Becoming
better at asking more powerful questions will undoubtedly increase your
influence and effectiveness by getting the recipients to think through things
for themselves. However we often though shoot ourselves in the foot by:
·
The way we ask them
·
Not giving the other person time to answer
·
Not listening attentively enough to the response we get.
There
are many ways to improve the way you ask questions and I have written about
them in my book ‘Purple
Monkeys! A Practical Leaders Guide To Unleashing The Power Of Questions To Deliver
Great Results.’ However addressing the three issues above to begin with,
will make a huge difference to your effectiveness
Firstly open questions. It’s
obvious I know, but closed questions close a conversation down, and open ones
open them up. This works with the exception of teenagers and politicians.
Teenagers respond to open questions with one word answers, and politicians
respond to closed questions saying it's not as simple or yes or no - let me
explain.
I
often run the following simple exercise on my training courses. I say to
participants that I want to go on holiday and you are all travel agents. So ask
me questions to find out what I want so that you can propose a package that I
will want. The questions start coming in such as, ‘Do you like beach holidays?’
or ‘Are you going alone or with family?’ or ‘Do you want an all inclusive deal?’
These are all closed questions and will result in me giving little information
away.
This
always happens, which suggests to me that this is the habit that we all get
into. And how helpful is it? It doesn’t save time, it doesn’t give us much
information and it doesn’t get the recipient to do much thinking. Asking more open
questions is one of the simplest things you can do to get other people talking,
thinking and taking more responsibility. A study of primary school teachers
showed they asked closed questions 58% of their time, and that by changing this
ratio they would make a significant difference in their pupils’ engagement.
My (open) question to you
is, ‘What’s would happen if you upped your ratio?’
Secondly even if we start asking more open questions
the danger is we spoil their impact by not giving the recipient time to think
and respond properly.
In
the same study of teachers, they also discovered that the ‘wait-time’ periods
of undisturbed silence after a question rarely lasted more than 1.5 seconds in
normal classroom discussion, and the typical length was between 0.7 and 1.4
seconds. They discovered that, if
teachers simply increased ‘wait-times’ to three or more seconds, then there
were benefits to be gained for both teacher and pupils. These included:
·
The length of recipient responses
increases 400 to 800 percent.
· Student achievement increases significantly.
·
Student confidence increases and they
ask more questions.
Simply by
increasing the gap at the end of the question it increases their effectiveness
substantially!
This
seems to be a well-documented finding in education but does not seem to be so
well known in the business world. So why don’t we do this? As the questioner we
often feel that the gap at the end of a question is like an eternity. As a
result there is a huge temptation to start talking to fill in the space. The
person on the receiving end has a very different perception. Their mind is busy
considering the answer and they notice the waiting time much less.
I
have developed the habit of counting five seconds in my head after asking a
question. It works and I wonder how much it would improve your effectiveness.
What would happen if you adopted a similar habit?
Finally
if you ask questions you had better be prepared to listen. Listening shows
enormous respect to other people. A basic need of all human beings is to have
our existence and importance recognised. When this need is not met we are
likely to act in all sorts of dysfunctional and unhelpful ways.
My
Dad died a few years ago. He had always been active in the local community and
over 100 people attended his funeral. I gave the eulogy and after the service
many people came up to me and shared their memories of him. The common theme of
virtually all of them was that he had time for people. He spent the time to
listen to them. Of all the things he did, they remembered that the most!
The
Chinese symbol for listening is made up of a number of characters which
summarise to me what good listening is all about:
· The character for EYES
· The character for
ATTENTION
· The character for OPEN
HEART
·
The character for EARS
The
benefit of listening are that you show respect but I have found that when I am
listening in this way the next question I need to ask becomes obvious. As a
colleague of mine says, ‘The last answer becomes the mother of the next
question.’
How much
attention do you pay when listening?
Notice
what happens when you do!
