Ask Better Questions

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.

For the last ten years, it’s been my job as host of this podcast to ask questions. When I started, I got a simple piece of advice that I’ve always tried to come back to: Ask what you think the listener would want to know. But there’s a lot more that goes into asking good questions than just that, so I’m excited to sit down today with two people who are expert question-askers. Our guests or Leslie John and Alison Wood Brooks, both faculty at Harvard Business School. They’re the coauthors of the HBR article, “The Surprising Power of Questions.” They’re here to talk about how to ask questions at work once that will help your conversations become more productive and help you bond with your team.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Leslie, thank you so much for joining us today.

LESLIE K. JOHN: Thanks for having me.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And Alison, thank you for coming back.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I am so happy to be back.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, let’s just start by talking about what’s the benefit to asking good questions in business.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Actually, the better question might be, what is the benefit of asking questions in business? Because the benefits are so abundant. Um, let me start simply by saying that most people do not ask enough questions and they’re missing out on many, many benefits, including that asking questions opens up the door for the exchange of information. When I ask you questions, I’m going to, you’re going to answer most likely and I’m going to learn what’s in your mind. So that’s information exchange, it’s very valuable. In addition to information exchange, we know that asking questions increases interpersonal liking because I’m showing that I’m interested in learning and what’s in your mind, I seem very responsive to you and empathic and I’m taking your perspective and I care about you. And that’s likable. Uh, we also know that asking questions increases persuasion, uh, again, because I’m taking your perspective, instead of trying to sell, sell, sell, I’m learning what you need and then I can deliver that to you.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Lots of benefits.

LESLIE K. JOHN: But one of the I think really fascinating insights of Alison’s research on this topic is that people don’t appreciate this. So, it’s not obvious to us, we don’t, we don’t—we really underestimate the value and the power of questions.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. Even people in conversations are aware of how many questions they’ve asked and how many questions other people have asked, but they don’t intuit the link between question asking, and liking, persuasion, and information exchange. It’s just not obvious, which is part of the reason that we probably don’t ask enough questions. We don’t understand the abundant benefits that await us.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It does surprise me to hear you say that people don’t somehow understand the link between asking questions and becoming more likable because that is like some of the dating advice that you will always get right, is, ask lots of questions. I did this when I had unsuccessful online dating, um, many years ago. I would be like, I’m going to make it a point of asking lots of questions because I think, you know, that’s how I’m going to get date number two. No! No dates number two. It really… I don’t know what I was doing wrong—something!

LESLIE K. JOHN: I think there’s, um, like potentially an interesting irony here in that when you really want something like, like for example, a dating context, if you go into a first date and you’re really drawn to the person, I think instinctively we kind of go into this “sell mode,” this mode of like we need to tell them stuff about ourselves to make them like us. But I think that in many ways, and the research points to this, that this is kind of a flawed mental model. Where, actually, if we get them talking, they’re going to like us more because of the point of Alison, one of her findings, that people just don’t realize that we think we’re kind of maybe too self-focused in all of this.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So what are some of the questions you guys have found that are really effective?

LESLIE K. JOHN: So in situations where someone may be tempted to lie to you, if you ask a question that presupposes the thing that they don’t want to tell you to be true, that’s a more effective strategy to getting them to tell you the truth than a question that does the opposite. So an example would be, imagine your, this is really simple, imagine you’re talking to a supplier and you’re wondering whether the supplier is going to deliver on time. Um, so the sensitive piece of information that the supplier may be reticent to divulge is that no, we’re not going to be on time. So you could ask them, you could say you’re going to be on time, right? That is kind of an optimistic assumption or you could say, I’m guessing you might be kind of late, right? And that would be a pessimistic assumption. So it’s easier for the supplier to tell the truth when you ask it in a pessimistic way because they just have to kind of confirm something. Whereas if you ask them in the optimistic way, it’s harder for the supplier to admit to that thing. Um, so they have to contradict you. They’d have to be like, actually, we’re going to write. The basic point is that you want to make it easy for the other party in these competitive situations. You want to make it easy for them to tell you the thing that’s hard for them to tell you. And so you can think about how you structure your questions in a way so that it helps them to disclose essentially.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What about a sort of differences between open-ended questions versus closed questions because usually in my job as an interviewer, I try to ask lots of open-ended questions, but are there situations where those are not as effective as a sort of tighter, closed question?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah, so it depends on your goals. And I think if you’re interviewing somebody or you’re trying to brainstorm or figure out what their interests are, asking open-ended questions, the way they answer those questions will be indicative of what’s on their minds, right? You’re giving them a long leash to decide like, how am I going to answer this? Now, if you shift to a more competitive conversation where people will be guarded about the information they have, then pointed questions can be very effective at trying to suss out the truth. It’s, it’s very hard to lie explicitly to someone’s face when I say, okay, you’re selling me this used iPod hasn’t been damaged in the past. It’s so much harder to say no. Right, right to my face with a yes, no question. Then if I say, tell me about the history of this iPod. Then you can lie by omission quite easily. Um, another type of question that I want to make the case for that’s so magical and powerful as the follow-up question. So here we’re talking about very specific examples and scenarios where certain types of questions will be good. Follow up questions are almost always good. Okay. They show that you’re listening to what the person has already said. You’re probing for more information, which shows that you listened, you care, and you want to know more, which is like the whole embodiment of empathy and perspective taking. So you seem like a very caring person and you’re smart because you’re going to learn more information. It’s like all of the good things wrapped up into one question-asking strategy.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I think we’re now realizing why I did not get any second dates. I think I was not asking follow-up questions, I was simply asking like a random list of questions. Okay. So, why is the follow-up question—I will try to ask a follow-up question about follow-up questions. Why are follow-up questions so much more powerful than other kinds of questions?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So the questions that are not follow-up questions, we would classify:  they’re either an introductory question, so like, hi, how are you? Or rhetorical questions that don’t even really demand a response. But most of the time questions that are follow up questions are topic-switching questions. So I might say things like, where are you from? Listen, listen, listen, listen. Do you like the band U2? Listen, listen, listen, listen. So it feels like you’re working your way down the list of topics, which is okay, but it would be much more engaging and interesting to say, where are you from? Oh, I’ve been to Tuscaloosa. Do you live in this neighborhood? I had a friend who was from there were, you know, where did you grow up? What were your parents like? What did your house look like? What do you regret about growing up there? All kinds of follow-up questions that make it really engaging. Almost all of our, um, effects of question asking are explained by the power of follow-up questions.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It sounds like a lot of this advice is sort of context-dependent. So if you have an adversarial relationship where you think that the person might lie to you, you need to take a different approach. What if you’re not exactly sure where you stand with someone that maybe you work together, but not always very well and you’re not sure if this person is a friend or an enemy or like a frenemy.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: You sound like you’re talking from experience, Sarah, and they’re going to get nervous.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I think we’ve all had relationships, especially at work, where we’re not exactly sure where we stand.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: No, I think we’ve almost constructed this false dichotomy where we presume that everyone knows you’re in a cooperative conversation or a competitive one—

LESLIE K. JOHN: And that each is one or the other.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Right? And in fact, most conversations are mixed goals. You have a cooperative goal to have fun and enjoy your interactions with others. Usually, there’s some sort of conflict goal even among managers and their direct reports. If you have to give feedback, constructive feedback, if you if you have to evaluate performance, if you have to negotiate a salary. And oftentimes you don’t really know what is the mix of cooperative and competitive goals in this interaction that we’re in right now. So your question is a good one. How do we navigate this? Um, I will argue that in almost every scenario, whether it’s cooperative or competitive, asking questions doesn’t hurt. It hurts a lot less than people think. So we’re very reticent to ask questions because we’re afraid that we’re going to ask something that’s rude or incompetent or inappropriate and in our results and our findings, we find that there are very few questions that people perceive as rude, incompetent or inappropriate, um, and so, and then especially follow-up questions. So just start somewhere, listen to their answer, and then follow up. And that will work in almost any situation.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: When is it better to ask the tough question first? Resist sort of warming someone up to it and then building up to the moment when you ask what you really want to ask them.

LESLIE K. JOHN: Yeah. So there’s one of my favorite, uh, pieces of research is, um, this Arthur Aron’s work, it’s a classic on how he and his coauthors brought people into the lab and they got people to ask questions to each other. And they instructed the dyad—so they, they put participants into little groups of two, they didn’t know each other before the study—and they got each group of two to ask each other questions and they started with kind of the safest questions, the less disclosing questions first, and then they gradually got into kind of deeper and deeper questions like what’s your biggest regret in life? And really kind of hefty stuff. And um, they, they found that relative to control situations that getting people to ask questions to each other and to share in this way of like increased revelation produced liking among these dyads. But then as a counterpoint, we have some research where we asked people questions. Now these were different types of questions. These were very direct questions. Um, and we systematically varied the order in which we asked people the questions. So some people started with kind of the easiest questions first and they got progressively harder. Other people, we started with the hardest questions first and they got progressively easier. And then we had another version where people were just asked in kind of a random order. And in contrast to what Aron found, we actually found that people disclosed more. Um, when you started with the most sensitive questions. My conclusion or one conclusion is that you sort of warm up and start with the easy questions and then you gradually build rapport. But we found that the opposite can lead to more revelation. And so you think about, well, how do you, how do you square away these two different findings? And one way that we have been thinking about it comes down to this goal of the interaction. So if you’re in a, if the goal is to foster a relationship and if it’s a very cooperative environment, then starting with easing your way into things I think is conducive to accomplishing that goal. But if on the other hand, the goal is a competitive situation where the goal is information elicitation, then starting with the most sensitive questions can increased disclosure overall. It’s again though not without its risks, like if the first question you ask is extremely sensitive, you risk really offending the person and having them walk away from you. So not without its risks but—

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And there’s a lot going on with tone too, right? Talk to us a little bit about sort of how to ask these questions, not just what you ask.

LESLIE K. JOHN: Well, we’ve found that especially when you’re asking for sensitive question are kind of inclination might be that we should adopt a very somber tone and we should really reiterate to the person that everything’s confidential, don’t worry, it’s going to be okay, whatever you say. But what we found is that sometimes the more assurances we give to people, the more worrisome it is for that person to disclose. And so what we find is that if you’re a little more casual about it and nonchalant about the way you ask questions, that can make the other party more comfortable responding. I’m responding to your questions.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What are some of the ways in which the dynamics are different when you’re in a group versus when you’re just interviewing or talking with someone one-on-one.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Conversational dynamics changed profoundly when the group gets larger and question asking dynamics change in particular. Um, it depends on the composition of the group. Are there men, women? What are their ages? Who’s the leader? What are their status relationships? There are norms around all of these things about who should be asking questions, who’s expected to ask questions and who’s expected to answer them. And anytime that you can break those norms—so if you’re expected to answer questions, why not try asking one instead? Anytime you can break those norms, I think it keeps things engaging and interesting.

LESLIE K. JOHN: It also introduces a host of problems, potential problems. If you think of an important goal of asking and answering questions is, of course, information sharing. And when I think of, um, group contexts, you have new risks including the loudest voices are the ones that are heard. Or the people, put differently, the people that are most comfortable speaking up in groups are the ones that say things. But your comfort in speaking up in groups is unrelated to the—oftentimes I would venture to say—is unrelated to whether you have good things to say. And so if you’re trying to get diverse perspectives, um, intelligent things said it can be a worry in group contexts, is that kind of a few dominating personalities end up doing all the talking. And they may have good things to say, but it may also be to the neglect of hearing from people who also have good and diverse additional points to contribute.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: One thing we see with our students a lot—and I think this happens in a lot of work contexts as well, and Leslie and I are both young women faculty members—um, that certain members of the group, and this happens with women and I think just young people broadly, or maybe low-status people, feel like they need to have something really great to say, like they need to have a brilliant statement to make in order to speak up and say something in a group context. Turns out that it’s really, really useful to just be the person who asks questions that might open a new important topic area or guide the conversation in a useful way.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So if you are put on the spot by someone’s question, um, what is a kind of a good way to prepare for that? Because on the one hand, we’re giving advice to managers to help them ask more questions to get more information and be more likable. That sounds great. But if managers listen to this and go back to their offices in are suddenly like asking a million questions, what should their teams know about kind of this new communicating with them?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: They’re going to like them better, so maybe it doesn’t matter! No, I think about this a lot. In any situation, there are questions that you hope no one asks you because you know it will make you feel really nervous and really uncomfortable on the spot. Many of those questions can be anticipated. Almost always they can be anticipated. You just have to ask yourself like, what are the things someone could ask me that will keep me up at night, that will make me feel awful and write them down. Right? So, if you have an important presentation and important meeting and there are questions that you’re afraid someone will ask, don’t run away from that. Confront it, write them down, write down pithy, succinct responses to them. Practice saying the answers out loud, or practice your dodges out loud. For any question that you could possibly get, there is a way to answer it and there’s a way to dodge it. So just not being surprised and caught off guard is a huge help in those moments.

LESLIE K. JOHN: I totally agree. Preparation is so important. And, and also the act of preparation, the self-reflection, I think you can learn a lot about yourself and about the situation just by doing that, that preparation. For what it’s worth, my favorite go-to of when I gasp, haven’t prepared or don’t know what I’m going to say, and I’m asked a question and I don’t know what to say, my favorite line of defense is deflection by question. Asking, well why do you ask?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: What do you think?

LESLIE K. JOHN: Yeah. What do you think? Or in class does everybody think this? You know, deflection by question I think is… whenever, whenever I’m in a bind in that, in that, you know, being asked a question that I don’t know how to answer. It’s a good kind of back-pocket, go-to strategy.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I will say two more quick strategies. One is if you can practice your humor skills, jokes are really, really easy way to dodge things because people are so distracted laughing that they forget what question was asked them that you didn’t answer it. Uh, and the second thing is used sparingly, it’s okay to be honest that you don’t know an answer. Um, and I think a lot of professors actually forget this and managers as well. Um, it’s okay to reveal that you’re not superhuman and have all the answers in the world, so used sparingly, it can actually be very, um, humble, a great humility strategy to say like, wow, that’s a great question. I actually hadn’t thought of that before. Let me go back to my team. Let me go back to my office and reflect about it and I’ll get back to you later today.

LESLIE K. JOHN: One thing not to do is kind of explicitly opt out of answering. So on a survey that would be, you know, checking the, “I choose not to answer” box. But in a conversation, if someone asks you a pointed question, you don’t answer it is, is saying I don’t want to answer that or in some way conspicuously not answering the question. So we’ve found that that strategy is actually worse than saying something really unflattering about yourself. Um, so it’s actually better if you’re faced with a question where if you answer it truthfully, it might reveal some unglamorous fact about yourself, we find that if you just come clean and answer it, you’ll come off better. People will like you more. They’ll think you more trustworthy relative to if you completely opt out of answering, if you conspicuously abstain from answering.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So if you’re in a job interview and someone’s like, well I see you left your last job after only working there a month, what’s going on?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I don’t want to talk about it.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Right. That’s like a big waving red flag. So just come up with something to say in that moment is what you’re saying.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, is there anything that we really should have covered that we haven’t covered?

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: That’s a great question. That’s a particularly good question.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: A very open-ended one.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yes.

LESLIE K. JOHN: Um, I think one thing that’s been under the surface of this whole conversation is the importance of listening. Listening enables you—being a good listener enables you to both ask questions effectively and answer questions effectively. And one of the ways I was thinking of that playing out is when you asked what happens if you ask a question that you don’t want to know the answer to or that you don’t care to know the answer to, a risk of that is you’re going to shut yourself off and maybe not listen. And then if you don’t listen, you’re not opening yourself up to learning more and in turn, asking better questions and answering questions more effectively.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, thank you both again for coming in. This was really fun.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Thank you so much for having us.

LESLIE K. JOHN: Thanks for having us.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie John. They’re both on the faculty at Harvard Business School. Read their article, “The Surprising Power of Questions” in the May-June 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review, or online at HBR.org.

Our show is produced by Amanda Kersey and Curt Nickisch. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager and we get technical and production help from Rob Eckhardt.

Thanks for listening to the HBR Idea Cast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.