Question your questions
Are you sure you want to hear that answer?
Before you ask questions of your team, consider why you’re asking those questions. You’ll often be asking for one of these two reasons:
- Discovery
- Direction
Discovery questions are designed to gather information. “Why do we think this customer issue seems to be coming up a lot lately?”
Direction questions are designed to elicit an answer from a predefined set of acceptable responses. “Which of these two features do we want to prioritize first?”
Be careful when you ask Discovery-type questions at the wrong time.
Here’s a simple example:
You’re in a tightly scheduled meeting with a specific end time, which is essentially right now. The meeting is wrapping up as people gather their things and push back their chairs, when the leader says, “Okay, we’re pretty much done here. Anyone have anything else they want to talk about?”
You can probably feel the collective groan from everyone else in that room.
Why?
Because the leader asked an open-ended Discovery-type question when they didn’t actually want to discover anything. Suddenly, anyone in the room has the power to keep everyone there indefinitely rather than getting the team out of there and back to work.
Instead, they could ask a Direction-type question like “Our next meeting is on Monday at 10:00 AM, right?” or just not ask any questions at all.
A tell that you should not ask a question is that you are either hoping no one will answer, or hoping for a very specific answer while dreading other answers. In this case, the leader is hoping for silence or “Nope!” while dreading other answers like “Actually, this is slightly off topic but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while…”
When you ask questions, there’s a very good chance someone will feel obligated to answer. Are you sure you want to hear that answer?