Telling vs Asking
Telling vs Asking puts every leadership conversation on a continuum - direct instruction at one end, open inquiry at the other - so you notice which one is your reflex, not your choice.
Five boxes run in sequence: name the continuum, map it to manager versus leader, spot your own default, practise the shift live, then debrief what changed.
Reach for this when…
- A leader's default in every conversation is to give the answer before anyone's finished the question.
- A team never generates its own solutions because the leader always gets there first.
- You want a leader to notice their own pattern, not just be told to 'ask more questions'.
How to run it
- Introduce the continuum: Telling (directing, instructing) at one end, Asking (inquiring, exploring) at the other.
- Map it onto the manager-versus-leader distinction.
- Have participants name their default position in the conversations that matter most.
- Practice deliberately moving toward asking, live, in a real conversation or scenario.
- Debrief what changed in the other person's engagement when the stance shifted.
A worked example
Situation. Pieter Janssens founded Atelier Vlas, a design agency in Ghent, Belgium, and his creative reviews had become him rewriting the brief out loud while designers took notes.
Applied. Practising the shift live in a session, he replaced his usual 'change the colour here, move this there' with 'what were you trying to solve with this layout?' and made himself wait for the answer.
Result. The junior designer proposed a fix Pieter hadn't considered. He kept the question in his reviews, and design meetings stopped being just him talking.
The catch
The continuum is a useful mirror, but 'ask more questions' can become a tic - asking that's actually telling with a question mark doesn't move anything. It requires the leader to sit with a genuinely uncomfortable silence while someone else thinks, which many skip by answering their own question. And in a real crisis, telling is sometimes exactly right.
A question that already contains the answer you want is telling wearing a disguise.
Origin: Robert Tannenbaum & Warren Schmidt (Leadership Continuum) / Edgar Schein (Humble Inquiry)