Using the power of questions to level up your conversations

If you use conversations to do a large part of your job (for example, managers, consultants, and coaches), this workshop is for you.

In a previous session, we collaboratively developed a document about engagement and its elements.

One of the things we all agreed on is that engaging conversations happen when you approach them from a place of curiosity. Rather than knowing what the person sitting across from you wants, your job is to find out what the person sitting across from you wants. It may end up being what you thought, or not quite – the point is to assume nothing, and get them to contribute to the “pool of shared meaning” as much as possible.

In a dialog, questions lay the ground-work for learning, problem-solving, and rapport-building. A recent survey showed a robust and consistent relationship between question-asking and liking, as a case in point. That means that most of the time, it’s much better to be interested than interesting.

In this session, we will get very tactical and discuss:

• What question can you use to focus a conversation when it feels scattered or overwhelming?
• What question can you use to expand a conversation when it feels constricted?
• What question can you use when you get that itching feeling that there’s something here you’re missing, or you don’t quite understand?

The aim: by having these three questions in your tool belt, you ask more and give advice less.

Speaker

Parham Doustdar is a completely blind team lead at Booking.com that relies on the power of conversations to manage his people. By night, he uses the power of 1:1 conversations to coach new managers to dream bigger than they have ever dreamed, and then to make them real.