The best executives we’ve studied share one habit that has nothing to do with decisiveness — they’ve learned to be the last person in the room to speak.

Ask a room full of executives what makes a great leader, and “decisive” is usually somewhere near the top of the list. Fast, confident, unhesitating. But a body of research going back half a century — from organizational theorist Chris Argyris’s work on advocacy and inquiry to Edgar Schein’s writing on “humble inquiry” to a wave of newer studies on question-asking in the C-suite — points in a different direction. The leaders who consistently make better decisions are not the ones who answer fastest. They’re the ones who ask a sharper question before answering at all.

The Advocacy Trap

In the 1970s and 1980s, Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris, working alongside colleagues including Donald Schön and later Robert Putnam and Diana McLain Smith, studied why smart, well-intentioned executives kept making avoidable mistakes. His answer centered on a distinction between two conversational modes: advocacy, in which someone states a position and defends it, and inquiry, in which someone asks a genuine question to test their own thinking. Argyris found that most organizational conversation, especially at senior levels, was heavily weighted toward advocacy — a mode that surfaces conclusions but hides the reasoning and assumptions behind them.

The related “ladder of inference,” a model developed within this same line of work, describes how people leap from a small set of observed data to a broad conclusion in a fraction of a second, then act on that conclusion as though it were fact. High-advocacy, low-inquiry conversation, Argyris argued, lets those leaps go unexamined. High-inquiry conversation forces them into the open — not by attacking the other person’s position, but by asking what led them there.

Asking Instead of Telling

Former MIT Sloan professor Edgar Schein pushed the idea further in his 2013 book Humble Inquiry, defining the practice as “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.” Schein’s argument was partly cultural: in fast-moving, achievement-oriented workplaces, telling is treated as competence and asking is treated as weakness. He contended that the reverse is usually true — that telling assumes the other person has nothing to contribute, while genuine asking signals respect and, over time, produces better information.

Neither Argyris nor Schein argued that leaders should stop making decisions or avoid stating a view. Their point was narrower and more durable: decisions made after real inquiry tend to hold up better than decisions made after unexamined advocacy, because the questioning process surfaces objections and blind spots before they become expensive.

What the Newer Research Shows

That older organizational-behavior research has since been picked up by more recent management scholarship. In a three-year research project reported in Harvard Business Review’s May–June 2024 issue, IMD Business School professors Arnaud Chevallier, Frédéric Dalsace, and Jean-Louis Barsoux studied how executives actually use questions in strategic decision-making. They found that most managers rely on a narrow band of question types — largely investigative, fact-finding questions — and rarely deploy the fuller range (including speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective questions) that surfaces options a team hasn’t yet considered. Their conclusion, echoed across dozens of executive interviews, was that unlike doctors, lawyers, and therapists, businesspeople receive almost no formal training in how to question well, despite how much of the job depends on it.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, one of the executives who has spoken publicly about this shift in his own management style, put it plainly in comments cited in that research: “I probably give fewer answers and I ask a lot more questions… Through probing, I help [my management team]… explore ideas that they didn’t realize needed exploration.” The description matches what Argyris and Schein each described decades earlier from different angles — a leader’s job is not always to arrive with the answer, but often to ask the question that lets the room find it.

A Discipline, Not a Personality Trait

What separates this research from generic advice to “listen more” is the specificity: it treats inquiry as a learnable skill with identifiable failure modes, not an innate personality trait some leaders happen to have. Executives can be high-advocacy by default and still learn to pause, ask what evidence underlies a claim, or ask what would change someone’s mind — the exact habits Argyris’s framework and Schein’s later work describe. The organizations that build this into their culture, the research suggests, don’t just make individually better calls; they build teams where more people feel safe raising the objection that would have prevented the expensive mistake.

Sources: Arnaud Chevallier, Frédéric Dalsace, and Jean-Louis Barsoux, “The Art of Asking Smarter Questions,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 2024 (hbr.org); Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, Berrett-Koehler, 2013 (getabstract.com); Chris Argyris, “Ladder of Inference” and advocacy/inquiry framework, developed with Donald Schön, Robert Putnam, and Diana McLain Smith (en.wikipedia.org).