World’s Top Meeting Expert Reveals The 6 Types Of Questions That Yield The Greatest Impact (And Examples Of Each)

1-on-1 meetings can be extremely powerful or a complete waste of time. It turns out knowing what questions to ask can be a huge game changer for leaders. Here's the secret to asking the best questions

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The Following is a guest post by Dr. Steven Rogelberg, Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte & bestselling author of the new book Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings. You can learn more about the book here.

Obviously, you can only ask so many questions during any single 1:1. However, rotating different questions periodically creates interesting and well- rounded conversations across time and 1:1s. Some questions may feel right for you and your relation- ship with your direct, while others may not, and that is totally fine. Think of the following examples as just a giant menu of options to consider. Moreover, I added a list of special questions for remote employees that can be found in the tools shared at the end of this book section. 

With some exceptions, the questions are generally framed as things you, as a manager, can ask. But certainly, most of these questions can be asked by the directs to you either as- is or with a little tweaking if they so desire

Combining questions I curated in my research, along with an ex- tensive literature review, six overarching, but highly interconnected, categories of questions emerged. As noted earlier, the ideal is to sample questions across categories to create rich and multifaceted conversations over time.

Let’s go through each category of questions to see an explanation of what that category is as well as examples of a few questions you can ask for each category.