I’m always looking for better questions to ask.
Good questions educate me about a situation or a mindset someone is in and help me understand where they’re coming from.
Great questions can open the mind of the person you ask the question of. They tend to create discussions that create slight momentum shifts toward changes previously considered “impossible”, “too costly” or in conflict with existing thoughts, processes and mindsets that are considered sacrosanct.
Asking great questions without belittling or embarrassing the person being asked is an essential skill whether you’re a journalist, salesperson, manager or business owner. Journalists who ask a mix of good and great questions not only get good answers from the podium, but also provoke the listener or viewer to think hard about their position and what formed it.
I suspect you can think of a few questions of that nature related to the social and political issues of the day. What I would encourage is considering what good and great questions you should be asking your staff, your clients and yourself.
Here are some of the useful questions I’ve collected over the years:
- Why? (often asked repeatedly)
- Why not?
- So? (Be careful, this can come off as a bit rude)
- What if our belief / prediction / estimate is wrong?
- If we suspend our tightly held opinions for a moment, what else becomes possible?
- How can I help?
- What can I eliminate, add, accelerate, decelerate, start or stop that will help?
- Help me understand.
- What’s the biggest risk in doing this?
- What’s the biggest risk in not doing this? This often works better than the prior question because most of us easily identify “Why we can’t / shouldn’t do this” items.
- If this fails, what is plan B?
- Why does that matter? This tends to provoke different responses than “Why?” by digging a little deeper into the Why.
- What does this accomplish?
- If this works, what’s the next step?
- If this fails, is that OK?
- How does this add value to the things we find important?
- Can you give me a bit more detail on how you got there? Good for digging deeper on an idea or analysis.
- How will this impact our clients’ ability to deliver what their clients need and want?
- If this is wildly successful, are we as a company structured to handle that kind of success?
- Is this designed to handle 10 times the input, output or clients we currently expect if we provide the necessary infrastructure to support that growth?
- And that’s important because? (often repeated)
- What challenges must be overcome to pull this off?
- Can we talk about how we’ll deal with those challenges?
- How does this impact our key performance indicators? Examples: cost per lead / new client / sale / deployment, support load, lead time, etc.
- What opportunities does this provide to our partners?
- Help me understand how this strengthens our core business.
- Is this in conflict with our values?
- How does this support our values?
- How did the pilot program go?
- What did our clients say about it?
- What about this is really important to you, your crew and our clients?
- What data will be used to monitor this project / activity? How will it be measured? Do we know what the decision points are for that data? How were those points determined?
- Do you have what you need to do this?
- How can we communicate this effectively to clients and internally?
- How does this drive our “one number”? Your number might be webinar views / month, the number of after hours service calls, free trials / month, or average days between purchases. A car lot might see a visit to the lot with a spouse as a leading indicator.
- What are your biggest barriers to success? What’s the plan to deal with them?
- Who isn’t “on board” with this? Why?
- If we remove our egos / need to be “right” from this discussion, what changes?
- What are the weaknesses in this plan? Do you need help with them?
- Who are your strongest leaders and how are you developing them to handle more responsibility?
- What are you doing to attract new talent?
- What expectations does this set? How will we manage them?
- What are you doing to identify and develop both new and existing leaders on your staff?
What good and great questions do you ask?
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at [email protected].