Improve Your QUESTIONING Skills 

The ability to question and to listen carefully to the answers are essential skills for successful leaders. Try talking less and asking more questions.

          A wise person poses the right question. Without the right question, you will never get the right answer.

A handful of tips to improve your questioning skills

* Establish a rapport

          Start with comfortable questions to put the person at ease. Chat and begin by asking questions that are simple and easy to answer. Establish a rapport at the start of an interview.

          “How’s your family? I hear the children are doing well at school.”

* Ask open-ended questions

          Open-ended questions invite a longer reply and aim to get people talking. “What did you like best about our meeting last week?” A closed question will get you only a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. “Did you attend our party last week?”

* Keep asking simple questions 

          Professional interviewers use simple questions such as ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘when’, where’, how’, who’ and ‘how much’.

          The most important question to ask is ‘why?‘ 

* Try some ‘suppose’, ‘probe’ and ‘agreement’ questions

          “If you were running this department. What things would you change?”

          “You said you were not happy with your working conditions. Why is that?”

          “What made you say that?”

* Don’t answer your own question

          Pause after asking your question.

          By keeping quiet you put the responsibility to respond on to the other person.  

          Summarise and repeat the answer given. Periodically give your interpretation of the answer given. This allows the other person a chance to amplify, to explain why they said what they said and to make any alterations.

          Avoid evaluating answers but express your gratitude for the response to your question.

          Never stop asking questions, you can gain so much new information. It’s better to ask many times than to go astray once.

-Geoffrey Moss(mossassociates.co.nz)

“Learn to question and listen with care. Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly.”  

Source: “Persuasive Ways. ‘Tricks of the trade’ to get your ideas across”. First published by  Moss Associates Ltd., New Zealand and in Chinese by the Shanghai People’s Publishing House, the Singapore Institute of Management, Kogan Page Ltd, U.K and Hungarian by Bagolyvar Konyvkiado.  Also published as the “Secrets of Persuasion” by Cengage Learning Asia and as an e-book and sold by Amazon.com.