The art of asking questions is almost certainly the most important skill for conducting negotiations. It combines within it so many elements that help us get through any process, no matter how complex, in an optimal way.
Asking questions can be so effective because it conveys to our partner to the process that we are, first of all, interested in them. The combination of asking questions and listening has great advantages. First, asking questions enables us to obtain valuable information from our partner to the negotiation. This information enables us to update our data base, to understand their emotional state, their thought patterns, inner conflicts, thoughts, needs, wishes, even dreams and, above all, to create an effective line of communication. Is there anyone who doesn’t like to be heard? When was the last time your business partner, your life partner, or even a good friend, said to you, “Tell me about something that upset you today,” and let you talk for seven minutes without stopping, without interrupting, without giving advice, but only listening and letting the glass empty? We live in an era of a listening deficiency, in an era that glorifies the me and the us much less. Dialogue has, in recent years, become more and more violent, and whoever yells louder wins the argument. It’s enough to listen to a radio program about current events to understand how destructive deficient listening can be.
And why is it so important? A glass of water that doesn’t empty and just fills up more and more ends up reaching the limit of its capacity, and the water starts overflowing, and we all know what happens when the water starts overflowing.
There are many kinds of questions. We can ask closed questions whose answer is simply yes or no. A closed question is an excellent way to clarify uncertainty or disperse fog. Its disadvantage is that it does not enable our partner to supply more information than we asked for. A different kind of question now enters the picture, an open question. “So what do you think about that?” A question like this invites the responder to choose what to respond to and what to share. There are, obviously, other kinds of questions, but the important rule here is quite simple – listen, update the data base, and go on to the next question based on the data received.
At a more advanced stage, we can try to take the information received, focus on a more specific subject and designate another question for developing it. “So I understand that the dropoffs in the morning are hard for you?” This is the question of all questions in many homes in Israel. The children are hardly able to get up in the morning, you discover that there are no fresh rolls for the ten o’clock meal, your oldest daughter is at the peak of adolescence and nothing is good enough for her, and Waze says that the drive to the office is going to take an extra fifteen minutes, and the event repeats itself every morning.
If someone were to ask me how I feel… If they would just listen to me… without rushing to a solution right away.
After we have gathered a little more information and emptied the glass, we can even ask, “Is there something that can be said or done?” Asking this kind of question requires our partner to start being creative and thinking about possible solutions. Their pupils start moving.
Like many things in life, asking questions is another skill that reaches the level of an art. It requires practice and rigorous training, the ability to know what to ask, to understand the limits of what one is allowed to ask and what one isn’t allowed to ask and, maybe the most important thing of all in asking questions, when to stop. Not every question has an answer, but the question itself makes our partner start thinking, moving their pupils, because, ultimately, the negotiation happens in their mind.
