The Power of a Well-Timed Question

As I noted in my previous blog post, I was in Washington DC on a policy trip with my Pepperdine colleagues (Go Waves!), and we were privileged to spend some time with Reverend Barry Black, the US Senate Chaplain.

In addition to the sharing the poem “It Couldn’t Be Done,” Reverend Black shared some of his thoughts on being what he phrased as being 10x better, which is a reference to Daniel and his colleagues in the Bible (See Daniel 1:20). One of the students followed up Reverend Black’s remarks with a question about how do you get 10x better. His was response came in the form of a question he has been asking himself for several decades: “What would do or be if you knew you could not fail?”

That question hit me like a ton of bricks. I have been doing some evaluation of personal and professional reflection for the past few months and had hit a rut. His question was the perfect “get unstuck” question that brought clarity and resolution to some of the answers I had been searching for.

From a leadership standpoint, it was also a powerful reminder that one of the best things we can do as leaders to help our people rise to the next level is not “tell” them what to do, but to effectively use questions that enable them to get unstuck.