How To Ask Better Questions

Someone once said to me: “questions are the answer to better thinking” and as an expression, it is burned in my mind. However, as I reflect on the challenges my clients face to drive value, manage stakeholders against competing priorities and get the job done, there is a profound need to level up the quality of questions we ask.

What’s the evidence for that?

All too often I hear my clients saying (a) there are too many meetings in my calendar (b) we’re not moving fast enough (c) there is too much consensus decision-making, and (d) the conclusion of this meeting is… another meeting.

Asking better questions is about the mindset of wanting to serve the conversation, add value, seek clarity, secure decisions and get to action. In addition, and when we ask them, we need to be crisp, clear, strategic, and then stop talking and listen.

Better questions are ones which:

• We’ve thought about in advance of speaking (versus simultaneously articulating our train of thought and wandering around the topic).
• Are singular (just one question versus stacking multiple questions one after the next before allowing the person to answer).
• Avoid ‘ask and answer’ tactics, which is a question followed by an opinion. This is extremely problematic because it contradicts meaningfully wanting to understand the other person.
• Are strategic: by which I mean we use open questions to understand, encourage creativity, expansion of thought and possibilities. Closed questions drive priorities, decisions, accountability, and ownership.
• Drive better conversations, better decisions, better actions… all because the questions made us think.

What Is Exquisite Influence In Business Today?

My focus this month has been writing custom content for a high potential talent development programme targeting emerging leaders. Their challenges are many: change, uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity, and the commercial expectation of the business is to drive agility as a leader. Now, improving processes are great, honing product knowledge helps, and segmenting marketing efforts to increase the effort/reward ratio all make sense.

And yet.

The game-changer will be honing leadership capabilities focused on influence. I call it ‘exquisite influence’, and by that, I mean the ability of leaders to “to be persuasive and compelling with a wide variety of audiences. An ability to flex leadership style, build collaborative relationships, engage and empower teams, lead change and drive results through exceptional communication skills, purposeful curiosity, and an optimistic mindset”. Sounds relatively straightforward, right?   Wrong.

For leaders everywhere, it’s never been harder to demonstrate exquisite influence, and to do so consistently, under pressure, in the absence of clarity, with little time to prepare, at distance, across cultures, time zones and dotted reporting lines. Our content hones practical, impactful skills and strategies to get it right. This is about building muscle strength and high impact habits which make a difference.

To learn more about what I do, go to www.sarahbrummitt.com

 

Enough With The ‘Does That Make Sense?’

What is it with this phrase? In the past couple of months I’ve heard it far too often. In one meeting, a client said it 18 times.

My perspective is that these types of questions (along with ‘do you know what I mean?’ amongst others) need to be removed from our vocabulary if our goal is to be impactful.

All it reveals is that we’re unsure and unconfident that our message has landed; and hence have developed this verbal habit to check that if what we suspect is true.

Instead, I suggest:

1. Think before speaking. Articulating our internal thought process is one reason we feel the need to check what’s landed.
   
2. Practise brevity using a narrative structure. This is the 3 section headings of our message which help organise the detail for relevance, logic and flow.
   
3. Read the room. Look at the audience; that will reveal whether indeed, you have made sense.

I’ll resist the very obvious sign off now.

Start Talking When You've Finished Thinking

My conversations with clients this month have focused on the habit of articulating our internal thought process as part of our communication with others.

We all work in a global business world of constant change, with multiple demands on our time and at lightening pace.

That won’t change; however we do need to resist the pressure to speed up in our communication.

And I’m focused on a very specific habit here.

Too often, I see and hear the pressure to start talking before we’ve finished thinking.

The impact on the speaker’s gravitas and impact is profound and not good.

Great communicators convey more by saying less.

Great communicators are confident to take the time to consider their thoughts and only then, start to share them.

Great communicators keep the line of logic, deduction and conclusion clear for the listener, rather than leave it to the listener to work out what the heck they’re talking about.

Great communicators never feel the need to ask ‘does that make sense?’ And if we have to ask, we already know the answer.

Selling Ideas To The Boardroom And Beyond (Part 2)

I promised to revisit this topic, given my reflections from last month on the subject. Always remember that the chances are senior leaders have not given your project, problem or idea much thought since you last met. Why? Because of the sheer number and scope of decisions to be made every single day. So, when we find ourselves in front of executives once more, consider:

1. Explain ‘why should you care’ immediately. The oft quoted Simon Sinek said “people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it”. Senior leaders are always thinking “why are you telling me this?”
   
   
2. Reference the individuals you’ve spoken with to arrive at your problem statement. Senior leaders are always thinking “who else have you spoken with about this before coming to me?”
   
   
3. Use a narrative structure to organize your message into 3 parts. I’ve spoken about this at length on multiple occasions. Great communicators organize the structure of their message first (think of this as the 3 chapter headings for it), in order to ensure that their message is logical, with the right amount of detail. We need to be crisp, concise and compelling. Senior leaders are always thinking “what’s the point here?”
   
   
4. Have the detail ready in reserve, should you be scrutinized. Otherwise assume they don’t care or don’t need it. Senior leaders expect you to have a grip of the detail when they ask questions about it.
   
   
5. Declutter your slides. Too many are visually dense, overwhelming, with far too much information on them. Stop it. Strip it down. Choose the data to support the story; keep the rest in reserve. Most data that’s prepared is redundant. Senior leaders are always thinking “what am I looking at?” “What’s the important number?”
   
   
6. Be clear on your ask. Senior leaders are always thinking “what exactly do you want from me?”

Selling Ideas To The Boardroom And Beyond

My conversations with clients this month have focused extensively around influencing others within our business to get on board with some really great ideas. Whether it’s to improve processes, increase employee engagement, drive growth or something else, the challenge is to build consensus that will lead to change.

The influencing skills and strategies needed to do this effectively require more than one social media friendly newsletter, however; here are my first three tips for success:

1. Define the problem you want to solve. This is so much easier said than done. All too often what I hear are superficial, ‘obvious’, vague problems which aren’t compelling. Extensive scrutiny, garnering opinion, scaling down, getting to the ‘root cause’ takes time, effort, and iteration.
   
   
2. Build consensus individually. Jumping on calls or walking into meeting rooms with an audience of many, who have not heard your ideas before is a recipe for disaster. You will be shot down. Effective influence means building consensus one person at a time so that you are not on your own when pitching your idea.
   
   
3. Understand and use the concept of ‘loss aversion bias’. We have many biases as humans; this one is the reality that we are twice as likely to act to avoid a loss, than we are to secure a gain. Think of it this way: what are the (negative) consequences of doing nothing? That’s the ‘why’ behind increasing urgency and relevance for the audience to agree with our idea.

Do we need to do more than this? Of course, but that’s for another month. Mastering these first three strategies would be a great place to start.å

Keeping Control Of The Message When You’re Not In The Room

My conversations with clients this month have focused on pitching project ideas, persuading key stakeholders and building momentum for ideas within the business. Often this is done remotely, where it’s not possible to control the attention and direction of the discussion.

Here’s what I noticed: extremely busy slides. Now, I’ve written endlessly about the challenge and difficulty with this approach and yet, if we ‘have’ to use them, then let’s strengthen our impact by using the following tools:

1. Always explain the context for the visuals first. Otherwise, it’s a sea of numbers, charts and figures, which can be viewed and interpreted in multiple, different ways.
   
   
2. Avoid, avoid, avoid presenting what looks like a report. I can read for myself, thanks. We add absolutely no value if what we present is effectively exactly what we’ve written on the slide.
   
   
3. Use builds – and rehearse them – to break down visual density.
   
   
4. Use ‘embedded commands’ i.e., direct the audience’s attention in terms of where to look. Trust me, they’ll look where they are told to look.
   
   
5. Create greater interest by interspersing appreciation, audience names, referencing their metrics and priorities to make your point powerfully resonate. Otherwise, this message is all about you… and in fact it should always be all about the audience.