# Strategic Questioning for Leadership Impact

**Podcast:** LEITWOLF Podcast - Leadership, Führung & Management
**Published:** 2026-03-05

## Transcript

If you ask a question, you may be a fool for five minutes.
If you don't ask questions, you remain a fool throughout your entire life.
As a leader, your role is not to have all the answers yourself.
It is not.
But you are responsible for the questions that give direction to the team.
Hello and a very warm welcome to today's Lightwolf Leadership Podcast.
Your podcast for leading with impact.
Today's edition is about a topic that is close to my heart.
Because I've seen this topic to have such profound impact many times in my life.
Today's episode is about questions.
And specifically about wrong questions that I've asked many times, and how you and I as leaders can learn how to ask the right question.
Leadership does not manifest itself first in decisions.
It shows itself first in the questions we ask.
And let me quote someone who is really great at questions and who must have been living a fool for few thousand years ago.
If you don't ask questions, you remain a fool throughout your entire life.
Unquote.
Very powerful, I think.
And let me share a very personal moment that happened during Christmas.
It's now the middle of January 2026, and we were happy and lucky to spend Christmas together with my in-laws, two wonderful people, Tanya's parents, age 85 and 80.
And at Christmas Eve, we were together, just Tanya, my sons, and my in-laws had a really nice evening.
Throughout the evening, one question was suddenly asked.
And it was asked to my in-laws.
And the question was, hey, Dita and Krista, is there a question you regret today never having asked your parents?
That question was followed by a moment of silence, a few seconds of deep thinking, and a wonderful deep conversation that not only made me learn more about the parents of my in-laws, but also about my in-laws, about my own family.
So it was really a wonderful conversation.
It was started with one insightful question.
Now let's switch to the business world that you and I are leading in.
My observation is that many teams are smart, committed, and experienced, and still, they deliver below their potential.
Often, this is not due to a lack of capability, but due to asking the wrong questions.
Let me share a key moment that influenced my business life substantially and also contributed to the fact that you and I are together now here in this leadership context.
It's a moment from the early part of my own career.
I must have been four to five years in my first employer.
I was a marketing manager responsible for two successful brands in a European market.
I was successful for six wonderful people who were all well on their way to be promoted to a position like mine very soon.
And one day I had taken the time to write down the strategy of one of my brands five years out.
And the question was, where do we want that brand to be and what do we want that brand to be in five years?
I condensed it all on one page.
Hard work, but it pays, and gave it to my boss.
And his name is Michael Bernhurster.
And if he listens to this now, Michael, warm regards.
And thanks for the question.
Because he came back just an hour later, circled just one thing and said, Stefan, good work.
You are suggesting option A.
But I have a question for you.
Stefan, are you aware about the impact this proposal is gonna have on your brand's revenues in your brand's biggest customer?
And I went silent.
I may have gone pale.
I felt embarrassed.
Because not only did I not know the impact that this would have on my own biggest customer in retail, I didn't even know who my biggest retail customer was.
That's how embarrassing that moment was for me.
And I went like, Michael, I don't know yet, but thanks for the question.
I will figure out the answer.
Give me some time.
A minute later, I walked over to the other end of the building and saw the Edeka team.
A big successful German retailer that happened to be my own biggest retail customer, and I had no idea.
So I went over, talked to my own team, and got about an hour of spontaneous pressure learning.
I learned a ton in just an hour.
And I went back to my desk, back to Michael, scrapped my old strategy proposal and said, You know what, Michael, forget about it.
I'll start over, I'll have a new proposal soon.
And by the way, Michael, I've seen that on all the other retailers, we have started assembling multi-functional teams.
It's not just the salespeople over there, but there is a finance person, there is a logistics person, and on many teams, there is a marketing person.
If ever you decide to starve a marketing person into that Edica team, Michael, this here is an application.
Please transfer me to sales for a year or two or three.
I want to learn.
And that's what happened about half a year later, and I had two fantastic years in the sales department.
So that's how profound the impact of that one question was.
It made me understand a very impactful leadership technique called asking insightful questions.
It made me realize how impactful you can change course, you can change direction without telling anyone what to do.
Michael just asked a question, and it shows how profound the impact can be beyond just the business strategy.
I volunteered to change functions.
I spent two years in a completely different department, and that was probably one of the best periods in learning from my experience being in differ because I grew like L, right?
Although I had much smaller responsibility than before.
So now let's go into a couple of common patterns that I have observed.
In researching for this podcast, in preparing for this podcast, I also involved all our cooperation partners.
We are 10 senior leaders.
All of us have 20 or more years of own practical line leadership responsibility.
In Europe, in the United States, in all of the Americas, some have been in Asia, some have been in Saudi Arabia, so we have even some global expertise.
And I asked my partners for their key insights on questions and why they are not more widespread and more common.
And a few patterns emerged.
Why not always the questions are of the quality they could or should be.
Sometimes they aren't even asked at all.
Why?
One of the areas that emerged was sometimes questions aim at the wrong thing.
They aim at justification, they aim at defense, they aim at excusing instead of insight.
We win by growing, and growing requires insight.
So if questions are posed like, hey guy, why did this not work?
Then there is no wonder that this creates angst.
It reduces psychological safety.
It produces defensiveness, not clarity and not learning.
Another area that is underutilized in the area of questions is the specificity.
Sometimes questions are simply too comfortable, too vague.
How is it going?
Yeah, very nice.
Sounds friendly and maybe a nice lead into a conversation to first connect with small talk.
But that's not the end of the conversation.
It must not be the end because then there is no leadership, no learning, no progress, no clarity.
So sometimes people say very vague and comfortable.
Just not to get into the uncomfortable area of truth.
And a third area we discovered while talking about questions is questions that avoid responsibility.
They collect opinions, they collect even more opinions, and they collect arguments and they collect counter-arguments without anyone taking any direction.
Waste of time.
Reminds me of a project with a super nice and successful, rapidly growing Indian company who we serve since uh three years.
And one of the projects involved me as a coach, and I supported two teams, middle managers on their way up, investing time into themselves as humans and leaders, and into the topic of leadership.
And they were tasked to offer strategic recommendations.
They had six months for a strategic recommendation to make.
Team A, after three months, well on its way.
Already discussing the answers, analysis, having hypotheses, already starting to discuss the answers.
Team B, three out of six months, half of the time already gone, nothing.
They just kept on just raising ideas and questions and themes and general topics.
No one took any responsibility to take any action.
They wasted half of the project time because there was a leadership vacuum created by no one asking questions to responsibility.
So these are typical areas that we in the team have seen that may lead to situations where questions are just not as impactful as they could be.
And now I would like to offer you three specific ways how you can ask questions with learning-oriented questions.
If we ask why did this fail?
Then of course the question directs us into the past.
And the question directs us towards mistakes and it creates defensiveness.
Instead, I recommend we ask learning-oriented questions to look to the future, to look and search for solutions, for opportunities, for improvements.
So specifically, I suggest you ask questions that put observation before judgment.
Observe, don't judge.
Ask about patterns, not blame.
And clearly separate analysis from decision making and complete your analysis sufficiently, no more and no less, before you take decisions.
So better questions could be: what have we learned about our approach?
Where were our assumptions right?
Where were our assumptions wrong?
What would we do differently next time?
And instead of asking why did you miss the target, blame on you, you ask what specifically prevented us and you from reaching the target?
And what can we do better next time?
The second kind of question opens up the other person, it opens up the entire team and gives you a chance to unleash real insight.
Real insight for improvement that changes customer behavior in favor of your product, service, and brand.
So, tip number one: replace why questions with learning-oriented questions.
Tip two, ask questions that force focus, questions that consciously limit the options.
Ask about what matters most, not everything that matters.
Don't ask what is important, but what is essential?
This way of asking will force focus and will make priorities visible.
For example, what is the one lever this week with the greatest impact for us as a team?
And what are we deliberately leaving out until next week?
Or how will we know by Friday that we were successful?
These kind of questions force focus.
And if you are in a meeting that just sets the day for a multifunctional team, for example, in the meeting, you see 10 topics, but then ask just one question.
Which of these 10 topics is the one that deserves our full attention today.
And why?
Right?
Asking this kind of question, and I'm sure you'll find even better ones for yourself.
This kind of question lead the discussion to be shorter, leads the definition of success to be clearer, and leads everyone to be much more productive, more successful, and have a more fulfilled business life.
All as a result of the quality of your questions.
So my second tip, ask questions that force focus.
And tip number three, use questions to activate responsibility.
Concrete suggestions, direct questions to individual owners, not to the entire group, like in my Indian example, right?
My experience is responsibility and accountability needs to be individual and personal.
That does not mean that we are leaving people alone when the shit hits the fan.
We are a team, right?
But we need to make one individual own the ultimate result.
And she or he will for sure in many cases need the support of many others.
But we should direct questions to have one person owning the result.
Not always to the entire group.
We should link questions to concrete next steps, not just to general topics.
And we should not leave vague questions hanging.
Identify them, spot them, sharpen them, clarify them, and translate them into action.
For example, responsibility questions.
What do you propose?
What do you decide now?
What result will you deliver by when?
Where do you need support?
And where do you prefer to be left alone?
And instead of asking what could we do, ask which decision are you making?
And what is your next step by when?
Leadership can be distributed and dissolved.
However, responsibility is then taken clearly and individually by this kind of question.
Wrong questions keep organizations busy in many directions.
You waste time, you lose success, you get frustrated, and that's exactly the opposite of what you want.
Right questions set teams into motion into one area, into one direction.
Let me share one more specific example from my own career from a gentleman who I really admire.
He already agreed that he will soon be a guest here in the Lightwolf podcast.
His name is Chris de la Puente.
Chris has been my boss in my first company.
He was there in a highly successful global consumer goods company.
He spent, I think, 25, maybe even 28 years in this company and had a roaring career, roaring success.
And for some time he was one of my bosses.
I had a local boss in the country, and I had a European boss in the region.
And he was one of my two line managers.
And I vividly remember when he then led the UK as a country, and we did a country visit in the UK when I had a European responsibility.
In many markets, there would be PowerPoint fights with a hundred slides or more.
Flying to the UK, there was just one sheet of paper.
One.
Super and very helpful for the business.
So one leadership technique I learned from him, I learned to improve from Chris de la Puente is this few sharp, insightful questions.
Now over to you and me.
As a leader, your role is not to have all the answers yourself.
It is not.
But you are responsible for the questions that give direction to the team.
So ask less, ask more clearly, ask more courageously.
Because those who ask the right questions get better results.
And that maybe makes you experiment with asking the best questions you have ever asked.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please take your smartphone right now, leave us a star rating, and leave us a short reference.
It helps us a lot.
Already now for you and me together again in the next Lightwolf podcast in the next few days.
Thank you very much.
Take care and see you soon.