Are You Asking the Right Questions?

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Few leaders have been trained to ask great questions. That might explain why they tend to be good at certain kinds of questions, and less effective at other kinds. Unfortunately, that hurts their ability to pursue strategic priorities. Arnaud Chevallier, strategy professor at IMD Business School, explains how leaders can break out of that rut and systematically ask five kinds of questions: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. He shares real-life examples of how asking the right sort of question at a key time can unlock value and propel your organization. With his IMD colleagues Frédéric Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux, Chevallier wrote the HBR article "The Art of Asking Smarter Questions."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Got 30 minutes?
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0:19.1	When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes,
0:22.0	it's time to get real.
0:23.0	HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins
0:28.6	coaches anonymous leaders through raw honest career questions that we all face.
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0:36.0	wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickin. The complexity and uncertainty around business today demands a different kind of skill in leaders, namely the ability to ask illuminating questions.
1:14.3	Jensen Wong, the CEO of Chipmaker Invidia, has said that over time his job has become less
1:21.1	about giving answers to problems and more about asking questions.
1:26.0	That he wants his team to join that exploration with him.
1:30.0	And it's probably not a coincidence that his company operates at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution.
1:37.0	After all, now that you have the ability to basically talk to a database, it really does come down to the questions you ask of it.
1:45.0	By the way, we talked to him on Ideacast on episode 940, check that out.
1:50.0	But today's guest says few business professionals are trained in the skill of asking questions.
1:56.8	They don't know the different types of strategic questions, and even when they do hang question
2:01.4	marks, they often have blind spots.
2:04.8	Here to explain is Arno Chevalier, a professor at IMD Business School.
2:10.1	With his colleagues Frederick Dalzas and Jean-Louis Barsoe, he wrote the
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