Each week I unpack one insight about questioning and one great question from the real world. When relevant, I also share articles and challenges that reinforce themes discussed in that week’s newsletter. Recurring themes: decision-making, innovation, connection, and leadership.
Greetings from Atlanta. This week’s insight reveals the seemingly obvious but rarely practiced secret to getting anyone to like you: asking follow-up questions. This week’s question helped a clever executive rethink how information flows to his office, and in particular, to ensure the bad news never arrives late.
💡 Insight of the Week: The Secret to Being Likable
We all crave being liked by the people we meet. It doesn’t matter whether we are chatting with a friend of a friend, on a date, or pitching a new client. We use our best material: a funny joke, a thrilling story, even a clever thought. It’s as if we are presenting evidence to the person that we are worth knowing.
But research shows that the secret to being likable is simply to ask more follow-up questions.
Follow-up questions convey responsiveness—a proven cocktail of positive signals that includes listening, understanding, validation, and care for the person. When we ask people to elaborate on their last statement, we indicate an interest in and willingness to understand what makes the other person tick.
This advice may seem too simple to mention. It isn’t that surprising. But very few of us practice it. Instead, we respond with stories from our own experience that are kinda, sorta like what the person just said. But are they? We usually latch onto a piece of their narrative we can connect to our lives. It’s rarely the same thing.
In every conversation, we face a choice. When it is our turn to speak, we can use the microphone ceded to reposition the conversation to be about our stories or opinions. That is to say, to convey who we are. Or, we can ask our counterpart a follow-up question that teaches us more about who they are. We think the first is the quickest path to being liked but it is the second that does the trick. Always ask follow-ups.
Source: It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask: Question-Asking Increases Liking by Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson, & Gino
🏋️♂️ Challenge of the Week: Double Your Follow-up Questions
Ask at least 5 follow-up questions in the first 20 minutes of the next conversation you have with a friend, family member, or colleague. And to be clear: follow-up questions are questions that encourage a conversation partner to elaborate on the contents of their prior statement, as contrasted with a partial or full-switch question that change the direction of the conversation.
Extra credit: Observe the apparent pleasure your conversation partner takes from expanding on experiences and areas of expertise that genuinely matter to them.
❓Question of the Week: How do I keep surprising information flowing to me?
We all have a tendency to cocoon ourselves amid information that reinforces the way we want to see the world. Behavioral economists calls this phenomenon confirmation bias. We search for, favor, and recall evidence that affirms our prior beliefs and decisions. Meanwhile, we ignore, question, or miss altogether evidence that challenges our perspective. Our lens is distorted. If we aren’t careful, we’ll not only make bad decisions but linger in that wrongness even as the world signals a need to change.
It is with this context that Walt Bettinger, CEO of Charles Schwab, asks a powerful question: How do I keep surprising information flowing to me?
Bettinger assumes information that validates his decision-making will reach his executive suite. Rather, it is disconfirming evidence that will elude him, either because he will overlook it or his managers will hesitate to share it until their evidence is rock solid. But this will likely be too late. As Bettinger explains, what separates exceptional executives is not the quality of their decisions but the speed at which they realize which of the decisions they made were wrong and adjust. This is true for all of us…
What I love about Bettinger’s question is not simply that it targets a specific cognitive bias we all suffer from. It also treats questioning as a habit to cultivate, even a set of tactics to build into his working life.
Bettinger’s tactics include requiring his direct reports to prepare “brutally honest” reports twice a month about “what’s broken?”, frequent chats with employees and customers where he explicitly asks them “If you were in my shoes, what would you do differently?”, and public recognition for employees who raise issues very early on.
Our context may be different, but the parallels seem obvious. We make decisions with a distorted lens. We then insulate ourselves from evidence that things aren’t going as planned. Instead, we must seek out, and then be receptive to, different perspectives. If we can do this, we can make course corrections that limit the impact of bad decisions.
Source: Questions are the Answer by Hal Gregerson
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!
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