The Leader Lab

1Q-step

Let's begin by examining the first Behavioral Unit (BU) that stood out in our research on what makes great managers different. Imagine you joined us in the lab. You take a seat in a small, dark room behind a two-way mirror and observe a manager in a one-on-one meeting. You switch on your handy stopwatch and let it run for 15 minutes. During this time, you count every question the manager asksW Once time's up, you tally the results. What's your prediction? In the span of 15 minutes, how many questions does an average manager ask? How many questions does a great manager ask?

If you guessed 2 questions for average and 10 for great, you are exactly right. Great managers ask 5 times more questions. Not only does question quantity set great managers apart, it's also a marker of great negotiators, influencers, creative thinkers, and even the secret to getting a second date (Huang et al. 2017). In one study of over 519,000 calls, researchers found that the best salespeople also asked more questions (Orlob 2017). Of course, it's possible to ask terrible questions. (“What were you thinking?” and “How can you be so bad at this?” are definitely questions, and definitely not questions we recommend.) Question quality is essential (more on that in Chapter 8), but the necessary starting point is question quantity. Great managers simply ask more questions than average. In fact, before ...