In the last post, I told the story of rolling out a night call schedule that failed after three weeks. The team had seen what was coming. They just didn’t tell me.
I closed with the question I asked myself when I sat alone in my office that day. Why didn’t anyone tell me?
The answer wasn’t only that I hadn’t asked the right questions. It was that, by the time I got around to asking, my team had already learned not to answer.
What Silence Really Means
I’ve sat in meetings where a leader asked, “Does anyone have any concerns?” The room stayed silent. The leader took the silence as agreement and moved on. I have been that leader too.
But it wasn’t agreement.
It was resignation.
The team had learned, through many meetings just like that one, that “any concerns?” really meant let me confirm that we’re all in agreement with the decision I’ve already made.
The Scheins have a line in their book that I keep coming back to:
The quality of your relationships depends on the quality of your questions.
When a leader always tells — or asks confrontive questions that are really their hypothesis in disguise — the relationship becomes one-directional. Information flows down. Problems get hidden. People stop volunteering what they know, because they’ve learned it doesn’t matter.
When a leader truly asks, the relationship opens up. Nurses share what they’re noticing on the floor. Middle managers flag problems before they become crises. Junior physicians bring ideas instead of just following orders.
That’s not just good leadership.
In healthcare, it’s safer care.
Why This Is So Hard for Physicians
Let’s be honest about why humble inquiry is so difficult for us.
It feels slow.
When you can see the answer, pausing to hear someone else’s opinion feels like wasting time.
It feels vulnerable. If you’re the leader who always has the answer, asking can feel like admitting you don’t.
And it requires giving up control. When you ask a real question, you don’t know where the conversation will go. For people trained to manage uncertainty by controlling the process, that’s uncomfortable.
But here’s what I’ve learned. The time you think you save by telling is almost always lost later.
You lose time to reworking things when people follow a plan they don’t understand. You lose engagement when people feel their input doesn’t matter. And problems grow in the dark — either because people don’t feel safe raising them, or because they’ve decided you don’t care.
Asking feels slower in the moment. It’s faster in the long run.
In an earlier post, I told the story of an alcohol detox protocol I tried to roll out — and the year it took to actually implement. What changed everything was the moment I stopped pitching and started asking. The nurses told me which workflows would have to change. They told me what the cascading consequences would be for staffing, for morale, for every shift downstream of the one we were trying to fix. They told me what was going to break.
The protocol got implemented. A year later than I’d hoped.
But it stuck. No one had to undo it three weeks in.
“The quality of your relationships depends on the quality of your questions.”
— Edgar & Peter Schein in Humble Inquiry
The Connection to Servant Leadership
If you’ve read my earlier post on servant leadership, you know that serving your team doesn’t mean carrying their problems. It means creating the conditions for people to do their best work.
Humble inquiry is one of the most powerful ways to do that.
When you ask, “What do you think we should do?” you’re not abdicating responsibility. You’re developing capacity. You’re signaling that their perspective matters. You’re building the kind of trust that makes teams resilient.
And when you’ve heard their thinking, you can still make the final call.
It’s just going to be a better call.
The One Practice
Here’s a challenge for your next meeting. It’s simple. It won’t be easy.
Before you offer your opinion on anything, ask a question first.
Not a leading question. Not a confrontive trap. A genuine question that signals curiosity.
Try one of these:
- “What are you noticing that I might be missing?”
- “What’s your read on why this keeps happening?”
- “If you could change one thing about how we’re handling this, what would it be?”
And if the meeting gets stuck — if the energy goes flat, or you feel the room pulling away — try a process-oriented question:
“Are we having the conversation we need to be having right now?”
That single question will rescue your strategy more than anything else.
Even if you don’t carry a formal title, you are leading. Every physician informally leads a clinical team every day. Ask the people around you what they think about a workflow. Ask them what about your way of communicating works for them — and what doesn’t.
Then — and this is the hard part — actually listen to the answer. Not to respond. To understand.
Try this in just one meeting. You’ll notice something change.
People will start saying more. The room will feel different.
And you might just hear the one thing you needed to know.
The thing no one would tell you until you asked.
This post draws on Edgar and Peter Schein’s book “Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling.” Their work is foundational for anyone who leads teams — especially in healthcare, where what people don’t say can have grave consequences for patient experience and safety.
