to reality. They ask what's happening, not what they expect to be happening. They find out what their teams are struggling with before it becomes a crisis. They adapt because they haven't already convinced themselves they understand a situation.
Leaders who stop being curious stop learning. And leaders who stop learning are managing, not leading.
The gap between 83% and 52% I mentioned earlier matters because organizations don't lack for solutions. They lack for the right questions. The right questions surface problems earlier. They surface better options. They tell you what your dashboards won't.
What Asking Looks Like in Practice
When someone brings you a problem, the default shouldn't be: "Here's what I'd do."
It should be: "What do you think the options are?"
When you're in a planning meeting, the default shouldn't be: "Here's the approach."
It should be: "What am I missing?"
When something goes wrong, the default shouldn't be: "Here's what we should have done."
It should be: "What do you think happened?"
These aren't soft questions. They're operational. They build the team's capacity to solve problems without you in the room. They surface information you didn't have. They create the kind of psychological safety where your team tells you bad news early, not late.
A team telling you bad news early still trusts you. Worth more than being right.
This connects to the work I've been doing with Step It Up HR around honest feedback in teams. Psychological safety isn't a cultural perk. It's the precondition for honest communication. And nothing builds it faster than a leader who asks rather than tells.
The Uncomfortable Truth
You don't get promoted to leadership by asking good questions. You get promoted by knowing things. But the moment you step into a leadership role, the knowledge-as-product model starts working against you.
Your job is no longer to be the best individual contributor in the room. Your job is to build a room full of people who don't need you to have all the answers.
Harder job. Requires resisting the urge to perform expertise when someone is struggling. Requires patience. Requires trusting an uncomfortable silence after "what do you think?" is productive, not a sign the conversation has stalled.
Most leaders never make this shift. They stay in answer-giving mode until their best people stop bringing them the hard problems.
Don't become the leader people stop talking to.
Try it this week. In your next one-to-one, ask before you tell. See what comes back.