Sixty percent of leadership is asking the right questions.
When you ask the right questions, you use your experience and responsibility to guide others into solving problems themselves. I learned this more as a commander than as a PAO—with my small, busy team, I focused on breaking down my own assumptions and asking questions that were always clear, often creative and sometimes uncomfortable.
In the Public Affairs realm, there’s a reason the Q&As are the most important part of any PAG or Briefing Card — Q&As make everything real. Your job is to think like a journalist and ask the hard questions that you know will be coming your way, and have answers for them. If you’re sugarcoating your planning documents with feel-good questions then you are failing to plan for contingencies … and thus failing plan at all. If you’re dismissing hard questions with a “no one will ask that,” check yourself, because you might be underestimating the media. If you’re only proposing the Q&As that you can answer yourself without further research, you might be delivering a product full of empty command messages with no true substance.
As a leader, asking the right questions builds discipline and credibility within your team. The right questions open the door to a productive discussion, without having to depend on assumptions or authority.
Small example: Two of my star performers once excitedly asked permission to “fly to Georgia” in order to cover a command information story for a different organization. I asked, “Does this story support our mission, or do you just want to do this so you can ride on a helicopter?” They admitted it was the latter, and agreed to cover our own local soldiers.
Here’s a sampling of the questions I’ve asked:
- “Do you have everything you need?”
- “Is there anyone else you could talk to?”
- “What did the Secretary of Defense say about this topic?”
- “When did you tell the XO you’d be done?”
- “Did you verify that statement is true?”
- “What did you say to that reporter?”
- “What charges did you make on your Government Travel Card?”
- “Why did you go with that picture for that article?”
- “What did you do for PT this morning?”
- “Did you write those words yourself?”
- “Are you drunk?”
- “When’s the last time you cleaned this piece of equipment?”
- “If I took this camera out right now, would it work?”
- “What’s your priority today?”
Here are the three groups of people The Right Questions will help you connect with:
People Who Know What To Do: These teammates are smart and motivated, but everyone gets caught up looking in the wrong direction. The right questions can refocus their attention on the bigger picture, or draw attention to administrative or logistical details that they didn’t know to consider.
People Who Need to Figure Out Where They Stand: A former mentor of mine often took me to Public Affairs “school” through the Socratic method—he’d challenge me to think about social media metrics, organizational behavior, strategic policy, and beyond. Even a simple “why” eventually strips away your assumptions, forcing you to test or reaffirm your own position. This is essential to AARs: with no emotion or baggage, we ask ourselves “why did we do this” and “what was different this time” in order to make faster, more clear decisions in the future.
People Who Are Trying to Get Away With Something: Lying destroys communication, including lies by omission. You can prevent lies by omission by asking the right questions. This type of question-asking calls for a high degree of discipline and wit; in doing so you can keep the organization on track and protect others from their own laziness.
Ask the right questions, and your people will learn to give the right answers.
