Show me the typical question that emerges from a meeting of any company’s leaders, and I’ll show you the culture of that organization.

One thing that struck me about Bob was that he preferred asking questions to holding forth - and his queries were incisive and straightforward. Something unusual had been built at Pixar, he said, and he wanted to understand it. For the first time in all the years that Pixar and Disney had worked together, someone from Disney was asking what we were doing that made our company different.

Much of our work is helping leadership teams formulate the right questions. Once they get the questions right, the answers tend to appear.

So often I’m called in to help lead conversations about mission, value, and purpose. When, really, the only questions that matter are those that tell us who we are and wish to be.

• How would our organization respond were we to hear all the things that are being said, regardless if they are being said with words or deeds? 

• What does it mean to be a leader at our organization? 

• What does it mean to be grown, a fully actualized adult? 

• How would we feel if our children were to work for the company we’ve created or the team we lead? 

• How has the unsorted baggage of what has happened to us shaped who we are as leaders? 

• When our employees and colleagues leave our sides and our company, what do we want them to say about our time together? 

• What do we believe to be true about the world? 

• What do we, as a community of people working toward a common goal, believe the world needs?

Who was working on the problem? Was the right team in place? Did they have what they needed to succeed? “When I became CEO of Google,” Sundar Pichai says, “Bill advised me that at that level, more than ever before, you need to bet on people. Choose your team. Think much harder about that.