North Central College management professor pens op-ed in Ireland Business Review

Brian Glibkowski addresses how you can transform your leadership style with better answers

Brian Glibkowski, associate professor of management at North Central College, penned an op-ed in the Ireland Business Review. The column, published May 6, 2021, focused on transforming your leadership style with better answers.

Here is an excerpt from his op-ed:

As a leader, you spend your days in meetings, making presentations, and in one-on-one conversations. In all these interactions, questions and answers are always present. As a society we are well versed in the importance of questions, which is exemplified by famous quotes from some of society’s luminaries: “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” – Voltaire

The preceding quotes emphasize the importance of questions and the importance of questions OVER answers. The focus of my recent book, Answer Intelligence: Raise Your AQ  was to highlight the value of answers.

For example, you are taught different question types in grade schools, such as open and closed questions, or the six WH questions (why, what, when, where, who, how). However, before my research, there was no typology of answers. In other words, we have lists of questions to choose from, but there is no corresponding list of answers to help us navigate important conversations in both business and in life.

To address this gap, my colleagues and I studied the top golf instructors in the world as rated by Golf Digest and Golf Magazine, an expert study of those in the upper half of the 99th percentile of their profession. The result was a typology of six answer types (story, metaphor, theory, concept, procedure, action) that map to questions.

For the first time, as a leader, you now have a framework to ask questions and provide answers. I refer to this framework as Answer Intelligence, or AQ for short. The name has a second, hidden meaning. The A (for answers) and Q (for questions) recognize that Answers are new (hence “A” is first), but no science of answers can exist without the science of questions (hence “Q” is second).

Click here to read the full op-ed in the Ireland Business Review.