If you want to be successful and reach your leadership potential, you need to embrace asking questions as a lifestyle. Here’s why:

You Only Get Answers to the Questions You Ask. Asking the right question of the right person at the right time is a powerful combination because the answers you receive set you up for success. IBM founder Thomas J. Watson said, “The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer.” But that’s true only if you are willing to ask the question.

Questions Unlock and Open Doors That Otherwise Remain Closed. In life’s journey we face many doors. Hidden behind them are all kinds of possibilities leading to opportunities, experiences and people, but the doors must be opened before we can go through them.
Questions are the keys to opening these doors.

Questions Are the Most Effective Means of Connecting with People. I often watch speakers stand before an audience and work to build a case for their ideas. They would be more successful if instead they tried building a relationship with the people in the room. The
most effective way to connect with others is by asking questions.

Questions Cultivate Humility. Isn’t it strange how we must surrender being right in order to find what’s right, how humility enables us to be authentic, vulnerable, trustworthy, and intimate with others? People are open to those who are open to them.

Questions Help You to Engage Others in Conversation. I want people to know that I value them and that, if possible, I want to add value to them. To do that, I believe I must get to know them. That requires that I ask questions, they talk and I listen.

Questions Allow Us to Build Better Ideas. Any idea gets better when the right people get a chance to add to it and improve it. And good ideas can become great ones when people work together to improve them. What is the key to shared thinking? Asking the right people
the right questions.

Questions Give Us a Different Perspective. By asking questions and listening carefully to answers, we can discover valuable perspectives other than our own. That’s valuable because we often make faulty assumptions about other people. We can correct those wrong assumptions and prevent miscommunication by asking questions.

Questions Challenge Mindsets and Get You Out of Ruts. Too many people have flat-lined mentally. If you want to make discoveries, if you want to disrupt the status quo, if you want to make progress and find new ways of thinking and doing, you need to ask questions. Questions
are the first link in the chain of discovery and innovation.

Never forget: good questions inform; great questions transform! What questions have others asked of you that have made a positive difference in your life? What questions have you asked others that are helping you even today? Become intentional from this point on in being a
questioner. You should even ask questions of yourself.