The Types of Questions Every Leader Should Ask

0:03Alison Wood Brooks:Welcome to HBR on Leadership. Case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. I'm HBR Senior Editor and Producer Amanda Kersey. One of the simplest ways to strengthen your leadership is to ask better questions. They can open up information you'd otherwise miss. They can build trust, and they can make you more persuasive. But most of us don't ask enough. And when we do, we don't always ask them in the most effective way. In this IdeaCast episode from 2018, host Sarah Green Carmichael talks with Harvard Business School professors Leslie John and Allison Woodbrooks.

0:52Alison Wood Brooks:Their research shows how thoughtful questions, whether open-ended, pointed, or follow-ups, can change how you're seen as a leader and colleague. Here's Sarah. Leslie, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. And Allison, thank you for coming back. I am so happy to be back. So let's just start by talking about what's the benefit to asking good questions in business. Actually, a better question might be, what isn't the benefit of asking questions in business? Because the benefits are so abundant. 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.

1:41Alison Wood Brooks:When I ask you questions, 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 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. We also know that asking questions increases persuasion. 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.

2:18Alison Wood Brooks:Lots of benefits. But one of the, I think, really fascinating insights of Allison'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. Yeah. 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.

2:56Alison Wood Brooks: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 always get, right, is ask lots of questions. I did this when I had unsuccessful online dating 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. I think there's potentially an interesting irony here in that when you really want something, 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.

3:50But 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 Alice and 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. So what are some of the questions you guys have found that are really effective? 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.

4:32So an example would be, imagine you're, this is really simple, imagine you're talking to a supplier and you're wondering whether the supplier is going to deliver on time. 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.

5:11Whereas if you ask them in the optimistic way, it's harder for the supplier to admit to that thing. Right. They have to contradict you. They don't have to be like, actually, we're going to be late. 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.

5:42Alison Wood Brooks:What about 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? 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?

6:18Alison Wood Brooks: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 very hard to lie explicitly to someone's face when I say, OK, you're selling me this used iPod. Has it been damaged in the past? It's so much harder to say no right to my face with a yes, no question than if I say, tell me about the history of this iPod. Then you can lie by omission quite easily. Another type of question that I want to make the case for that's so magical and powerful is the follow-up question.

6:57Alison Wood Brooks: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. OK. 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. I think we are now realizing why I did not get any second dates.

7:32Alison Wood Brooks:I think I was not asking follow-up questions. Yes. I was simply asking like random a list of questions. Okay. So why is the follow-up question? I will try to ask a follow-up question about follow-up questions. Good job. You're doing great. Why are follow-up questions so much more powerful than other kinds of questions? So 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 not follow-up questions are topic switching questions.

8:04Alison Wood Brooks: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 a 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. 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 effects of question asking are explained by the power of follow-up questions.

8:39Alison Wood Brooks:It sounds like a lot of this advice is sort of context dependent. So if you have an adversarial relationship or 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? You sound like you're talking from experience, Sarah. and they're going to get nervous. I think we've all had relationships, especially at work, where we're not exactly sure where we stand. 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.

9:17Alison Wood Brooks:And that each is one or the other. 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 constructive feedback, 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? I will argue that in almost every scenario, whether it's cooperative or competitive, asking questions doesn't hurt.

9:56Alison Wood Brooks: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. 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. Jen. When is it better to ask the tough question first versus sort of warming someone up to it and then building up to the moment where you ask what you really want to ask them?

10:35Yeah, so there's one of my favorite pieces of research is this Arthur Aaron's work. It's a classic on how he and his co-authors brought people into the lab and they got people to ask questions to each other and they instructed the dyad. So 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 disclosive 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.

11:20And 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. 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.

11:57And then we had another version where people were just asked in kind of a random order. And in contrast to what Aaron found, we actually found that people disclosed more when you started with the most sensitive questions. My conclusion or one conclusion is that, you know, if you sort of warm up and start with this 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 is is comes down to this goal of the interaction.

12:33So if the goal is to foster a relationship and it's a very cooperative environment, then starting with the 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 increase disclosure overall. It's, again, though, not without its risk. 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.

13:08Alison Wood Brooks: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. Well, we've found that, especially when you're asking for a sensitive question, our kind of inclination might be 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 OK, 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 to your questions.

13:59Alison Wood Brooks: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? Conversational dynamics change profoundly when the group gets larger. And question asking dynamics change in particular. It depends on the composition of the group. Are there men, women? What are their ages? Who's the leader? What's one of 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 any time that you can break those norms, so if you're expected to answer questions, why not try asking one instead?

14:37Alison Wood Brooks:Anytime you can break those norms, I think it keeps things engaging and interesting. It also introduces a host of problems, potential problems. If you think of a goal, an important goal of asking and answering questions, of course, information sharing. And when I think of 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.

15:23And so you have this if you're trying to get diverse perspectives, 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.

15:47Alison 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, 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.

16:22Alison Wood Brooks:So if you are put on the spot by someone's question, what is a kind of a good way to prepare for that? Because on the one hand, we're not, we're giving advice to managers to help them ask more questions, to get more information, be more likable. That sounds great. But if managers listen to this and go back to their offices and are suddenly like asking a million questions, what should their teams know about kind of this new communicating with them? They're going to like them better, so maybe it doesn't matter. 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.

17:03Alison Wood Brooks:But 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, an 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.

17:39Alison Wood Brooks:So just not being surprised and caught off guard is a huge help in those moments. I totally agree. Preparation is so important. 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 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. Oh, I don't know what to say. My favorite line of defense is is deflection by question asking. Yeah. Why do you ask or what do you think? Yeah. What do you think? Or in class, does everybody think this?

18:20You know, there's the deflection by question, I think, is whenever and it also whenever I'm in a bind in that in that, you know, I being asked a question that I don't know how to answer. It's a good kind of back pocket go to strategy.

18:34Alison Wood Brooks:Yeah, I will say two more strategy, quick strategies. One is if you can practice your humor skills, jokes are a really, really easy way to dodge things because people are so distracted laughing that they forget what question was asked and that you didn't answer it. And the second thing is use sparingly. It's OK to be honest that you don't know an answer. And I think a lot of professors actually forget this and managers as well. It's OK to reveal that you're not superhuman and have all the answers in the world. So use sparingly. It can actually be very humble, a great humility strategy to say, like, wow, that's a great question.

19:11Alison Wood Brooks: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. One thing not to do is kind of explicitly opt out of answering. So 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 saying, I don't want to answer that or in some way conspicuously not answering the question. So we found that that strategy is actually worse than saying something really unflattering about yourself. 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.

19:50We 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 answer, if you if you conspicuously abstain from answering.

20:02Alison Wood Brooks: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? I don't want to talk about it. Yeah, 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, is there anything that we really should have covered that we haven't covered? That's a great question. That's a particularly good question. A very open-ended one. Yes. 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.

20:45And 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.

21:06Alison Wood Brooks:Well, thank you both again for coming in. This was really fun. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for having us. That was Harvard Business School professors Leslie John and Allison Wood Brooks speaking with HBR IdeaCast host Sarah Green Carmichael. You can find their HBR article, The Surprising Power of Questions, at hbr.org. If this episode helped you, share it with your friends and colleagues. And follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. While you're there in the app, consider leaving us a review. And when you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all at hbr.org.

21:54Alison Wood Brooks:This episode was produced by Kurt Nickish and me, Amanda Kersey. On Leadership's team includes Maureen Hoke, Rob Eckhart, Erica Trexler, Ramsey Kabaz, Nicole Smith, and Anne Bartholomew. Music is by Coma Media. Thanks for listening.