Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask, Revised and Updated

Many leaders are unaware of the amazing power of questions. Our conversations may be full of requests and demands, but all too often we are not asking for honest and informative answers, and we don’t know how to listen effectively to responses. When leaders start encouraging questions from their teams, however, they begin to see amazing results. Knowing the right questions to ask—and the right way to listen—will give any leader the skills to perform well in any situation, effectively communicate a vision to the team, and achieve lasting success across the organization.

Thoroughly revised and updated, Leading with Questions will help you encourage participation and teamwork, foster outside-the-box thinking, empower others, build relationships with customers, solve problems, and more. Michael Marquardt reveals how to determine which questions will lead to solutions to even the most challenging issues. He outlines specific techniques of active listening and follow-up, and helps you understand how questions can improve the way you work with individuals, teams, and organizations.

This new edition of Leading with Questions draws on interviews with thirty leaders, including eight whose stories are new to this edition. These interviews tell stories from a range of countries, including Singapore, Guyana, Korea, and Switzerland, and feature case studies from prominent firms such as DuPont, Alcoa, Novartis, and Cargill. A new chapter on problem-solving will help you apply questions to your toughest situations as a leader, and a new “Questions for Reflection” section at the end of each chapter will help you bring Marquardt’s message into all of your work as a leader.

Now more than ever, Leading with Questions is the definitive guide for becoming a stronger leader by identifying—and asking—the right questions.

About the Author

Michael Marquardt is professor of Human Resource Development and International Affairs as well as program director of the Executive Leadership Program at George Washington University. Mike also serves as president of the World Institute for Action Learning.

He has held a number of senior management, training, and marketing positions with organizations such as Grolier, American Society for Training and Development, Association Management Inc., Overseas Education Fund, TradeTec, and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Dr. Marquardt has trained more than 100,000 managers in nearly 150 countries since beginning his international experience in Spain in 1969. Consulting assignments have included Marriott, Microsoft, Sony Music, Goodrich, Motorola, Nortel, Alcoa, Boeing, Caterpillar, United Nations Development Program, Xerox, Nokia, Constellation, Samsung, Organization of American States, and Singapore Airlines as well as the governments of Indonesia, Laos, Ethiopia, Zambia, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, Jamaica, Honduras, and Swaziland.

Dr. Marquardt is the author of twenty-four books and over one hundred professional articles in the fields of leadership, learning, globalization, and organizational change, including Action Learning for Developing Leaders and Organizations, Optimizing the Power of Action Learning, Building the Learning Organization (selected as Book of the Year by the Academy of HRD), The Global Advantage, Action Learning in Action, Global Leaders for the 21st Century, Global Human Resource Development, Technology-Based Learning, and Global Teams. Over one million copies of his publications have been sold in nearly a dozen languages worldwide. Dr. Marquardt also served as the editor of the UNESCO Encyclopedia volume on Human Resources and is an editor and/or advisor for several leading professional journals around the world. He has been a keynote speaker at international conferences in Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, South Africa, Singapore, and India as well as throughout North America.

Dr. Marquardt’s achievements and leadership have been recognized though numerous awards, including the International Practitioner of the Year Award from the American Society for Training and Development. He presently serves as a senior advisor for the United Nations Staff College in the areas of policy, technology, and learning systems. He is a Fellow of the National Academy for Human Resource Development. His writings and accomplishments in action learning have earned him honorary doctoral degrees from universities in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Dr. Marquardt received his doctorate in human resource development from George Washington University and his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Maryknoll College. He has done graduate work at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Virginia.