By Valeria Torres, Corporate Psychologist
There is a question I hear constantly from successful executives when something inside their organization is not working:
"How do I fix this?"
It sounds like a perfectly reasonable question. In many cases, it is. These are people who have built careers by solving problems quickly, identifying obstacles, and moving toward solutions while everyone else is still trying to understand what happened. Their ability to fix things is often one of the reasons they reached the top.
But during a conversation with a senior executive some time ago, I noticed how limiting that question could become.
He was describing a recurring problem with one of his strongest leaders. They had already changed responsibilities, clarified expectations, adjusted incentives, and had several difficult conversations. Each time, the situation improved temporarily and then returned to exactly where it had started.
He looked frustrated and asked me again, "So what else can I do to fix this?"
Instead of answering, I asked him something different.
"What if the problem isn't that you haven't found the right solution? What if you're solving the wrong problem?"
He became quiet.
We spent the next hour talking, and eventually the conversation moved somewhere neither of us had expected. The issue wasn't really the employee's performance. It was the executive's difficulty letting other people lead differently than he did. Every time he delegated responsibility, he eventually stepped back in, corrected the approach, and unintentionally reinforced the dependence he was trying to eliminate.
The answer had been difficult to find because the question protected him from examining his own role in the problem.
That experience reinforced something I have seen repeatedly in my work with high-performing men: as leadership becomes more complex, the quality of your questions begins to matter more than the speed of your answers.
Successful People Are Trained to Find Answers
Most executives have been rewarded for answers their entire careers. Someone brings a problem, they solve it. A client becomes difficult, they handle it. Revenue slows, they develop a strategy. A competitor moves, they respond.
This creates an incredibly useful mental habit: identify the problem and move toward resolution.
But organizations become more psychologically complex as leaders rise. At the executive level, many problems no longer have clean answers because they involve human behavior, competing incentives, incomplete information, identity, relationships, and uncertainty. The question "How do I fix this?" can actually narrow thinking when the situation requires exploration rather than immediate resolution.
Great leadership eventually requires tolerating the discomfort of not knowing long enough to understand what is actually happening.
That is harder than it sounds, particularly for men whose competence has become part of their identity. Having an answer feels productive. Asking a better question can initially feel like doing nothing.
It isn't.
Sometimes it is the most strategic thing you can do.
The Wrong Question Can Produce an Excellent Answer
This is what makes poor questions so dangerous.
You can answer them brilliantly.
An executive asks, "How do I get my team to move faster?" and builds an extraordinary accountability system when the real issue is that employees are afraid to make decisions without approval.
He asks, "How do I motivate this person?" when the more useful question might be, "What have I failed to understand about what matters to this person?"
He asks, "Why can't they handle the pressure?" instead of asking, "What kind of pressure am I creating?"
Or perhaps the most expensive one:
"How do I prove I'm right?"
instead of:
"What would convince me I'm wrong?"
The difference can appear almost semantic.
Psychologically, it is enormous.
Every question directs attention somewhere. And once attention moves in that direction, the brain begins searching for information that supports the frame it has been given. A narrow question can therefore produce sophisticated analysis while completely missing the deeper issue.
The intelligence of the answer cannot compensate for the limitations of the question.
The Questions We Ask Often Protect Our Identity
This is where executive psychology becomes particularly interesting.
Questions are not always neutral.
Sometimes we unconsciously choose questions that allow us to examine a problem without examining ourselves.
"Why isn't my team accountable?" keeps the attention on them.
"What am I doing that may be making accountability harder?" brings the leader into the equation.
The second question is psychologically more expensive.
It introduces the possibility that the leader may be contributing to the very situation he wants to change.
For high-performing executives, this can be uncomfortable because success creates strong internal narratives: I solve problems. I make good decisions. I know how to lead. I see things other people miss.
Those beliefs are often supported by years of evidence.
But when identity becomes too attached to competence, questions can quietly become tools for protecting that identity rather than discovering reality.
This is why curiosity requires more confidence than certainty.
You have to feel secure enough in your own capability to seriously consider that your interpretation might be incomplete.
Better Questions Create Better Rooms
One of the most noticeable differences I see in psychologically mature leaders is how they ask questions in meetings.
Less experienced leaders often ask questions that contain the answer they want.
"Don't you think we should wait?"
"Isn't this too risky?"
"Why didn't you do it this way?"
Everyone in the room immediately understands where the leader stands. The question technically invites participation while psychologically signaling the preferred response.
Strong executives learn to remove themselves from the question.
"What are we missing?"
"What would make this fail?"
"Who sees this differently?"
"What assumption are we treating as fact?"
"If we couldn't solve it this way, what would we do?"
These questions do something authority alone cannot do: they create room for other people's intelligence.
And that matters because the purpose of having talented people around you is not to give them opportunities to confirm what you already think.
It is to gain access to thinking you could not produce alone.
The Question Behind the Question
In my work, there is one question I return to frequently when an executive feels stuck:
"What are you actually trying to protect?"
The answer is rarely immediate.
Sometimes it is control.
Sometimes reputation.
Sometimes money.
Sometimes certainty.
Sometimes the image of being the person who always knows what to do.
And occasionally, the leader realizes he has been trying so hard to solve the business problem that he has never examined the psychological problem underneath it.
That moment matters.
Because once the real question appears, the conversation usually changes.
Curiosity Is a Form of Executive Discipline
A related reflection, The Difference Between a Rich Lawyer and a Powerful One, explored the distinction between external success and the deeper internal capacities required to sustain influence and authority over time. One of those capacities is intellectual humility: the ability to remain curious even after your experience has given you every reason to trust your own judgment.
Great leaders do not abandon confidence.
They become more disciplined about where they place it.
They trust themselves enough to question themselves.
They can hold a strong opinion without becoming psychologically dependent on defending it. They can hear information that contradicts their assumptions without experiencing disagreement as a threat to competence.
That is not indecision.
It is executive maturity.
The Question That Changes the Conversation
I spoke with that executive again several months after our original conversation.
The situation with his team member had changed significantly. But what interested me more was something he said about himself.
"I've started catching myself whenever I ask how to fix something," he told me. "Now I try to ask what I'm not understanding first."
That shift sounds small.
It isn't.
At a certain level of leadership, your greatest value is no longer having the fastest answer in the room. You have people, resources, experience, and expertise around you for that.
Your value increasingly lies in seeing the problem clearly enough that everyone is solving the right one.
So perhaps the question great leaders eventually stop asking is:
"What is the answer?"
And the one they begin asking instead is:
"What question would change the way we're seeing this?"
Because the quality of your leadership will never consistently exceed the quality of the questions you are willing to ask.