Why the Best Leaders Stop Giving Answers and Start Asking Better Questions

Just 13% of employees in Europe are engaged at work, according to Gallup’s latest global data.

Gallup estimates low engagement costs the global economy US$8.9 trillion, around 9% of global GDP.

Engagement does not collapse in isolation. It reflects how leadership teams behave under pressure, how clearly direction is set, and whether challenge is welcomed or avoided at the top.

Google’s Project Aristotle found psychological safety to be the most important dynamic in high-performing teams. In other words, performance is shaped less by individual talent and more by whether people feel safe enough to speak, question and challenge.

Ian Windle has worked with senior leadership teams across sectors to build exactly that foundation. A former UK diplomat at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and now an award-winning leadership speaker and coach, he has delivered more than 130 sessions to Vistage CEO groups, focusing on alignment, vulnerability-based trust and disciplined leadership under pressure.

In this exclusive interview with Diversity & Inclusion Speakers Agency, Windle explains what high performance demands from senior leadership teams, how leaders move people from comfort into growth, and why credible leadership during uncertainty begins with focusing on what can be controlled.

Q1. In organizational culture work, “high performance” often rises or falls at the top table. When you assess a senior leadership team, what are the non-negotiables you look for before high performance is even possible?

Ian Windle: “Well, high performance teams. I think you could start with the most important team in a business, which is the senior leadership team. And I say that because everything flows from there.

“If you sit with the leader, the CEO, the directors, and you say, “How high performing is this team?” Well, it’s pretty high performing. Well, okay. Where’s it falling down? Well, I’ve got a question mark over one person in the team. Okay. Maybe they shouldn’t be there. Maybe they should be in a different seat. Maybe they were overpromoted.

“So, you’ve got the people on the team. That’s one thing. But then you’ve got how do you create a team that becomes high performing. And it goes back to purpose. What’s the purpose of the team?

“I always say to people who are about to be promoted onto a leadership team, one of the key differences is the job you were doing, you had to be an expert in that job. So, let’s suppose you were a director of marketing or head of marketing or head of sales and suddenly somebody says, right, you’re now director of sales on the leadership team.

“What’s the big difference? The big difference is suddenly you have to understand the business and not just sales. So, you’ve gone from deep to wide. You still have to understand sales, but you also have to understand marketing, operations, IT, everything about the business.

“And so, the purpose of a leadership team is to get everyone focused on where the business is going. Real clarity, real alignment and understanding what the purpose is.

“When the purpose is sorted out and everyone understands it, the leader has got to create a culture of psychological safety. Then people will be more relaxed when they come together.

“Psychological safety is really created by what Patrick Lencioni calls vulnerability-based trust.

“Vulnerability based trust is where I can be open and transparent with you about who I am, what I like, what I don’t like, how my life’s going. When we create that, we trust each other so much that you can challenge me and I can challenge you and we’re okay about it.

“Great teams, and you see it perfectly demonstrated in sports teams, will challenge each other massively, but nobody takes offence. Everyone goes, “Great. That feedback you gave me through your challenge was what I needed.” And when you get a great high performing team, they go, “Yeah, I needed that. That’s great. Challenge me more.” Because they’ve got this basis of trust.

“When you get that challenge coming out all the time in a good way, then you can start to hold people to account. Going back to what we were discussing off air about the questioning side, which comes into its own in challenge because you can challenge people really well by asking them challenging questions rather than giving them answers.

“So, tell me more about what happened when you had this meeting with this client. That can be a very challenging question.

“And they say, well, it didn’t go so well. We didn’t win the pitch. Okay. Tell me why you think we didn’t win that pitch. What went wrong? How did it go for you? What were the circumstances? And then you get to the heart of it.

“If we’ve got a great relationship based on trust, you’ll open up, I’ll open up, and what we’re trying to do is reach the truth. When we’ve done that, we can move on and the organization can be much more high performing because we’re focused on what makes us better rather than ego.

“Once you’ve got the challenge, you get the accountability and the commitment and finally all that produces is great output from a team.

“But it’s all based on that secret source of getting vulnerability-based trust and you can never stop doing it. I’ve worked with countless management teams over the years and all of them I start off by developing vulnerability-based trust through various exercises and questioning techniques to get them to really open up and go outside their own comfort zones to be open and vulnerable. Then success happens. It’s extraordinary.”

Q2. In HR and leadership development, “growth” can become a buzzword. When you talk about the Growth Zone, what does it look like in real workplaces, and what’s the leader’s job in moving people from comfort into stretch without tipping into burnout?

Ian Windle: “That’s really interesting. I based my TED talk in 2018 around this idea that everyone needs an unreasonable dream. It was not just from theory but from looking at growth and stretch and comfort myself and asking what does it mean in my life, how’s it playing out and how can it play out in other people’s lives.

“The more you think about it, going from comfort to stretch is where life really happens. It’s where energy happens. It’s where we learn. Once we start to move from comfort to stretch and achieve something we didn’t quite know if we could do, we’ve learned something along the way. We felt uncomfortable. We’ve achieved something.

“Once we do that, we get a real buzz, and we want to do it again. So, it becomes a virtuous circle.

“The flip of that in some organizations is too many people are stuck in a comfort zone, and they’re not pushed, not stretched, not encouraged. Apathy sets in and they become disillusioned. They start whinging about work and say, “Well, it’s not great around here,” and start thinking about their own circumstances too much.

“I believe we’re fundamentally designed to grow and change. Some people need more encouragement than others. But once you start doing that it becomes incredibly exciting.

“That’s what leaders need to do with their people because the most important thing a leader can do is develop another leader.

“So how do you develop another leader? You help them to stretch and grow, discover what they can really be. Then it becomes virtuous for them and they go, what else can I do? They want to stretch again.

“You can’t grow a business without growing people. It doesn’t come from a product; it comes from people. You might have the best product in the world, but people have got to sell it, market it, be engaged in how amazing it is and talk about it.

“If people come to work with a real spring in their step because they think, “Wow, I’m going to be challenged and I’m going to grow and develop today,” that’s incredible.

“You don’t want to reach a point in your life where you think, “What could I have done?” I’ll never regret the things I tried and failed. I’ll regret the things I never tried. That’s where you want to be as a leader with people. You want to push them to the point they can achieve their potential and then they’ll thank you.”

Q3. During disruption, leaders often default to reassurance or spin. From your work with organizations, what does credible leadership look like when uncertainty is real, and how do you keep people focused on the controllables without ignoring what’s happening around them?

Ian Windle: “Uncertainty is going to happen. Businesses are not linear from bottom left to top right. Even if you look at great organizational success stories, Apples or Amazons or Googles, it’s a roller coaster line. There’s going to be uncertainty from all sides.

“It could be environmental uncertainty, the economy. You know, the UK at the moment is struggling a little bit. It could be people, lack of being able to recruit the right people. It could be the competition. It could be your products not selling in a new market.

“The thing is, what can you control?

“Don’t worry about the stuff you can’t. There’s no good sitting there saying, “If only the economy was better.” It isn’t. So, what can you control?

“Once you take it back to what you can control, things get much clearer.

“One of the jobs of leadership is to get real clarity into an organization. You know, what are we trying to do here? What’s our three-year vision? You know, what would it look like when we wake up in three years’ time? What are we trying to be? What are we trying to do?

“When people have that clarity and focus on what they can control, it becomes more tangible. You figure out, okay, I can pull this lever, and this will happen as a result.

“Leaders have to be honest. They can’t make it up. They can’t say everything’s fine. That vulnerability shows people will follow them much more if they think they’re human beings. People will see through inauthenticity.

“Leaders have to create real clarity about the future, be honest about where they are and focus on the controllables.”

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This exclusive interview with Ian Windle was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.