When he was on the campaign trail before becoming President of the United States, Barack Obama was quoted as saying, “Leaders don’t need the answers. They just need to know what questions to ask.”

However, I notice that asking effective questions is one of the biggest challenges facing many people managers. We are conditioned by a long history of telling and being told. For people managers, it often seems easier and faster to tell people what they should do, rather than seek their ideas.

From an employee perspective, the expectation of being told what to do by our people managers is ingrained in us. Even where there are benefits to being asked, as opposed to being offered solutions. Benefits include people learning to think for themselves, greater awareness of what enhances performance, stronger buy-in to the decisions that are made, improved learning, a greater sense of responsibility, and enhanced self-belief.

Apart from developing a higher level of employee motivation and commitment to the job, there are a couple of other benefits to people managers for asking questions rather than telling people what to do.

Firstly, you probably don’t have all the answers. Frequently your people will know their job better than you do. So by asking questions you also tap into their expertise rather than solely rely on your own. Secondly, they will frequently already know what to do. They don’t need to be told, they need to be motivated. And if they don’t know why they should do something, or how to do it, good questioning will uncover that.

So, to help you improve your questioning, here are some tips:

Ask one question at a time.
Inexperienced and unconfident questioners often fall into the trap of asking several questions all at once. For example, “Bronwyn, I was wondering what issues customers have been raising lately? I mean, why are so many customer complaints being escalated to you? Is there a problem with some of your people, or is the new policy we put in place last week having a negative impact?”

Which of the four questions is Bronwyn supposed to answer? This bombardment of questions usually happens when the questioner hasn’t thought through what they’re trying to uncover. A little thought is likely to have Bronwyn’s manager realise that what she wanted to know was the effect of the new policy. In that case, the question could have been more effectively shortened to, “Bronwyn, what customer reactions have you heard regarding the new policy we put in place last week?” This is a straightforward, unbiased question that Bronwyn could feel comfortable answering.

Pause at the end of a question.
Make the pause long enough for the person being asked the question to think, construct and deliver their answer.

Silence is often overlooked as a people management tool. When it comes to asking questions, developing the skill of staying quiet is essential. If you fail to stay quiet, it means that you’re unlikely to get an answer, or you won’t get a good answer, or you won’t get the real answer.

Staying silent after asking a question involves more than not talking. It means maintaining eye contact, staying still, and feeling comfortable while you wait. This takes practice. A pause of 10 seconds might feel a long time if you’ve asked the question, but a short time if you’re preparing an answer. Pay attention to your own pauses after asking a question, and your own comfort with silence in any situation.

Use more open questions than closed questions
In broad terms there are two main types of questions – open and closed.

A closed question can be answered by using a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or by providing a simple piece of information. On the other hand, an open question gives the person answering it much more opportunity to provide information they feel is relevant. It can, to some extent, force a person to provide more information than they would have otherwise.

Closed questions often start with ‘can’, ‘do’ or ‘will’. Open questions start with ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘when’, ‘how’, and ‘tell me’.

Open questions create much more space, opportunity and incentive for people to talk. Even though people will generally volunteer more information than asked for from a closed question, their response is typically less than if the same question had been rephrased as an open question.

Having worked with thousands of people managers in the past decade, I can tell you this. The majority unthinkingly favour asking closed questions, and often struggle to ask effective open questions.

For example, many people managers might ask, “So, can you see why it is important to get your weekly report in on time?” rather than the more effective, “Why is it important to get your weekly report in on time?”

Or, they might ask, “Can you tell me what you’re going to do to ensure that this problem gets solved?” rather than the more effective, “Tell me what you’re going to do to solve this problem.”

The difference between the questions appears subtle, but the difference in the answers between the two types of questions is frequently dramatic. Closed questions tend to close the response down. Open questions tend to open the response up.

Ask follow-up questions
Follow-up questions distinguish a good interviewer from an average one. No doubt you’ve experienced the frustration of watching an interviewer ask a question, get an answer that almost demands clarification, and then, rather than asking a follow-up question, simply move to the next question on their list. This failure to ask follow-up questions to dig a bit deeper sends the message that you’re not serious or interested.

There is one drawback to asking follow-up questions. Use too many of them and it starts to sound and feel like an interrogation. To help you avoid this pitfall, you can encourage clarification of points made in an answer by using verbal encouragers. You probably use them already during interesting conversations – “A ha”, “What else happened?”, “Tell me more”. Although some of these are questions, they are delivered without the upward inflection that is the verbal equivalent of a question mark. They are instead delivered with a flat end as a statement, and they encourage further dialogue.

You’ll find that by consistently practising the four behaviours of asking one question at a time, pausing at the end of a question, using more open questions than closed questions, and asking follow-up questions will help you to become a more effective questioner, and a more effective people manager.