What makes you a good collaborator? You’re probably already checking a lot of the boxes: being kind, hardworking, empathetic, and smart.
On top of that, you might be constantly honing your skills, ideas, and knowledge, so you can bring more to the table.
But there’s another major skill set that plays an incredibly important role in your ability to collaborate effectively: asking questions.
It’s not just the ability to ask questions. There’s a right way to ask questions so they work to benefit you and your coworkers, improving shared projects and collaborations. How you ask might even be more important than what you ask. Here’s why.
How Asking Questions Benefits Your Collaborations
Questioning is deeply collaborative. As Professors Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie John, who have conducted research into the power of questioning, put it: “We pose and respond to queries in the belief that the magic of a conversation will produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.”
To collaborate better, it’s critical to welcome and understand other people’s ideas. Questions aren’t just about aiding our own understanding. They bring a range of other benefits.
Better Flow of Information
Asking questions is a “Uniquely powerful tool for unlocking value in organizations” – Brooks and John. It facilitates learning through the exchange of ideas.
By posing a question, you can create space for others to put forward insights they may not have offered otherwise. This could be because the opportunity wasn’t there, because they lacked the confidence, or because it simply hadn’t occurred to them that the point might be relevant. And as the saying goes, a good question is half the answer.
Questioning also nurtures a more exploratory atmosphere, encouraging people to brainstorm collaboratively, and put forward half-baked ideas that could actually be winners.
Shifting Perspectives
Lecturer Hal Gregersen once found himself in an uninspiring brainstorming session which he likened to wading through oatmeal. In an attempt to salvage the last 5 minutes, he suggested that they stop looking for answers and instead pose as many questions about the problem as they could.
The result was energizing and resulted in lots of ideas about new approaches. “Suddenly, there was much more to discuss,” explains Gregersen, “because we had opened up unexpected pathways to potential solutions.”
An exchange of questions enables everyone to tap into the broad knowledge base and diverse experiences of the team. This is especially helpful when your team finds itself at an impasse as it can result in approaches to problems from fresh angles.
Building Relationships
Want people to like you? In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie suggests that since people generally enjoy talking about themselves, being regarded as a great conversationalist can be as simple as asking thoughtful questions and showing genuine interest.
Research shows that people who ask more questions are better liked by their conversational partners. Questions demonstrate responsiveness, a quality we subconsciously equate with caring, validation, and genuine engagement. That’s why asking questions is a key part of being an active listener.
The benefits go far beyond making people like you more, though. You’re also able to learn more about the other person, making it much easier to empathize with them and to understand their perspective, even if you disagree. This strengthens emotional intelligence, making you a much stronger collaborator overall.
How To Ask Questions to Improve Collaborations
“Questioning allows us to organize our thinking around what we don’t know.” – Warren Berger, Author, The Book of Beautiful Questions
How you ask is essential to ensuring questions lead to better collaborations, not worse.
For example, it’s important to be open about your intentions to avoid misunderstandings.
Likewise, if people are unprepared for questions, it can make them feel like you’re putting them on the spot, making them feel uncomfortable. They may also feel like you’re questioning their expertise or the validity of their perspective, causing them to respond defensively. So, there are times when asking questions is not collaborative, and in those scenarios, it can backfire.
Here are some things to keep in mind when thinking about how and when to ask questions while working on collaborative projects.
Start With “How Might We…”
If your team is trying to innovate or solve a problem, try starting with the “How Might We” approach. This involves distilling what you’re trying to achieve into simple questions that begin with, as you might guess, “How might we…”.
IDEO Chair Tim Brown tells HBR: “The ‘how’ part assumes there are solutions out there — it provides creative confidence… ‘Might’ says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”
Prioritize Open Ended Questions
As seen with “how might we…” above, questions that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or a “no” are particularly helpful during brainstorming or problem-solving.
Open ended questions encourage people to consider different possibilities and put forward novel ideas. They also keep the conversation from feeling like an interrogation – something you definitely want to avoid while collaborating.
Though, yes or no questions (aka closed-ended) do have their uses, such as for seeking factual clarification or checking your understanding.
Follow Up
Don’t just ask one question and leave it there, even if you get great responses. Asking follow-up questions helps you dig into everyone’s answers and push a topic further.
Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John have observed that these questions feed directly into the relationship-building aspect as well. “Follow-up questions seem to have special power,” they explain, “They signal to your conversation partner that you are listening, care, and want to know more.”
Think About the Sequencing
You don’t necessarily have to jump in at the deep end right away – you might want to build up to a particular question by doing some groundwork or establishing context first.
What preparatory questions could you use to introduce the topic and prime people for the discussion you want to have? According to Hal Gregersen: “Descriptive questions (what’s working? what’s not? why?) best precede speculative ones (what if? what might be? why not?).”
Avoid Leading Questions
Leading questions put pressure on someone to respond in a certain way, either because they nudge them towards a particular answer or because they’re based on an assumption. For example: “I’m getting the impression that you disagree. Could you explain why?”
They’re bad news for collaboration – as well as getting in the way of gathering genuine insights, they could make someone feel uncomfortable, misunderstood, or trapped.
To avoid leading questions, try to keep your language neutral – don’t assume you know how someone is feeling (even if it seems obvious), and try not to suggest an answer.
Types of Questions to Ask
While there are endless questions we could ask during a given collaborative scenario, keeping things on track can be easier if you understand the purpose and reasoning behind the type of question you’re asking.
A team at the Institute for Management Development has identified 5 types of questions that help us make better decisions.
- Investigative – Questions that analyze the situation or problem such as “What’s Working and what isn’t?”
- Speculative – Questions like “What if…” that explore possibilities.
- Productive – Questions like “What might we do about…” that assess the resources available to you.
- Interpretive – Questions like “How would that affect…” and “How do you envision the end result?” that dig deep into the implications of an idea.
- Subjective – Questions like “How would you feel if we…” and “Can you explain how this resonates with you?” that explore how people’s emotions and perspectives might influence an outcome.
They’ve found that we all naturally gravitate to certain types of questions over others. It’s useful, though, to sprinkle a mix of different types of questions into a conversation, brainstorm, or feedback cycle.
Identifying the types of questions that you’re drawn to and those you avoid can help you to be more strategic about the mix of questions that you ask. It can also help you to identify the types of questions that tend not to get asked in your group discussions so you can start to fill that gap.
Do You Think Asking Questions the Right Way Makes You a Better Collaborator?
Asking questions encourages knowledge sharing, enables you to tap into the diverse perspectives within your team, and nudges people into thinking in novel ways.
It also helps to strengthen your working relationships and gives you a deeper understanding of your colleagues and their perspectives – as long as you approach this collaborative practice the right way.
So next time you’re talking to your colleagues about a project you’re working on, rather than thinking about what point to make next, why not try thinking about what questions you could ask instead? Who knows what you might discover?
