Many leaders tend to believe that they need to know the answer.

A question is being asked, a problem is being brought forward, and they see their role in providing the solution.

In the past, this might have been the way they could most often use to help others. For example, in a time in which books were rare and Google was far away.

Since then, many leaders saw that the best way they could support their team was by knowing what questions needed to be asked.

This has, in many situations, indeed been a great way to help their team develop themselves. The ability to ask the right question allowed embedding a task or request in a context. Instead of an answer, the quest was to determine where the answer would be.

These ways of asking questions still meant that it was up to the leader to deliver the answers.

While these questions have not lost any of their usefulness, they may not be the way a leader fills his role anymore. With teams consisting of individuals with a wide variety of specialized expertise, there rarely will be a person in the room who has the answer. In most cases, the people in the room are together in the room because it is only together that they can develop an answer and the way forward.

What their task often will be, is to develop an answer that becomes one the team will buy in. Not because they have been persuaded, but because they knew what their task was and developed an answer to it they decided to trust in.