The Questions to Ask Before You Ask a Question (07/15/2025)

Happy Tuesday!

I hope your week is off to a great start – and I hope this newsletter helps you supercharge it.

I have a quick take about the changing workplace and the news, and an article to help you ask better questions.

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Make it a great Tuesday and remember …

You are Remarkable!

Kevin 😊

When Thinking About the Workplace, Stop Reading the News

As a society, we have been adjusting to the way we work and the way we view work for the last five years. Which seems like a long time except it took about 80 years for the last model to settle in, and about 80 years before that for the previous model to settle in.

We are living through this change at a rate that humans never have before.

And so naturally, people have opinions about what is working or not. And studies are being done to understand it better. But if you read the business press, you will feel like you get a different message every day. One week the trend is back to the office. The next study says people aren’t coming back. One study says collaboration and culture suffer at a distance. Other organizations experience the opposite.

Reading all the conflicting signals won’t help you in the short term, they only cause confusion.

What is the better option?

Worry less about others and focus on your situation.

Keep working on what you are doing in your organization, with your work, in your context, with your team(s). Keep testing, trying and adjusting.

When you do that, you will be moving towards a work model hat best serves you – which is what you want anyway.

The Questions to Ask Before You Ask a Question

We all ask questions every day, so many that we seldom stop to think about how to ask them more effectively. And if we do decide to work on our question-asking skills, we often focus on the words we choose and maybe the tone of our voices. As important as those things are to successful questions, it is what comes before you ask the question that is most important.

Asking questions as a leader is especially important and sometimes tricky. Because of our positional power, our questions can be easily misinterpreted. That makes our preparation in asking extra important.

Here are some questions you can use to help you think about your intention and goals for your questions. When those are clearer, you will ask better more effective questions – and most importantly, sometimes decide not to ask the question at all.

KEEP READING

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