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Priyesh: hey there my name is Priyesh Ramman from the your training program podcast. If this is your first time listening, Your! trainee program podcast is about making personal development accessible for you! Today I want to talk about some interpersonal skills and more specifically I want to talk about asking questions. Why is asking questions so important? How are you going to benefit from it and how can you start with asking better questions or maybe ask questions at all? I want to start today with a quote:
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers
Voltaire
This is a quote which you might know, it’s by Voltaire and if you think about it for a second you will soon see why asking questions is important. I want to do this with a small experiment to you guys to show you the power of asking questions. Think about it you’re in this meeting room with colleagues may be 5 6 7 8 10 20 doesn’t matter, someone asks a question and someone else gives an answer.
I want you to think about it real quick what you feel about the person who is giving an answer to a question. You might think he’s being a smart-ass or well that’s a good answer or something like that and the moment will pass and you’ll just go and will progress and like nothing happened.
Now I want you to think you are in this meeting, same meeting, the same topic, same amount of people and someone asks a question. I want you to think about how you feel about someone asking a question. It can sometimes be something normal or small when you think ‘whatever’ but usually you’ll think ‘that’s a good question’ we haven’t considered it yet or what might be even worse is that you think that’s a great question, why didn’t I came up with that! The way people ask questions tell’s something about their intelligence and ability to cope with problems to solve problems and they usually make a way bigger impact on us than being smart or showing off our smartness. Asking questions brings a lot of good things.
You get answers. But most of all you get clarity. Clarity about some specific situation. It also shows they you are involved if you’re in a conversation and you’re asking questions to someone. It shows that you’re involved, it shows that you care, and it shows that you really want to help someone. If you imagine, if you don’t ask questions and just do nothing, someone tells you a story and you do nothing with you there was a situation with you you will tell someone a story and someone wouldn’t ask questions at all. You might feel hurt but probably you also think he or she doesn’t care why isn’t she interested in what I’m telling. Also asking questions allows you to affirm or reject your thoughts so you and your people will be working on the right stuff. I also made an episode about assumptions and how they work and why you probably shouldn’t do a lot of assumptions and just check things. Asking questions is a great way to check your assumptions. There is no such thing as mind reading mind-reading.
Asking questions gives us the opportunity to check if we really understand our conversation partner in whatever way. If we have a conversation, you have had a conversation with someone and at the end you can ask questions to check if you weren’t on the same page and this will allow you and your conversation partner. Because you guys will leave from the same into the same direction and from the same direction. As professionals we always want to progress we want to get smarter, we go we want to get the the best techniques to do our jobs better. We have this urge to progress and one of us of our biggest fears in progress is asking dumb questions when we are asking questions or when we want to ask questions we always turn inwards. We are thinking about how will people react, how will the respond, what will they think of me. Will they think I’m dumb, I’m not paying attention or I didn’t prepare as well as they did. We’re busy with what’s happening in our mind and that’s really a shame.
Because the most of the questions people ask which people feel internally, are good questions so if you can manage to ask the right questions, it will make you a lot more effective because it allows you to work on the right things, build better relations and I’m just produce and deliver the results you want and the people around you need. So it’s a real important skill and I’m going to talk about how we can improve and asking better questions.
First I want to tell you something about a version of me a couple years ago I think it’s like 3 or 4 years ago. At this time I was a business intelligence adviser or a business intelligence consultant. What this actually means is that I was responsible for several business units and their data and their decision-making. My responsibilities were talking with managers and project managers about how they are going to get better results through data and also I had to talk and work with my colleagues, data specialists, to actually build the reports.
I was real proud of his job. It was in Tech and it was cool and new and upcoming and so it was a lot of fun to explore. But most of all it gave me the ability to help other people manage their businesses, that was really great. At the same time I was also a having doubts about my own abilities and that was about asking questions and how I didn’t ask questions as much as I I probably should.
I was working with data specialists and these data Specialists new specialist knew everything about data, about tooling about everything technical and I was just walking around talking with people talking with managers about what they need and how we can deliver something which adds value to their business. The internal conversations with my colleagues made me really insecure because, imagine this were at the table with like five or six seven people in a meeting, some of them were also BI consultants, but a lot of them where data specialist, they were talking about technical stuff which I never heard about and that made me really insecure.
Which I guess is not a good thing because I was kind of a consultant and my job was to talk with people about what was going on in their business, I needed to ask a lot of questions for my profession and the thing was I was scared, I was scared to ask questions even in my own team so this was kind of a problem for me. At the same time my former manager also noticed that I was getting a lot more quiet and conversations and meetings and he took me apart and he said: what’s wrong and this is not the way I know you this is not the same guy I met a couple of months ago. It was really answer just take about business intelligence and I was going into the firm talking with people asking questions learning about the subject and he asked me what is wrong? I was really honest with him I told him that I was getting quite insecure because of the people I was working with the data specialists.
He has asked why are you getting insecure about that? They have another job? They’re doing other things and what is wrong? and I told him that we were in this meeting with data specialists and also with business intelligence consultants and what happened is that most of the business intelligence consultants were getting to the same language and as the data specialist. The BI consultants were in the expertise level of the data professionals. And I told him that’s not going to work for me because I haven’t studied to be a data specialist and I am a consultant. I asked questions and stuff but I’m getting insecure now because it feels like they know a lot more about such things than me and I don’t see how I will get the same level of knowledge. He looked at me and he was really surprised about my story about what I was telling him.
And he asked me, if you aren’t asking questions? How are you going to learn about this subject? I told him, I don’t know I bet that’s the problem. I think I’m going to read a lot about it. I’m going to buy a couple of books and I am going to study into the subject a lot of a lot more. He nodded and he said well that’s that’s a possibility but if we look back at the meeting from this afternoon, what do you think about what do you feel about it? What didn’t you know about it? And I asked him if there was some kind of there was a term ‘ETL’ tooling’ and everybody seems to understand what was meant by E T L tooling and I didn’t I had no clue what ETL tooling was. And he looked at me and he said do you think everybody at the table know wat ETL tooling is? And I told him, yes off course, they are data specialists and BI consultants and they are working here for a very long time now. And I also use the term so of course they know what now what ETL tooling is.
And he nodded again and he said why don’t you test that assumption in the next meeting, because we both knew the term was going to come back because it was a real hot topic at the time. And one of the dataspecialists and one of the BI consultant were working on a new ETL tooling project so it was a subject which was always in place. I thought about it and I I was a bit confused by what he was saying because I thought these people also have lots of experience they work here for they work here for 2 years for years 4 years some of them even work there for like 8 or 9 years and I was still confused about how I was going to make a change and how I was going to enlarge my impact on this on this team and on the organization and on the way how we are going to do things better here so I thought why not I’ll give it a try and I’ll ask about it when it comes by.
A lot of time went by and we we we spoke aloud a lot about a lot of stuff and some of the stuff I was interested in and I knew something about it so I participated, but then the further the famous ETL tooling subject came again and I was getting nervous I felt it in my entire body, my palms were sweating, My breath was really in my mouth almost, and I was really nervous and I thought this is the moment that I’m going to ask something, which seems like a really stupid question because everybody at this table knows what ETL tooling is except for me. And they will probably think that I’m stupid or that I’m not taking it serious or that didn’t prepare for the meeting or something and I lot I had a lot of assumptions in a lot of fears coming up and it was in my head and it was also my body like I said before and what happened at that moment was really magical.
I graps the courage to to ask the question at the meeting, a moment of silence fell, and I asked well what is ETL tooling actually because I’m having conversations with my clients and with business unit managers and I’m talking a lot about what the value is for them in their products we are making and we are talking about a lot about ETL tooling so what is it actually? Something really magical happened, some of the people looked at me like they saw there were they were completely surprised by the question and at the same time I was sensing that some of the people at the table in the meeting so again BI consultants and data specialists didn’t knew what ETL tooling was because it was something technical and they were they were doing things with ETL tooling like everyday because they were helping each other and one of them was in a larger project project for ETL toolin replacement for the entire firm. The people looked at me and I asked again so what is it do I need to know about it and am I missing something?
Because it’s not in my vocabulary and I don’t use it in my daily work. And in the corner of my eye saw my manager and he was […] laughing and he was really trying his best not to show his laugh. And and I saw a couple of my colleagues, the BI consultants, looking away and not really answering the question. So I pointed to one of them directly and I asked so what do we do with ETL tooling? Why do I need ETL tooling. And a that moment I felt a moment of security. And I felt a moment of hey this is not strange I don’t know what you ETL tooling is but a lot of these people at the table table don’t really know what ETL tooling is so what happened is it one of the colleagues started to explain what it is but he was really insecure and he said something like ‘yeah you know we need ETL tooling because if we don’t have property ETL tooling we can’t build our reports’.
One of the data specialists answered that’s ‘some of that is true bot not entirely”not that’s something as if some of that is true but thats not what ETL tooling is. And I’m not going to bother you with the entire story about ETL tooling. If he wants to know what what ETL tooling is youcan look it up on Google. It’s nothing fancy, it’s just a term in business intelligence what they use for building there their platform on. Wat was interesting about this case is that I asked a question which was really, which seems really stupid for me. And I tought everybody knows what it is, and also again I was making a lot of assumption I thought everybody knows what it is and I don’t know what it is and I’m going to look stupid in front of all my colleagues and they will probably think of me lower than in I am and I really felt the fear controlling me and my behaviour and that moment changed what we were doing in the even made such an impact that ETL tooling wasn’t a subject anymore for the group meetings.
We had group meetings and we had specialist meetings like a meeting with only specialist like the tree or four BI Consultants together thinking about how we are going to build our strategy are we are going to do things smarter so we can serve the organization better. And we had separate meetings for the dataspecialists, which were doing the same. They were thinking about how they can make their specializacion better ETL tools and software, hardware whatever and the question I asked made such a big impact because some of them said well actually this is not a subject to talk about here we can do this separately or we can lift it out of the meeting and we will we can progress on it on another way it’s not it’s not a subject which we all need to know about because and this was also part of the answer I got you, you are not going to do anything with ETL tooling because you’re an advisor. I think your role is to to add value to the customer, the business units and that has nothing to do with ETL tooling. Because there is no choice for a business owner which ETL tooling he is going to use.
It made a very big impact and it also changed the way I looked at asking questions. At first I was really scared about asking some things I was really scared about showing my insecurities, showing that I didn’t knew everything and that it didn’t make me feel good at all. It didn’t feel felt good in my mind and also and also didn’t feel good in my body. And it has changed, the moment I just described, changed the way I was asking questions everywhere because this example happened a lot of times. I saw this a lot of times, in other meetings with other people with interesting subjects where people think or act like they know everything about the subject. But if you are if you’re going going deeper you go digging deeper into the subject you will see that not everybody’s on the same page which it which is okay.
Not everybody has to have the same information level. That’s why you have a team. That’s why you work together with other people of course but it shows that everybody has a different perspective. Everybody has a different Viewpoint and that’s what’s the value of teamwork. And I want to make a small side note because it’s not about asking dumb questions just to ask dumb question.
But the message here is to ask the things which yo are insecure about and especially if you feel that other people are also insecure about and what is going on in that moment because thats when you can have the biggest impact. That’s the moment also when you can change things for the better.
So you might recognize some of the stuff I mentioned earlier and some of the examples I mentioned but how are you going to overcome the fear of asking questions or how can you ask better questions?
Tips to ask better questions and overcoming the fears
Well i have a couple of tips for you which are, hopefully, make it a bit easier for you to ask better questions or to ask more questions.
Start small
First, start small.Start with asking questions in a controlled safe environment. Practically this means that you can look for an environment with people who are really close to you and who won’t judge you very soon. You can think of a colleague who you like or which is a mentor to you and if you tried in those kind of settings and it will allow you to learn from it, with people who won’t judge you that’s fast and will allow some room for error. This testing will allow you to see what happens if you ask certain questions. You can also ask a dumb question on purpose and see what happens and you will probably see that people are willing to help you with what’s bothering you. and will help look for an answer and this should give you the feeling that there are no dumb questions and that you can ask your questions unconditionally. so look for a safe environment and start with test questions.
Ask open questions
Try to ask open questions. And why am I saying this, you see a lot of websites on the internet and always people in and also in advosory courses. They tell you to ask open questions .
Ask open questions: what, why, when?
Instead of isn’t it like this or isn’t it like that? That’s a closed question. A closed question can only be answered by yes or no and an open question can be answered anyway. And why you should be asking open questions is because it tells a story someone wants to tell. If you just look at this example: if I ask you if this laptop is black you would probably say yes it’s black or no it’s not black. If I ever asked you what colour is this laptop you will probably say it looks something like silverish metallic but I’m not sure. It’s something like that but we can look it up.
An open question allows you to pick someone’s mind!
Priyesh Ramman
What happens is that an open question allows you to pick someone’s mind and it is it allows room for someone someone’s experience instead of a close questions which will be be answered with a yes or no. And you will get trapped by the information which you are not getting this because you’re only getting yes or no. And what you want is room for someone interpretation so a story, the room to tell something which is taught by someone and which will probably give you more information on a couple levels. More information about the question you’re asking. But it will perhaps also give you other thoughts of the person with which could be really valuable.
Ask the obvious
Number three is to ask the obvious. it’s possible to ask questions when you think that is very it’s very obvious, but you have to be careful with those because it’s not about asking the obvious or asking dumb questions because they’re dumb questions. It’s about feeling that at that particular moment in probably in meetings or somewhere else and that not everybody’s on the same page.
what you’ll see happening a lot, people rattling, and rattling and think that everybody’s on the same page but that can be a trigger for you to ask a question, a check question to see if everybody’s on the same page. An example of such a question is when someone in a meeting is rattling about that we’re going to have a we’re going to finish this project Thursday, and you see some people looking at you, you see a confused look on some people’s faces then they are like okay or whatever and you are not quite sure if it’s this Thursday or Thursday May in 2025 or which Thursday. There are a lot of Thursday so if you see this confusion you can feel that not everybody is on the same page. This will allow you to ask the question in to get more clarity for everybody you will also see that often when you ask a question which is quite obvious you will you will see a lot of people nod.
Because they also didn’t know the answer to the question but they were probably not secure enough to ask the question. They probably thought ‘oh it’s obvious.’ or they ask it after the meeting to John. It really show some sense of Courage if you’re able to ask questions which state the obvious.
Try to ask questions on other levels
The last tip which I have for you is that you can also ask questions not only about the contents but also about other teams things. If you are stuck in content and you can’t can add value on the content level which is a genuine possibility. Then you can also ask questions about other levels. If you look at it the effective conversations cheat sheet which you get when you subscribe subscribe for my email list, you’ll see different levels of communication and content is one of them but a more deeper level of communication can also be about a process like how are how are we going to do this
Who do we need and when does it need to be finished and even deeper. About relationships and about people and about emotions. You might imagine a conversation and you see his eyebrows up and his mouth crawling. What you can do is ask question about house how someone is feeling on that particular moment. You ask something you see someone thinking very hard and you can have something like hey I see that you are frowning and why is that is is this okay with you, but how do you feel about my proposal. And this is a really powerful weapon and I’m considering to make a separate episode about it and if you feel something about that subject let me know and I’ll definitely make a new podcast episode about this.
Experiment and try!
With content, with processes with emotions. Just with everything in life start small, test in a particular setting, and then build it from there and you will see that if you get over this fear it will be easier to ask questions and with time you will you will be able to ask better questions and better questions and better questions. Which it will change the way your career will go but will also change the way people will see you.
Well actually that was it for today guys and girls. As always if you haven’t subscribed for the your trainee program podcast please subscribe for the podcast and get it the conversations cheat sheets for free!
and I would like to hear your thoughts about asking questions what are your best tips about asking questions how are you progressing.
State it in the comments, and I hope to hear you another day,
bye!
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