Ask, Don’t Tell

  Career Development   Communications Management   New Practitioners   ProjectsAtWork  

Are you a good questioner? It’s a good question to ask yourself. You can’t always have all the right answers, but the right questions can transform your working relationships and help you focus on what’s meaningful to clients, partners, stakeholders and teams members. Here are nine ways that questions help us as project leaders.

The old-fashioned “trusted relationship” in business has started to look good again. In this post-Madoff era of unpredictability and suspicion, people are looking for deeper, more intimate, and more engaged relationships — the kind that reduce risk.

This is true of project clients, stakeholders and team members, too. When times are tough and the future is uncertain, people want to put down roots and partner with people they truly like and trust.

Bottom line: In today’s projects, the most valuable commodity is the ability to connect with others and rapidly build trust. And that begins by asking the right questions.

Asking questions and letting people come up with their own answers is far more effective than spouting facts or trying to talk someone into something. Telling creates resistance. Asking creates relationships.

Here are nine ways questions can transform your professional relationships:

1. Use questions to turn arms-length business relationships into enduring personal connections. When a …

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