Tag humble inquiry

Why New Leaders Shouldn’t Trust Their First Instinct

Rushing to judgment is a big mistake a new leader can make

Early in my first leadership role at a state psychiatric hospital, I learned that a patient was sitting on a locked ward, psychotic and untreated, because her physician had never filed a court petition for involuntary treatment. My first instinct was discipline — the union process, the medical staff committee. A mentor stopped me with one simple question that helped me see that the doctor wasn't indifferent. He was inexperienced, having never petitioned a court in his long career. A verdict reached in anger became a conversation, a learning moment, and a treated patient. This post uses that story to show new leaders why a verdict reached early may be wrong, and why having a mentor is a necessity when stepping into leadership.

What Silence Really Means — Humble Inquiry, Part 2

Quality questions lead to quality relationships

In Part 1, I shared the story of a night call schedule that failed because my team didn’t warn me…because I didn’t really ask them. This follow-up explores what that silence actually means: not agreement, but resignation. Drawing again on Ed and Peter Schein's Humble Inquiry, we see why physician leaders find humble inquiry especially difficult because it feels slow, vulnerable, and out of their control and how we can start practicing it today.

Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me? — Humble Inquiry, Part 1

Humble Inquiry leads to open communication

Once, when a Chief Medical Officer, I rolled out a night call schedule that failed three weeks in. The team had seen what was coming; they just didn't tell me. The reason wasn't a communication failure — it was an asking failure. Drawing on Ed and Peter Schein's Humble Inquiry, this post explores why physicians, trained to be the person in the room with the answer, struggle to ask real questions when they move into leadership. It introduces the Scheins' four types of inquiry — humble, diagnostic, confrontive, and process-oriented — and shows how most physician leaders unknowingly default to confrontive questions that teach their teams to confirm a hypothesis rather than share what they actually see.