Lauren Ready: Questions Can Transform Leadership

Memphian Lauren Ready’s book, Ask Like A Leader, is a treatise for our times.

With the public crying out for leaders to address the challenges and opportunities before it, she offers a blueprint for how the power of effective leadership begins with asking the right questions.

In a warm, empathetic, and narrative-driven style, the writing of Ask Like A Leader reflects her enthusiastic and charismatic personality as she tells stories that illustrate the effectiveness of leadership grounded in authenticity, curiosity, and connection. While much of her work is grounded in Memphis — its people, leaders, and energy — her writing transcends geography, capturing fundamental truths about resilience, creativity, and human connection.

The book illustrates her six-part Question Lens method that defines the elements of asking better questions – open-ended, specific follow-up, clarifying, active listening, reflective, and share-a-little of yourself – which sharpens our focus, deepens our conversations, and motivates our effectiveness as leaders.

In its way, it’s about a way of living – and leading – in relationships, whether in personal or professional contexts. Ultimately, it is about storytelling, the secret weapon for highly effective leaders. “We learn more about each other and deeper truths which result in stories that create connections, build trust, and drive change,” she said.

Leadership Is Not For The Few

Ms. Ready, a documentary filmmaker and founder of Forever Ready Productions, has spent years behind the camera telling stories that matter. With Ask A Leader – A Method for Revealing Deeper Truth and Turning Blind Spots Into Breakthroughs, she shares the lessons of her journalistic experience, gathering insights from Memphis leaders across generations, industries, and backgrounds.

In the end, she shows readers how to explore what leadership can look like in practice, not theory, and in a book that is not a manual or a manifesto, but more of a conversation — honest, vulnerable, and distinctly Memphis.

Most of all, it’s a call to action. Her book models the culture of curiosity and accountability Memphis needs and reminds us of the commitment and courage that are being unleashed across the city in nonprofits, classrooms, neighborhoods, and small businesses and whose work can be maximized by asking the right questions.

If there is a thread running through the book and its stories, it is that leadership isn’t reserved for the few. Rather, it is something any of us can practice, whether it is a teacher in a classroom or a parents’ meeting, a community organizer recruiting volunteers, a small business fighting employee turnover, and more.

A Message for Modern Memphis

A six-time Emmy award winner and former journalist at WMC-TV, Lauren Ready is clearly drawn to mission-driven people, especially nonprofits, that are doing transformational work, taking risks, and finding extraordinary courage in ordinary circumstances.

In her book, she poses thoughtful, sometimes difficult, questions for us to ask: What have you learned from failure? How do you build trust? What do you do when you don’t know what to do? The resulting conversations are intimate and instructive. There is authenticity in the answers, but also the grace in the asking.

That framework — curiosity as leadership — feels especially timely for Memphis now. The city is wrestling with how to grow equitably, how to retain talent, and how to nurture its next generation of leaders. In pursuit of solutions, asking good questions, listening to hard truths, and finding common ground across sectors isn’t just valuable; it’s essential.

Her stories in Ask Like A Leader about Memphians and nonprofits persuasively illustrate how success begins with leaders’ questions and ends with storytelling that influences, persuades, and attracts others to support and join them in driving change.

Equally important, her stories are about people who also changed themselves. “Leadership isn’t about having all the answers but about having the courage to ask the right questions,” she said. “Great leaders don’t rush to answers or think they have to have all the answers. They slow down and ask the kind of questions that reveal the real story about their organization and the story beneath the story.”

Once leaders are liberated to ask the questions that empower people, draw them into a stronger sense of purpose, motivating the team, and building trust. The right questions uncover compelling “stories that help unlock the potential within individuals and within teams that helps people move together toward something,” she said. “Asking better questions and active listening open the pathways to innovation and growth.”

Asking the Right Questions

Ms. Ready cites research that 70% of employees say they are more effective when they think they are being heard. That goes for employees of a company but likely equally applies to the citizens of Memphis. Her critical message for her hometown is that our voices carry power and that leadership begins wherever we are. “I love Memphis,” she said. “Memphis is seen as an underdog. I love to represent Memphis wherever I go.”

“When we ask questions, we find common ground and find ways to go deep and find that we are more similar than different,” she said. “In addition, there is power in all parts of lives in doing this and asking ourselves: ‘How can we be stronger? How can we grow more trust?’”

When applied to our community, the right questions urge us to dream bigger, connect deeper, and lead with heart. For anyone looking to have an impact, her stories prove Memphis is the perfect place to be ground zero for asking like a leader.

The proof that this approach works is clear. Through Forever Ready Productions, she has already helped numerous organizations tell their stories of impact and resilience, leading nonprofits to raise more than $18 million.

Proof of Concept

But one of her proudest story-telling documentaries was pro bono. It was about the false confession to murder made by 17-year-old O’Shay Sims. He wrote a confession after seven hours of interrogations, alone and only with the police, to killing a 26-year-old near Lamar Avenue and Airways Boulevard in 2018. Mr. Sims went willingly for questioning by police, who had found his phone number in the victim’s call log.

After spending more than a year in jail, he secured a lawyer who told the court that the high school student had falsely confessed and he was released on his own recognizance to await trial. His reason for confessing was never explained by him because he died in a car accidents two months after his release from jail.

By asking the right questions and digging deep, Ms. Ready’s firm was able to produce a powerful documentary that exposed the lack of protection for children who have been arrested or charged. It lead in 2024 to the Tennessee General Assembly passing a law that required any formal interview or interrogation of a child taken into custody for suspected delinquent or unruly conduct to be recorded.

The documentary, “What We Will Never Know,” shined a spotlight on the issue of juvenile interrogations, specifically how a youth like O’Shay Sims could undergo a lengthy interrogation without the protections many assume. Her storytelling bridged journalism, film, and advocacy. She brought the story to local media where it raised questions from public defenders and district attorneys about current policies.

Her work helped build momentum and public awareness that contributed to criminal justice reform and legislative action.

We Are All Leaders

In a moment when the city is striving to find its next great chapter — in business, in education, in civic life — Ask A Leader is not just a book, but a spark. It’s an invitation to every Memphian to listen more deeply, lead more boldly, and believe more fiercely in what this city can become.

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