In 2009, Simon Sinek gave a talk at TEDxPuget Sound called How great leaders inspire action. His message was simple. The most inspiring leaders and organizations start with why. They know their purpose, and they lead from it.
That talk has now been played more than 71 million times, and “start with why” has become part of how we talk about leadership.
I think it’s a great idea. But like a lot of great ideas, it’s being stretched well beyond what it was meant to do.
These days I hear leaders asking why about everything. Why is this late? Why did you send that email? Why didn’t anyone flag this sooner?
When leaders ask questions like these, they aren’t asking about purpose anymore. They’re asking for an explanation and a justification, and you are never going to explain or justify your way into better performance.
What asking why does to people
When you ask someone why they did something, you turn their attention backward. They start reviewing what already happened and building a case for it. Even when you ask with the best intentions, it can sound like an accusation, and most people respond by getting defensive.
That’s a hard place to do good work from. When people feel they have to defend themselves, they spend their energy on protection, leaving little left to solve the problem.
Root cause analysis is one reason the habit runs so deep. Many of us learned the “5 Whys,” a technique made famous by Toyota, where you keep asking why until you reach the source of a problem. It has its place, but even inside Toyota there were doubts. Former Toyota executive Teruyuki Minoura once said the method “doesn’t seem to be working as well as it should be,” because people fall back on guessing at causes instead of going to look at what actually happened.
Asking ourselves why can be just as unhelpful. I spent years trying to understand why people did what they did and why things turned out the way they did. It made me sharp, but it also kept me stuck in my head, replaying the past instead of paying attention to what was in front of me. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found something similar in her research on self-awareness: asking ourselves why tends to lead to rumination rather than insight.
But what about learning
Most leaders who ask why have good intentions. They aren’t trying to put anyone on the spot. They want the person to think through what happened so they learn from it and do better next time.
The problem is that “Why” rarely gets them there.
If we want to help someone learn, ask them questions that open them up rather than shut them down. One of the most powerful techniques I learned as a coach was to ask questions that start with the words “What” or “How.” When we ask a simple, disarming question like, “What happened?” or “What did you notice along the way?” or “How did you decide on that approach?” we encourage conversations that result in learning.
We can also ask future-focused questions, instead of questions that shift attention to the past. When we ask “What would you do differently next time?” you elicit a very different psychological response than when you ask “Why did you do that?”
Open-ended and future-focused questions go a long way in shifting the tone of your conversations. They move attention away from what went wrong and toward what’s possible, which is where creativity and innovation come from.
Here’s the subtle shift:
Ask “Why” only when you’re looking for purpose
For everything else, stop asking why.
My friend Cameron Schwab, the former CEO of the Richmond Football Club in Australia, has a helpful way to think about this. He encourages leaders to write their “because” story. Your because story answers the question why, and it is valuable because it puts why to bed. Once you’ve chosen (and it is a choice) to define what you stand for and why you do what you do, you don’t need to keep asking yourself or others for explanations and justifications.
