Eight years ago I was smoking cigarettes in an alley in Los Angeles. I wore a bright green gardening glove to keep the smell off my hands.

A man without a home asked me for a cigarette. He looked at the glove, looked at me, and said, "Hey man, you need to figure that out."

Then he took my cigarettes and walked away.

He didn't give me a five step plan. He said the true thing out loud and left me to answer it. That moment led straight to my book Stop Living on Autopilot.

Why do great leaders ask better questions instead of giving better answers?

The short answer: answers are everywhere now, and people are still stuck. Everybody on your team has a phone with more answers on it than every library ever built. What they don't have is someone asking them the right question. A good question makes people think, say it out loud, and own the answer. Advice gets nodded at and forgotten by lunch. That's why the leaders people remember ask more than they tell.

The answers got infinite. The questions got worse.

I spent more than a decade as a television journalist at NBC, PBS, and MTV Networks. My whole job was asking questions and pulling out what people didn't know they were carrying.

I never stopped. The subject just changed. Now I do it for leaders and their teams.

And everywhere I go, leaders are drowning in answers. Frameworks, playbooks, dashboards, and now AI that'll write you a strategy memo in ten seconds. And their people are more stuck than ever. Not because nobody told them what to do. Because nobody asked them the right question.

What the research says about asking questions

Don't take my journalist bias for it.

Researchers at Harvard, led by Karen Huang and Alison Wood Brooks, studied real conversations, including speed dates. They found that people who ask more questions, especially follow up questions, are better liked by the people they're talking to. In speed dating, people who asked more follow up questions got more second dates.

The same research found something I love: people consistently underestimate how much asking questions helps. We think we need to have the answer. Usually we just need to ask the next question.

Brooks and Leslie John wrote about this for Harvard Business Review in "The Surprising Power of Questions". Questions help you learn, build trust, and get people to open up. And most of us don't ask nearly enough of them.

Why questions beat advice at work

• Advice is easy to dodge. People nod, say "great point," and keep doing what they were doing.
• A question makes people answer. And once they answer out loud, they can't unhear themselves.
• Questions show you're listening. That's the responsiveness the Harvard researchers found people respond to.
• Your people already know a lot. After 15 or 20 years, expertise stops feeling like expertise. A question pulls it back out.

7 questions leaders can ask this week

Steal these. Most of them come straight from my keynotes, my books, and my coaching sessions.

1. "Based on your last 30 days, would they rehire you?" Ask yourself first. Then ask your team about the team.
2. "What will make today matter?" One question to start the day before the inbox takes over.
3. "What do you know that you've stopped noticing?" For your most experienced people.
4. "Who did something worth noticing this week?" Then go tell them.
5. "Tell me more." The best follow up question ever invented. Three words.
6. "Do the five people you spend the most time with make you better?" From Stop Living on Autopilot. Works for teams too.
7. "Is that fair to say?" Check what you heard before you decide what it means.

How I bring this to organizations

Every keynote I give is built around a question, not a list of tips. Transform Your Next 30 Days asks whether they'd rehire you. The 1-Day Method asks what will make today matter.

I deliver them as keynotes, in person and virtual workshops, and group or one on one coaching for leaders who want to get better at asking instead of telling. It's a conversation, even when the room is big. People leave with the question and their own answer to it, and that's the part they remember on Monday.

FAQs

Q: Why should leaders ask more questions?
A: Questions get people to think and commit out loud, and research from Harvard shows people who ask more follow up questions are better liked and seen as more responsive.

Q: What are good questions for leaders to ask their teams?
A: Try "What will make today matter?", "Who did something worth noticing this week?", "What do you know that you've stopped noticing?", and the simplest one of all, "Tell me more."

Q: Is asking questions better than giving advice?
A: Usually. Advice is easy to agree with and ignore. A question makes someone answer, and people are more likely to act on what they said themselves.

Q: Who is Antonio Neves?
A: Antonio Neves asks the questions that change what you do next. He's a former NBC, PBS, and MTV Networks journalist, author of Stop Living on Autopilot and The 1-Day Method, and has delivered 400+ keynotes.

Final Word

Nobody's short on advice.

Somebody on your team has been carrying the same thing around for two years. They don't need another answer. They need someone to ask.

If you want your leaders asking better questions, let's talk.