|CHAPTER 9|
Questions: How to Ask the Best—and Answer the Worst
“My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.”
“Management teams aren’t good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.”
Find Your Balance between Making Assertions and Asking Questions
When Kevin Sharer became CEO of Amgen, a $14 billion biotech company, he spent 150 hours asking questions.
150 hours. He interviewed 150 Amgen leaders, one hour each.
Would you have done that?
Smart people ask smart questions, although this isn’t always easy. I remember preparing a roomful of executives at a Fortune 100 company for a Q & A session with their company’s new chairman. They didn’t want to ask anything, nor did they want to be asked anything.
“Anything we say could be extremely career-limiting,” they explained.
Then the chairman walked into the room. He immediately stripped off his jacket and tie, as if to say, “I’m a regular guy.” Then he sat down and, after a few minutes, everyone relaxed, probably because he didn’t undress further.
When you ask a skillful question, you raise the IQ of the room, and you stand out—it’s another 8-second moment.
Kevin Sharer asked five main questions, such as: “what are three things you want to change?” and “what are three things you want to keep?”1
Note the specific number, three things, which pushes the other person to get specific (please also see page 85, Push for Specifics.).
Question: Are you more comfortable asking questions or providing answers? Be known as someone who does both.
Before Giving Advice, Ask a Few Questions
“I think the main reason you employ me,” Bob said, “is to hear yourself talk.”
Bob was a career strategist who’d run the career office at Harvard before opening a private practice.
I sometimes consulted him for advice. Except that he hardly gave any. His role, as he saw it, wasn’t to tell me what to do. It was to engage in dialogue so that I could figure things out myself. But the dialogue was crucial.
How often do you give advice?
Advice isn’t bad. When you have expertise, and the other person doesn’t, your advice may be useful. I give lots of advice when coaching executives on leadership messages or presentations. Advice is what they expect and value.
But sometimes, when someone wants you to solve their problem, it’s better not to.
The downside of advice? It robs others of the chance to develop judgment.
When people ask me for advice, I often listen for a while, then ask a question like this: “Suppose you were talking to a very wise person. What would she or he advise you to do?”
“She’d advise me to stay put,” said a colleague. He’d been wrestling with whether to accept a job at another company. Suddenly, he knew the answer.
A similar question: “What would Person X do (where X is a role model)?”
Movie director Steven Spielberg, while making Jaws, struggled with a mechanical shark that didn’t work. He could have called Alfred Hitchcock for advice. Instead, he asked himself, What would Hitchcock do?
Answer: Don’t show the shark. It’s scarier.
It’s scarier to let people solve problems on their own. It’s easier just to give an answer.
But the next time someone knocks on your door for advice, remember: that’s a coachable moment.
Sharpen Your Questions
“Do you like horror movies?”
You’re probably not asking this question at work—it’s from an online dating service, OkCupid—unless your company is a nightmare, and you need to warn others.
JOB APPLICANT: This seems like a good place to work. Is it?
YOU: That depends. Do you like horror movies?
But the horror movie question is instructive if you want to sharpen your questions.
1. Open vs. closed: The first thing you notice is that it’s closed, meaning you’ll get a one-word, yes/no response.
Q: Are closed questions bad? (A closed question.)
A: No.
Q: So why do we care about the open/closed distinction? (An open question.)
A: Because closed questions limit the info you get. And limit the other person’s engagement.
Q: What % of questions at work are closed? (Closed.)
A: 82.6%.
Q: Where did you get that figure? (Open.)
A: I just made it up. But at your next business meeting, keep score. You’ll be surprised by the tilt.
FYI: Even if you already know the open/closed distinction, common knowledge is not common practice. Do you ask too many closed questions? (Closed.) Check.
2. Your inferences: OkCupid discovered that if two people, now dating, gave the same answer to certain questions (in an initial survey), their odds of having a long-term relationship went up.
OkCupid identified three significant questions (listed on page 79), not just one. And even then, the correlation was only 32%.
FYI: Be careful what you infer from any one answer.
3. A questioning strategy: Sometimes you need a series of questions, deliberately sequenced. For example:
Q: Do you like horror movies? (Closed.)
A: No.
Q: How would you feel about dating someone who loved horror movies? (Open.)
A: Afraid.
Q: Because you might have to sit through a lot of blood and gore? (Closed.)
A: No, because I’m already married.
Q: Ok, but suppose you were single. Would the horror movie difference be a deal-breaker? (Closed.)
A: No.
Q: What differences would be deal-breakers? (Open. And the key question in this sequence.)
FYI: Plan your questioning strategy. Resist the temptation to just wing it.
p.s. The three OkCupid questions (and my answers, which match my wife’s):
1.Do you like horror movies? No.
2.Have you ever traveled around a foreign country alone? Yes. (Warning: Don’t ask your date this question, lest she assume that being with you will feel like going somewhere strange, and then being abandoned.)
3.Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat? No. (I don’t love sailboats, so this idea sounds a lot like a horror movie.)
Not All Open Questions Are Smart
A smart question gets others to think. Most ordinary questions, whether open or closed, don’t do that—nor is there any reason they should, if it’s a casual conversation.
Consider these questions about the “weekend.”
1.“Did you have a good weekend?” you ask a colleague. Typical question, and it’s closed.
2.“How was your weekend?” Technically an open question, but you’ll often get a one-word response (“good”).
3.“What did you do over the weekend?” Open, but you won’t spark any new thinking.
Again, all three questions are perfectly fine. No one’s looking for deep insights about the weekend.
But suppose you were?
4.“What would your ideal weekend look like?” This question is different; it makes the other person think.
Let’s apply smart questions to work. Imagine you’re a manager, talking with one of your employees about his job satisfaction. You could ask, “How was your day?” or “How’s it going?” but these questions won’t take you far.
Try a variation of question #4:
“What would an ideal day at work look like for you?” Or, “Tell me about one of your best days here.” And then, “How can we create more of those?”
Smart questions get others to think. But before you can ask one, you need to think.
Your Questioning Strategy: Start Low Risk
If you’re asking multiple questions, begin with the easy ones. Let’s say you’re leading a senior executive meeting at your company to discuss the new corporate values, which don’t seem to working. Your sequence of questions could look like this:
a. (Low risk): On a 1–10 scale, to what extent do our employees know the values? Asking a “1–10” question is a good start. The answer will rarely be a 1 or a 10; usually, you’ll get a middle number, 4–8. But then you can ask the natural follow-up: “How can we get to a 9 or 10?”
b. (More risky): To what extent do employees believe the values? They may know the values, but not really buy into them. And the next question might explain why.
c. (Most risky): How, specifically, have we, the leaders, demonstrated the values?
You could also ask, “Who here knows the values?” But asking a group the “Who here knows about X” question—where X could be anything whatsoever—is always risky.
“Who here knows what to do if you’re bitten by a rattlesnake?” is not a good question at a meeting, unless the meeting happens to involve hiking through rattlesnake-infested terrain, and one or more people just got bitten.
But at a normal meeting, someone might know a lot about X, but not raise his hand out of fear you’ll call on him. Someone else might not know a thing about X, but raise his hand anyway, because everyone else has hands up.
No one wants to look stupid. What’s the risk your question will do that?
p.s. From Snakebite! What to Do If You’re Bitten: “It’s important to get away from the snake as soon as possible so it does not bite again. Do not try to capture the snake.”2
Hmm. Capturing the snake never even occurred to me.
Before Asking a Risky Question, Disclose Why You’re Asking
Imagine these two scenarios.
Scenario #1: Sweat
The CEO of your company summons you to her office. “Is this a high-performing organization?” she asks.
You start to sweat. What’s the best answer, you wonder, to keep your job?
Apart from scaring people, the question is flawed by its closed, yes-no form. It will yield little info. Yet one CEO called it her favorite question.
Better: “In what ways is this a high-performing organization?” And then, “How could we improve?” Or ask for three ways the organization is high performing, and three ways it’s not, similar to Kevin Sharer’s approach (page 75).
Best: Before asking anything, say why you’re asking. For example: “I’m committed to making this a high-performing organization—I’m sure you are too—and that’s a never-ending process. I’d love your perspective on what’s working and what’s not.”
Scenario #2: No sweat
Her first week at a large insurance company, a young employee did something fearless. She called up the CEO and asked if she could stop by, because she wanted to get a feel for the company and where it was going.
Intrigued, the CEO said yes.
But her supervisor didn’t know about the meeting till later. He was furious. “I’ve been at this company for over 10 years,” he said. “I’ve never even met the CEO.”
You could argue that the new hire was naive, that she didn’t know about the chain of command, and that she won’t ever do this again. Fine, but what’s the cost to the organization?
The cost is fear.
Which scenario, #1 or #2, is more common in your organization? Years ago, consultant Tom Peters popularized “management by walking around.” He urged managers to get out of the office, ask questions, and find out what’s really going on.
Great advice, except for one thing: Most people, unlike that new hire, are reluctant to speak truth to power.
Don’t underestimate fear.
Before you ask a tough question, reduce the fear. Say why you’re asking.
Avoid Asking Loaded Questions, at Least 95% of the Time
“Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?” Steve Jobs asked John Sculley, then president of PepsiCo. “Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
That’s a loaded question. It says, “Look, this job of yours, running PepsiCo, is extremely silly. I’m offering something big.”
Sculley was persuaded it was big; he took the job as Apple’s CEO. (Years later, he would call the job a big mistake.)
Do you ever ask loaded questions? Suppose you work at McDonald’s. You might ask:
1.“Would you like fries with that order?” Perfectly reasonable. You’re suggesting an option.
2.“You’re going to want fries with that order, aren’t you?” Ok, now you’re getting pushy.
3.“You can get fries or a shake for half price—which do you want?” Even pushier—this is known in sales as an “assumptive close.” You assume, aloud, they must want something.
I generally avoid questions like #2 or #3. Except for one time . . .
I’d gone to a job-hunting workshop in my 20s, led by a career expert who gave lots of tips, including, “If you’re ever invited for an interview in a faraway city, make sure to ask the following question.”
I wrote the question down in my notebook, although it seemed nervy. A few months later, a recruiter called about a job in Miami.
After we scheduled an interview, I put the recruiter on hold, dashed around the apartment, found the notebook, tore through the pages, got the question, and returned to the phone.
“Will you be sending the plane ticket,” I asked, “or would you prefer me to invoice you?” (That’s the “fries or shake” assumptive close.)
After a short pause, which seemed endless, the recruiter agreed to the invoice.
So I went to Miami. I didn’t get the job, but not because of the question. Today, that question seems tame and, of course, worth asking.
Does that mean assumptive questions are ok? Well, it depends on the context. And that reminds me of something else the career expert said:
“For 95% of you, when you think you’re being obnoxiously aggressive, you’re really just being appropriately assertive.”
Good advice. Unless you’re in that 5%.
Go to the Dark Side
I call them opposite questions.
Try this one at your next team-building retreat: “Suppose our group wanted to win an award for being completely dysfunctional. What would we do?”
Sometimes people get tired of best practices. When that happens, flip the question and ask about the worst.
Taking a short detour gets people warmed up. You’ll be surprised by how many answers you get and how energized people are.
If you ask the dysfunctional team question, people will say things like:
“We’d gossip, we’d text, we’d gossip and text. No wait, we already do all that.”
Later, of course, you’ll need to flip the question and discuss what you need to do more of, less of, or differently. For example, with the dysfunctional list, you’d ask, “Which of these items should we be most concerned about?”
Vary the opposite question, depending on topic:
Customer Service: “What are the 20 best ways to completely alienate our top clients?” This question is frightening—you may already be doing a few.
Stress: “How could we make working here so anxiety-provoking that you’d need an industrial strength horse tranquilizer just to walk through the door?”
Management: “Suppose you wanted to be the worst manager in the synthetic resin industry?” Hmm. Possible response: “I don’t know a thing about the synthetic resin industry.” (Ok, that’s a good start!)
Turns out, it’s easy to brainstorm worst practices. Most of us have had impressive experience.
Push for Specifics
“Tell me about your culture,” you ask the hiring manager.
You’re considering a new job, so you really need to know, because even the best job—in the worst culture—will kill your satisfaction and success.
But you’ve asked the wrong question. It’s too abstract, too vague, and will prompt the other person to give you a bland answer.
Here’s what you’re likely (and unlikely) to hear:
We’re innovative. (The truth is, we have no idea what we’re doing.)
We embrace change. (Our priorities change from minute to minute.)
Picture one big family. (Picture one big unhappy family.)
We work hard. (We avoid frivolous activities like weekends.)
Read our core values statement. It says it all. (Read the 207-page report the U.S. Dept. of Justice just issued. Our CEO has promised to turn things around. As he says, “Anyone can work from jail.”)
“I hate the word culture,” says the CEO of GM, Mary Barra. “It’s like this thing that sits out there”.2
What is culture, anyway?
“It’s the stories we tell about the company,” Barra says. “It’s how we behave.”
Agreed. So don’t ask about culture. Ask about stories and behaviors, with questions like these:
Stories: “Tell me about someone who’s been really successful here” (not just based on technical skill, but on modeling key values). “And tell me about someone who hasn’t.”
Behavior: “Suppose I exceeded my performance goals. What other factors would contribute to a high-performance rating here? What would get me a low-performance rating, even if I met objectives?”
For example, here’s what the creator of Time Warner, Steve Ross, said about risk-taking behavior: “I’ll never fire you for making a mistake. I’ll fire you for not making any.”3
It’s a mistake to ask bland questions. Push for specifics . . .
At a job interview:
You’re the interviewer, and you greet the job applicant in the lobby: “Did you have any trouble finding us?” you ask.
You’ve got two big interview questions, and this isn’t one of them. This is filler. Filler questions break the ice.
But we also use fillers when we’re unsure what to ask next and we’re desperate to ask something.
Sometimes with a problem—any problem—we don’t know what we need to learn, or, even if we know, we don’t know how to learn it.
Consider the problem of hiring the right person:
• What do you need to learn about the applicant? Well, you need to learn whether he can do the job and also fit into the organization.
• How will you learn it? You need to ask the right questions. Unfortunately, the right questions don’t just magically appear; you need to think them through in advance.
Suppose, as the interviewer, you begin indirectly: “Tell me about yourself,” you ask, without broadcasting what, exactly, you’re looking for.
Still, you do need to know what, exactly, you’re looking for. Lurking beneath your opener is one of your two big questions; you won’t ask it directly, but it will drive most of your questions: WHY SHOULD WE HIRE YOU?
Let’s shift to the job applicant and his response. “Well, I could talk about my marketing background, my leadership experience, or my last triathlon. Where should I start?”
Here, he’s asked a smart counter question. He’s given you fast, bulleted info, presented as options that say, “You should hire me because I’ve got X, Y, and Z.” And he did it in 8 seconds.
(The triathlon, by the way, is not trivial—it shows energy, discipline, and achievement. Plus, it adds variety. Unlike marketing and leadership, it’s personal.)
You: “Let’s talk marketing. Any experience with social media?”
Is social media experience a must-have? What, exactly, are you looking for?
Applicant: “Yes! To launch our new office machine—a combo phone, fax, and microwave oven—we made a series of YouTube videos called ‘Indestructible.’”
So far, the applicant is doing ok. Unfortunately, he’s about to get worse.
You: “Suppose your boss were sitting here. What kind of constructive feedback might she give you?”
Here’s the other big question you’re fishing for: WHY SHOULDN’T WE HIRE YOU? Asking about constructive feedback is one way to probe.
Applicant: “Well, she’d say I’m aggressive.”
You: “In what way?”
When someone uses abstractions, like aggressive, don’t pretend you understand. Aggressive could be good or bad. Ask for specific examples.
Applicant: “For the YouTube campaign ‘Indestructible,’ my concept was to first spill coffee on the machine, then drop it on the floor, then hurl it out a window, and then take a sledgehammer and try to bludgeon the thing to death.”
You: “Ok. We’ll get back to you . . .”
Whether you’re interviewing a job applicant, meeting a client, or coaching an employee, figure out what you really need to learn, and then how to ask.
Let’s talk now about answering questions—nightmare or otherwise.
When Asked a Question, You Have Options—Use Them
Suppose you’re giving a presentation:
1.Answer the question. Sure, if you know the answer. But no one expects you to know the answer to every question. And you’ll lose credibility if you pretend you do.
2.Ask the questioner a counter question.
a. Ask him to clarify: “Could you say a bit more about that?” Sometimes there’s a more important question underneath the first one. Other times, you really have no idea what he’s talking about—yikes!—until he says more.
b. Ask her to answer: “I’m flattered you’re asking me that, because I know you’ve thought a lot about this topic. How would you answer the question?” This works well when she really has some expertise and may be dying to talk.
3.Defer.
a. For a few minutes: “We’ll be covering that in about 20 minutes, please give me a shout if we haven’t answered your question by then.”
b. Till the break: “I’d love to discuss that with you over coffee.” Good move if the question will derail you and no one else in the audience is interested.
c. Till the end of the day: “Let’s put that on the parking lot.” Then create a chart that says “Parking Lot,” and make sure to actually do something with those items later.
d. Till later that week: “I’d like to do some research on that. Would it be ok to get back to you in 48 hours?”
Let’s linger on this option, it’s a good one. Here’s what you’ve just communicated (in 8 seconds):
You’re a serious person, and you take the question seriously.
You don’t bluff.
You keep your commitments (because, of course, you will follow up).
So your influence is actually enhanced—much more than if you tried to wing it.
e. Till the end of time: This is appropriate for borderline questions, the ones where you wish an HR exec would suddenly appear and make a house arrest. Stay calm, stay friendly, and then move on (for more detail, please see page 91, When the Question is Too Personal, Decline).
4.Refer.
a. Refer the question to the group at large: “Good question, what do we think about that?” Then move off stage to the side, while the group discusses it. Return to the center of the room when you’re ready to summarize and resume control.
b. Refer the question to a specific table group. Walk over to the group. Wait for their answer. Then take their answer to another table group, as if the first group’s answer is the craziest thing you ever heard. Ask the second group what they think. Then take their answer back to the first group. Good for stimulating group discussion—and/or stirring up trouble.
5.Bridge.
a. Find a keyword or key phrase in the question to dwell on for a moment, before you move the conversation back to your comfort zone. Politicians do this all the time—returning, over and over, to their talking points—but you should do it sparingly. Otherwise, you’ll sound like a politician.
b. Answer the question beneath the one that was asked—the question you’re comfortable with. “I think what you’re really asking is . . .”
An Example of the Bridge Technique
As a warm-up exercise in one of my workshops, I sometimes ask participants to talk for a minute, in pairs, about a ridiculous topic. For example, I ask them to speak about “sports played on the planet Jupiter,” while agreeing with the crazy premise that Jupiter has sports.
There’s not a lot to say about sports on Jupiter, so bridging makes sense. How? Well, note the keywords: sports and planet Jupiter. You could transition to talking about sports in general, or planets in general. Let’s try sports:
“You’d need to be extremely fit,” you might begin, “to play any sport on Jupiter because of the intense gravitational pull. The good thing is that you’d only need to exercise for a few seconds each day—maybe just get out of bed—to stay in amazing shape, whereas on Earth, you need to work out much longer. I usually . . .” and now you bridge to your own exercise routine.
When the Question Is Too Personal, Decline
When President Bill Clinton was asked in 1994 whether he wore boxers or briefs, you expected him to decline.
(Or to bridge: “I think what you’re really asking is who am I as a person, inside. Let me speak to that.”)
Unfortunately, he answered.
The 17-year-old girl who asked Clinton, at an MTV town hall, said, “All the world’s dying to know.” But all the world wasn’t; most of the world didn’t even want to think about it.
In 2012, presidential candidate Mitt Romney was asked what he wore to bed. “As little as possible,” he said. Most of the world didn’t want to think about that either.
Why do leaders answer these questions? Well, to appear approachable, or likable, or real.
The message of Bill Clinton’s presidency, wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene: “The president is just a guy. There’s no distance between the president and the people”2
But a leader needs distance. It’s hard to imagine a U.S. president before Clinton talking about underwear. Now, these questions are routine.
I usually advise business leaders to welcome questions, to step into them, and to stay loose and relaxed.
But when the question is inappropriate, do the opposite. Put up your hands (as if stopping traffic), possibly smile (unless the question is too offensive), and say something like, “I don’t think I’m going anywhere near that one.” Then move on.
Or even simpler: “Thanks. Next question.”
The nightmare interview question: “What’s your biggest weakness?”
It’s a test, how well do you handle yourself? You’ve got to answer, but without revealing too little or too much.
Some bad answers:
• I’m wanted in three states for grand larceny.
Too much. If you have to go this route, stick with larceny, delete grand. Grand sounds like a boast.
• I have no weaknesses.
Too little, too defensive.
• I’m a perfectionist.
Too cute.
• I’m highly critical of other people’s footwear.
Too odd, though original.
The ideal answer is: job-related, already known, and fixable.
For example, if you’ve only worked for Fortune 500 companies, and you’re applying for a nonprofit job, mention your lack of nonprofit experience—that’s certainly a weakness.
But also mention: You’re a fast learner, and you’ve done extensive volunteer work. Plus, you’ve had lots of experience in the airline industry, and none of those companies ever made a profit either.