Tag psychological safety

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.