The Art of Asking Questions Effectively to Get the Best Answers
Asking effective questions is a powerful skill. Effective questions can help you better understand your client’s problem, work with your staff more effectively, gather better information, defuse volatile situations, and reduce mistakes, among other things. They also can help you plant your own ideas, making questions valuable if you’re attempting to influence someone.
The challenge of asking good questions goes back to childhood; with so much emphasis on standardized testing, children may learn how to answer questions without learning how to formulate their own. As we grow up and move into the working world, we become good at solving problems but not so good at asking questions about whether they are the right problems to solve. And performance is more often viewed in terms of creating and implementing solutions rather than finding the best problems to tackle.
In formulating questions, think about your objective. If the purpose of your questions is to gather information, start by defining for yourself what, exactly, you want to know so that you don’t confuse or mislead the person you’re questioning. But if you’re in a leadership position, it might be better to be less direct so it doesn’t seem as though you’re trying to steer the person toward a specific answer.
Choose carefully between yes-or-no questions, which can be conversation stoppers, and open-ended questions, which invite respondents to elaborate. You’re likely to generate more and better information by asking, “Which solutions do you think have the best chance of succeeding?” rather than asking, “Is this solution the best one?” Of course, if all you want is a straightforward yes or no, then don’t ask an open-ended question—though, as Dilbert discovered, some people will use even a yes-no question as an opportunity to pontificate.
Whatever the purpose of your questioning, ask only one question at a time. People can retain only so much information. If you ask two or three questions in one breath, you’re likely to get an answer to only one—and often only the final one you asked. If there are two or more things you want to know, ask separate questions.
Once you’ve asked a question, stifle yourself and listen. Just listen. Tempting though it may be, don’t interrupt. When you ask good questions and listen carefully to the responses, you can determine whether to move on to your next point, restate a point in a way that helps the other person appreciate your perspective, or start over with a different approach. Silence, it turns out, is one of the most important components of effective questioning.
