39 Questions Emotionally Intelligent Leaders Ask

Melody Wilding, LMSW
3 min readJan 20, 2021

Great leaders are great communicators.

Namely, they have perfected the art of active listening, a component of emotional intelligence that requires you to be completely present with another person.

When you’re listening actively, you’re not in your head formulating what you’ll say next. Rather, your focus is 100% on the other person and how they are feeling.

This is one reason Sensitive Strivers make amazing leaders — their empathy and thoughtfulness translate into building deep relationships and trust.

But many of my coaching clients get tongue-tied when it comes to one crucial part of active listening: asking questions.

They overthink their responses and end up getting so trapped in their heads (trying to say the “right” thing or wondering how the other person is judging them), that they lose sight of the goal of the conversation, which is to connect.

39 Questions to Ask in Meetings and One-on-Ones

To you help you, here is a list of questions I share with my clients.

Keep these saved somewhere so you can refer back to them and become the emotionally intelligent leader you are meant to be.

When you want someone’s…

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Melody Wilding, LMSW

Author of TRUST YOURSELF. Executive coach to Sensitive Strivers. Human behavior professor. Featured in NYT, NBC, CNN. https://melodywilding.com/book