Having a healthy company culture is a marketplace advantage. Employees who feel connected to their organization’s culture are 62% less likely to feel burned out and 4.3 times as likely to be engaged at work, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. Buried in those metrics, however, is a less encouraging statistic: only 20% of United States workers describe themselves as feeling “connected” to their organization’s culture.
The numbers tell the story. Workers, particularly younger generations, want to be part of organizations that live out their purposes and promises. Too many are showing up to work to find environments that lack understanding, collaboration and clear objectives. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Like any strong relationship, a healthy culture requires consistent time, care and attention. Managers and team leaders who are willing to slow down, ask the right questions and step into the role of coach—while remaining coachable themselves—are the ones who will bring out the best in their people while producing work that matters. It requires positive intent and patience, but leaning into the following practices and approaches can help fuel efficiency, transform average team members into leaders and drive better outcomes.
Lead with Curiosity
By default, managers often bridge the culture gap for employees. As the main connection point to the company vision, it’s easy to slip into the mindset that you must have all of the answers, protect the mission and stay in control. In reality, focusing on what matters requires developing a “posture of curiosity,” says Michael Bungay Stanier, the author of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way You Lead Forever and the founder of learning and development company Box of Crayons.
“Your advice is not nearly as good as you think it is,” he says. “It is very easy to get seduced into thinking, ‘Look at the value I’m adding by how rapidly I’m serving up a solution to this problem,' but you’re probably serving [up] a not-very-good solution to the wrong problem.”
The antidote to this rapid-response leadership style, he says, is to move into coach-like conversations. This doesn’t mean giving up control of processes and outcomes but, rather, choosing to use curiosity as a way to dig deep beyond the surface pain points to the actual problem at hand. Doing so without spinning into endless tangents that eat up valuable calendar space, however, requires learning to ask the right questions.
Understand the Keys to a Good Question
First and foremost, Bungay Stanier says, ask one question—not 10—and then actually listen. Leaders often miss valuable information because they are busy formulating what they want to say next instead of paying attention. The best questions should not only solve problems but also develop people along the way. That means questions that begin with “why” or “how” are off-limits.
“It’s very difficult to ask a ‘why’ question without it sounding somewhat accusatory,” says Bungay Stanier. “'How’ questions certainly have a place, but... they are always about implementation.... Typically, you need to figure out what the real challenge is before you move into the ‘how.'”
Fake questions, the kind that start with phrases like “Have you ever thought of,” are equally ineffective.
“It’s not a question, it’s just advice with a question mark attached on the end,” he says.
Instead, he recommends one simple question to start: “What’s on your mind?” From there, he encourages leaders to leave room for elaboration with, “What else?” You can then drill down to the heart of the matter with, “What’s the real challenge for you?” The key is to personalize with “you” to avoid peripheral obstacles and “real” to gain personal insight about an employee’s capacity.
Empower Employees to Say No
Good managers know how to work hard. Great managers know how to select the work in a way that serves the overall mission. Almost every request and Slack ping that crosses an employee’s desk will feel urgent, important or critical in some way. But saying yes to one thing, Bungay Stanier says, means turning down or rejecting something else—be it personal or professional.
Effective managers coach their teams to distinguish between high-priority tasks that deserve company resources and low-priority distractions. In practice, this looks like getting crystal clear on an individual’s goals and then empowering them to select which meetings are essential and which ones they are allowed to skip, which projects are non-negotiable and which ones can be left behind.
This requires a certain level of emotional intelligence for both manager and employee, but coaching teams about the value of their time and yours can lead to downstream victories that otherwise might have been swallowed up by a crowded calendar.
Transition from Director to Consultant
Once employees have whittled their tasks down to ones that actually move the needle for the company, they need to be given the autonomy to complete them. At this point, well-meaning managers will often step in to help or appoint themselves the go-to for answers. This may feel like generosity but, in reality, it creates a bottleneck that slows down every other process.
There are key metrics that have to hold fast within any organization. As Bungay Stanier says, “It doesn’t matter how good everybody is feeling about themselves. If the ship is sinking, everybody is in trouble.” But creating empowerment at scale can build sustainable momentum that not only produces trust and longevity within team relationships but also relieves managerial workloads and drives results.
Learning to ask the right questions that help team members identify and solve their own problems may feel like a heavy lift in the beginning. But managers who master the transition from being the one who puts out all of the fires to teaching employees how to wield their own fire extinguishers can be the secret sauce for growing team capacity.
“In other words,” Bungay Stanier says, “if you would like to work a little less hard, feel a little less responsible, but also have more impact in the work that you do [while] building a team that loves you, then this posture of curiosity can be helpful.”
Featured image by PeopleImages/Shutterstock
This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of SUCCESS Digital Edition. Get your FREE copy here.
