In high school, I once applied for a leadership position I thought I deserved but didn’t get. When I got the news, I followed up with the decision-maker, and he gave me the most important constructive criticism I’ve ever received: I needed to listen more.

I had always thought of myself as a natural leader. I’m never shy to speak first, raise my hand, or share my opinion. For a long time, I believed leadership was all about being the first to do something. I would speak loudly and often, but when it was another person’s turn, instead of listening, I would just wait my turn to talk.

Much to my surprise, I learned that a few people I had worked with would not have chosen to work with me again. I was told I had a tendency to make people feel unheard, and that my voice would often drown out others. This was the first time I’d heard this. My boisterous tendencies had isolated my more reserved peers, and they were already the least likely to speak up.

Later that year, I read a book called The Student Leadership Guide. A few chapters were assigned for a class, but I ended up reading the entire thing because it reminded me of the criticism I’d received a few months earlier. It discussed many assumptions that people tend to make about leadership, and explained why they were incorrect. I realized how many of them I had fallen victim to, and vowed that from that point on, I would make a concerted effort to practice servant leadership.

Servant leadership involves serving the people you work with rather than pursuing personal goals or ambitions. Unlike traditional leadership, which follows a command-and-control structure where leaders give orders, servant leadership reverses this approach, prioritizing the support and empowerment of team members over exerting control.

In my experience, the most effective way to be a servant leader is to actively listen more. When people feel truly heard, they become intrinsically motivated to pursue a goal and view themselves as integral to the project’s success—or failure. They see the goal as a reflection of their values.

Recently, I encountered a product leader who was a catalyst for good ideas. She was someone who just seemed to be there whenever things were happening. It wasn’t that she had particularly special ideas herself, but she drew them out of the people who did by asking the right questions.

Almost every time she was tasked with solving a group problem, she would begin by asking three simple questions:

What’s the goal?
Who’s the audience?
How will we know if we achieved it?

And then she’d use the answers to spark more questions. After a few rounds, she’d trigger a lightbulb moment for someone who’d been thinking about the problem for ages. She never needed to parade her own ideas. She realized the experts in the room knew more than she did, so her job was to guide them toward new realizations.

Rather than acting like a traditional leader, stoking one’s own ego by promoting their own brilliant ideas and taking credit for successes, she behaved like a servant and sparked inspiration in the uninspired.

She got very far just by asking questions. I think we should all ask more questions, and actually care about the answers.

On Asking Questions