As a consultant, you are tasked with many different types of projects. Flexibility becomes a term that is familiar and comforting as it is beneficial to you and your clients. So often, you partner with a client’s project team yet carry out different aspects of your work with others throughout the institution. As a result, you have to get creative in how you ensure understanding is clear across all project parties and that you fully comprehend what others understand about the project. This can get confusing because oftentimes in consulting, projects are focused on achieving specific results and that always involves some type of change. It could be the selection or implementation of new technology or software. It could be an organizational restructure or possibly an initiative to review processes and provide recommended modifications for improvement. The possibilities for different projects are endless as each organization and/or client has unique needs. Thus, flexibility is essential.
When thinking about change, many things come to mind. First and foremost, change is difficult. Change is sticky and overwhelming at times. At the same time, change is exciting. Change can mean innovation and new thinking and action. So, as consultants, how do we approach mediating the negative or positive impacts of change? How do we help “lessen the blow” when critical, complex changes are needed? How do we help prepare and motivate clients for exciting, empowering innovation? At Transforming Solutions (TSI), we strive to make the process of change as easy as possible for our clients. We continually check in with our clients to ensure we are aligned and in step with their culture and organizational needs. We also continually check in with ourselves to assess our transparency, clarity, and effectiveness in our communication. We require flexibility at every turn and an evaluation loop surrounding all facets of our work. Change permeates all levels of an organization, however great or small.
To navigate change and monitor the experience of clients during our projects, we strategically and tactically use questioning as an integral tool. Much like chatting with a teenager, without properly crafted questions, you may receive minimal information from the response given. Questions are dynamic and strategic. Questions glean insight and answers. Questions assist the assessment of culture, values, norms, emotions, and reactions. Questions help balance challenge with opportunity. When distilling it down, TSI uses questions for four main purposes: Listening, Learning, Lending, and Leading.
Questioning to Listen
Listening may seem like an obvious characteristic of any profession. In consulting, listening is imperative for many reasons. As a client-centered profession, it is our job to objectively understand the needs of the client. We must craft questions to stimulate the cycle of collecting information. As a colleague expressed, asking an effective question is “like throwing a strike right down the middle of home plate.” We strive to ask questions that will yield important information or insights and extract what is needed for the project. Refining how we question will enhance the quality of responses we receive to reinforce understanding and illuminate further areas of inquiry, gaps, or blind spots that require more questioning for clarification. Asking the right questions will help stimulate actions and reactions to help gauge where to challenge more, where to be more sensitive, or where to shift direction. Asking questions to draw out information allows us to best situate project objectives within the organizational environment as well as build relationships with clients to support successful project objectives. Therefore, we ask questions that yield opportunities for intentional listening.
Questioning to Learn
In order for action to take place, you have to gather and understand information as a foundation to implement plans, ideas, or assessments. When working with diverse groups of people, we must ask the right questions to engage all parties and engage multiple perspectives and voices. Our job is to learn as much as we can about the project, the organizational context, the expectations, and involvement of clients and stakeholders within the project and organization. By strategically crafting and asking the right questions, learning ensues; learning about people, culture, organizational structures, challenges, needs, strategies, successes, personnel functions, anxieties, hopes, etc. Questioning to learn is a cyclical process of questioning, learning, taking action, questioning more, learning more, taking more action.
Questioning to Lend
Borrowing from Jerry McGuire, “Help me, help you!”, questioning to lend affords a strategic opportunity to best navigate what clients need. Often in challenging situations, we don’t know what we don’t know. We aren’t always sure what it is we need even when we know there is a dire need. By strategically asking questions, we can highlight needs or areas where we may be able to help. We use questioning as a technique to lend expertise, talents, networks, technology, ideas, tools, or support.
Questioning to Lead
The experience that consultants can bring to projects yields an opportunity to provide leadership. Organizations are often tasked beyond their capacity to complete needed work towards change, function within highly politicized environments, or need an expert to fill a particular void or complete a team. We use questions to help lead actions and direct strategy. Questions support actions and glean any reactions to those actions. Questions help maintain the pulse on emotional, cultural, or organizational responses to help develop appropriate guidance or strategy. A consultant’s success reflects the success of the organization with which they work. It is essential to use questions to ensure success, action, innovation, and quality.
With all of these questions, you may ask, “How do you know what questions to ask?” or “How do you not get overwhelmed within the sea of questions?” The answer is…passion for what we do. We thrive on communication and finding solutions. We use questions as a tool for communication and a method to increase the capacity of dialogue. Questions help us get to know our clients and learn from context. Ultimately, we have fun with our clients and aren’t satisfied until they succeed. The art of questioning helps make this success a reality! We do not always have the answer immediately, but rest assured- we will keep asking questions until we do.
In our continual engagement with best practices and learning, we would love to hear from you!
- What strategies do you use to optimize questioning?
- What types of questions do you ask in your work?
- What techniques do you use to invite rich conversation and dialogue?
