Are You Asking Enough Questions..??

“We run this company on asking questions, not answers.” — Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google

Have you ever been encouraged to ask as many questions as you want. I guess the answer to this “question” is no, right? Let me take you down the memory lane back to your school days. How rare it use to happen that you were able to gather the courage to ask question in front of the whole class and how many times you didn’t ask just because you thought, what if the teacher or my classmate will judge me on my questions. How silly it will look, I will look fool and they will judge me on my intelligence if I ask this question.

Now, let’s come back to today, irrespective where you are in your career from being an employee to a businessperson — now be honest with yourself — you still carry that hesitation, fear of being judged on what if you ask this question. What your colleagues or your manager or your employee will think if you ask these questions. And there are many more reasons which we will discuss later in this article.

Questions are the best way to gain deeper insights, to develop more innovative solutions but more importantly learn more. So why do so few people utilize them to our benefit?

Children learn by asking questions. Students learn by asking questions. New recruits learn by asking questions. Innovators understand client needs by asking questions. It is the simplest and most effective way of learning. People who think that they know it all no longer ask questions — why should they? Brilliant thinkers never stop asking questions because they know that this is the best way to gain deeper insights.

Here is an excerpt from an article published by Harvard Business Review that I want to share with you all. Here you can check the full article.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Get

“Be a good listener,” Dale Carnegie advised in his 1936 classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. “Ask questions the other person will enjoy answering.” More than 80 years later, most people still fail to heed Carnegie’s sage advice. When one of us (Alison) began studying conversations at Harvard Business School several years ago, she quickly arrived at a foundational insight: People don’t ask enough questions. In fact, among the most common complaints people make after having a conversation, such as an interview, a first date, or a work meeting, is “I wish [s/he] had asked me more questions” and “I can’t believe [s/he] didn’t ask me any questions.”

There is no stupid question; stupid people don’t ask questions — Olivia

The great philosophers, thought leaders, change makers spend their whole lives asking deep questions about the meaning of life, morality, truth and so on. We do not have to be quite so contemplative but we should nonetheless ask the deep questions about the situations we face. It is the best way to get the information we need to make informed decisions and for sales people it is the single most important skill they need to succeed. Let me share few such examples from the history.

Columbus solves his mysteries by asking many questions; as do all the great detectives — in real life as well as fiction. All the great inventors and scientists asked questions. Isaac Newton asked, “Why does an apple fall from a tree?” and, “Why does the moon not fall into the Earth?” Charles Darwin asked, “Why do the Galapagos islands have so many species not found elsewhere?” Albert Einstein asked, “What would the universe look like if I rode through it on a beam of light?” By asking these kinds of fundamental questions they were able to start the process that lead to their tremendous breakthroughs.

Why don’t we ask questions?

Now, have you ever think why people hold back on asking questions? Perhaps one reason that i think of and taking from my personal experience is that most of us often think that we know all the answers (which sometime can be true but actually it’s not). Another reason and perhaps the most important is the fear of being judged on their intelligence and what if the other people view them as weak, ignorant and incompetent. And there are many more such reasons that don’t let us ask questions.

People may be egocentric — eager to impress others with their own thoughts, stories, and ideas (and not even think to ask questions). Perhaps they are apathetic — they don’t care enough to ask, or they anticipate being bored by the answers they’d hear. They may be overconfident in their own knowledge and think they already know the answers (which sometimes they do, but usually not). Or perhaps they worry that they’ll ask the wrong question and be viewed as rude or incompetent. But the biggest inhibitor, in our opinion, is that most people just don’t understand how beneficial good questioning can be. If they did, they would end far fewer sentences with a period — and more with a question mark.

Finally some people are in such a hurry to get with things that they do not stop to ask questions because it might slow them down. They risk rushing headlong into the wrong actions.

Asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. Questions are such powerful tools that they can be beneficial — perhaps particularly so — in circumstances when question asking goes against social norms. By giving the other person a limited choice of responses we get specific information and deliberately move the conversation forward in a particular direction.

Also, asking many questions is very effective but it can make you appear to be inquisitorial and intrusive. So it is important to ask questions and let your mind grasp the information from other’s perspective.

So, from next time, try to practice asking more questions in your everyday conversations. Instead of telling someone something, ask them a question. Intelligent questions stimulate, provoke, inform and inspire. Questions help us to teach as well as to learn. You only get things when you ask.