Imagine you've lost your biggest client to a competitor, which has reduced your annual revenue by 10%. What do you do next? This is one of the scenarios Angus Fletcher, a professor and the director of the Fisher College of Business Leadership Initiative at Ohio State University, recommends using with your leaders to incorporate tactics used by the U.S. Army Special Operations to train soldiers how to handle volatile situations. Fletcher outlines how to use immersive training with executives to hone their skills and help them overcome fear, hesitation and self-doubt when a crisis arises.

Put it into practice: The training isn't meant to give executives problems with neat solutions, but to provide them a chance to "generate new plans under pressure," Fletcher writes. "Every scenario should provide students with the experience of doing what leaders do: Inventing and testing possible plans in ongoing uncertainty and volatility."

Create aligned autonomy within your teams by combining transparency, alignment to shared goals and iterative feedback, so they can make decisions confidently while staying coordinated with organizational objectives, writes startup advisor Keith Lucas. "Competent leaders of intrinsically motivated teams build systems optimized for team-based creativity, innovation and problem-solving -- systems defined by practices, principles and feedback loops," Lucas writes.

Put it into practice: Create aligned autonomy by building a system that boosts "team-based creativity, innovation and problem-solving," writes Lucas, which is different from micromanaging tasks. "This type of leadership is not a blend of passive management and micromanagement. It does not abdicate, and it does not remove agency."

Concise, open-ended questions that end cleanly at the question mark and refrain from adding extra ideas or choices are key to eliciting valuable and unexpected insights, writes Shane Snow, an author and leadership expert. We ask wordy questions that suggest answers as a way to make ourselves and others more comfortable, Snow notes, but it reduces the possibility of learning something new.

Put it into practice: We ask questions all day long of employees, customers and suppliers, Snow observes, but rarely examine the questions we ask. "If your goal is to pin someone down, by all means ask them a 'yes or no.' But if your goal is to increase your knowledge, resist the temptation to offer answers. Just ask the question."

Royal Caribbean Group CEO Jason Liberty and Chair Richard Fain discussed the past, present and future of the company during a chat on the Star of the Seas. Fain credited the organization's achievements to attracting and nurturing top talent within a culture that values teamwork and shared purpose. "You can't lead if you don't have a culture that will accept leadership and that will work with you toward a common goal," Fain said.

We think our inner monologues are private -- something no one can detect, but researchers have developed a brain-computer interface that can decode what we say only to ourselves. Using electrodes implanted in the brain, the system detects neural signals associated with silently thinking words, and achieved up to 74% accuracy in translating internally spoken sentences. Far from being used to read everyone's mind, though, researchers say the technology could help people with severe speech impairments better communicate.

As leaders, we ask a lot of questions, and if we want to get to the heart of the matter and get the information we need, those questions should be short and to the point, writes Shane Snow.

Short questions are powerful because they strip away complexity and invite direct, clear responses. When a question is concise, the other person doesn't have to spend time deciphering what is being asked. This reduces confusion and makes it easier for them to focus on sharing what they know. Long or layered questions can overload the listener, often leading to partial or evasive answers. By keeping the question simple, you hand the other person the opportunity to expand, rather than filling in the space yourself.

Some questions to keep on hand include, "What do you need?" "How can I help?" "What's unclear?" or "What do you think?" Each of these invites thoughtful, specific responses while signaling that you genuinely care and are curious about another's needs and experience.

As Snow notes, we use wordy questions to try to make others, and ourselves, more comfortable. "But if our superordinate goal in asking questions is to keep people comfortable (or to keep ourselves comfortable), we're going to compromise on information gathering. Asking open-ended questions opens up the opportunity to learn information we couldn't already have guessed. Eliminating the easy off-ramp of suggested answers may reduce comfort, but it increases possibility."

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