The instinct to lead by having the answer ready is understandable, and it's also usually backward. Zenger Folkman's research (opens in new tab), drawn from more than 18,000 employees rating their leaders across 60 specific behaviors, found that leaders who score above average on a small set of respect-building behaviors, several of which come down to genuinely inviting questions and different perspectives rather than defending a position, see a dramatic shift in how their teams show up. Among leaders who scored well, employees' intention to quit dropped from 37% to just 20%, and the share willing to give real extra effort nearly doubled, from 23% to 47%.
A leader who genuinely asks a question and waits for the real answer is doing more for their team's willingness to speak up than most training programs manage in a year.
What's notable is how small the required shift is. The same research found that leaders performing in the top quartile on just three of the eight identified behaviors, being open to diverse perspectives chief among them, saw psychological safety scores among their teams climb to the 53rd percentile; leaders hitting the 90th percentile on those same three behaviors pushed safety scores to the 62nd percentile. Nobody has to master all eight behaviors or become a different kind of leader overnight. A leader who genuinely asks a question and waits for the real answer, rather than the answer that confirms what they already believe, is doing more for their team's willingness to speak up than most training programs manage in a year.
of employees are willing to give real extra effort under leaders who score well on psychological-safety behaviors, nearly double the 23% under leaders who don't. Zenger Folkman, "Research: What Leaders Do to Create Psychological Safety" →
The habit is harder to build than it sounds, because it asks a leader to give up something that made them successful in the first place: being the person with the answer. One executive quoted in the research put it plainly to their team: "We can't promise everyone will get their way, but everyone will have their say," and reinforced it by inviting dissenting voices to speak first rather than last. That's a small, repeatable practice, not a personality trait, which is exactly why it's learnable. A leader who asks more questions than they answer isn't avoiding responsibility for the decision; they're making sure the decision gets made with everything the team knows, instead of only what made it to the top of the room.
