By Ron Sidman 

Possibly the most under-appreciated and under-utilized tool for gaining knowledge and insight in any situation is the carefully crafted question. Yet too often we don’t put enough thought into what to ask . . . or maybe we’re just afraid to. 

Let’s face it. Communication between people in general, even those who speak the same language, is often outrageously poor leading to misunderstanding, inefficiency, potential grief and even harm. We so often never get the whole truth when we talk to or work with someone. This can be due to many factors including social convention, reluctance to reveal inner thoughts, differing mindsets or simply because we didn’t ask. Yet all of these obstacles can be overcome just by recognizing that open-ended (as opposed to yes or no) questions are the power tools of interpersonal communication.

Here are some common business situations where you can use clever question-crafting to generate superior outcomes:

Conducting Consumer Satisfaction Surveys

No doubt you’ve had a restaurant manager come to your table with a question like, “How was your dinner tonight.” Unless your steak tasted like shoe leather you probably said, “Good.” But what if they followed up with a question like, “Is there anything we could have done or done differently that would have made your experience even better?” That question gives you “permission” to mention things that you were reluctant to mention because they weren’t earth shattering complaints but that would be very useful to restaurant management.

When you conduct in-person or online surveys in your company, don’t just ask the obvious. Include open-ended questions that really probe the otherwise unspoken concerns and desires of your customers.

Interviewing Prospective Employees

Hiring selection failure rates are higher than they need to be because it’s very easy for applicants to be very good at interviewing even if they’re not qualified to do the job. Instead of the stock questions like, “What would you say are your biggest strengths and weaknesses?” try something like this—“What was your most successful (sales effort, product launch, project, etc.) and describe in detail how you accomplished it.” No one can fake this and you can verify the accuracy further via subsequent reference checks.    

Providing Performance Feedback

If you’re trying to change someone’s behavior, you could simply tell them that their performance is not satisfactory. That’s likely to prompt a defensive response and uncomfortable conversation. But look what happens when you phrase it as a question like, “What do you think you could do to speed up progress on the web site development?” You’ve changed the focus from looking backward and finding fault to looking forward and generating improvement.

Brainstorming

At my company, The First Years, we learned a brainstorming technique from a company called Synectics. What they taught us was when throwing out ideas in a brainstorming session, always phrase them as “How to . . .” or “What if . . .” questions. That type of phrasing stimulates the thinking of the rest of the group and blows open the possibilities. For example, instead of saying “collapsible high chair” say “How to create a high chair that is easy to travel with?” “What if . . .” questions encourage solving seemingly unsolvable problems. For example, “What if baby monitors didn’t need batteries?”  

Strategic Planning

Carefully crafted questions can break through mental barriers. To encourage out of the box thinking when creating strategy, ask your senior team questions like, “If we were starting this company today, how would we design it?” Or, “What could we do that would make us indispensable to our customers?”

Monitoring Employee Satisfaction

Retaining your star employees is critical to the success of your company. Too often managers assume that if an employee is not complaining they’re happy. I was blind-sided a few times in my management career by key employees suddenly departing and this may have happened to you. You might prevent this by making it a practice to ask questions like, “Is there anything about your job that you wish was different?” Or, “Where do you see yourself going in this company over the next few years?”

Identifying New Product Opportunities

One of the best ways to get new product ideas is to spend time observing your customers do what they do relative to your product category and then ask them open-ended questions like, “Why did you do it that way?” “What were you thinking when you did that?” “What was that experience like?”  

Mentoring

The temptation when providing someone with advice is to provide solutions. Much better is to ask questions that cause the mentee to think through the issue and come up with their own solution. For example, rather than advising someone to verify their new business idea by conducting 1:1 consumer interviews, you’d be a more effective teacher asking, “How do you think you could verify that consumers will want to buy your product?” 

Negotiating

The most successful negotiations result in win-win solutions for both sides. Quite often you can get what you want by offering something the other side wants that you’re happy to provide but you just weren’t aware of. But you won’t uncover that opportunity without asking something like, “What is it that you’re looking to accomplish in this negotiation and why?”

Planning Your Life

Stephen Covey famously encouraged everyone to think about listening to the speakers at your own funeral and asking yourself, “What would you like each of these speakers to say about you and your life?” What a powerful way to create a “life vision” that can guide your decisions and behaviors.

Next Steps

Take advantage of the power of open-ended questions by learning to have a “question bias.” Practice this whenever you have the opportunity and you’ll be amazed what you can accomplish. It’s like having a magic key to unlock information, ideas, and even relationships.

If you’d like more information or assistance from me regarding your unique challenges, consider taking advantage of JPMA’s Executive Mentor Program. Check the JPMA website for more information or contact Steve Clark at sclark@jpma.org.