There’s an old sales adage: the person who asks the questions controls the agenda. 

How well do you ask questions? Even though salespeople are very deliberate and strategic in their question-asking, most managers and leaders don’t think about this issue. After all, you don’t usually find “the ability to ask good questions” on any list of managerial competencies, but asking questions effectively is a major underlying part of a manager’s job, which suggests that it might be worth giving this skill a little more focus.

Dan Black, in On Leadership , states that “Having and maintaining relationships is essential when it comes to leadership. One essential aspect to learning about, connecting with, and relating to the people in your life comes through the art of asking good questions.” This is an essential ingredient to becoming a relational leader.  

Two basic question-asking principles can be valuable tools for a leader: open-ended questions and clarifying questions.

1. Open-ended questions can lead to a better discussion and a deeper level of conversation. This is because they require more than a yes or no response. One example is: “What is your most pressing business challenge in taking on this project?” This question type keeps a conversation alive and flowing.

2. Clarifying questions show engagement and bring clarification to what the other person is saying. Some examples: “Can you be more specific?” or “Can you share an example?” An interesting consequence to asking a clarification question is that it spawns successive questions.

Socrates observed that you can tell how clever a person is by their answers, but you can tell how wise a person is by their questions. Most of us never think about how to frame our questions, but doing so not only improves a one’s inquiry skills, it can, as our sales adage reminds, help us gain something strategically. 

There once were two monks who lived an uncomplicated life of peace and devotion at the monastery. Both were exemplary individuals, but each also had one vice, that of cigarette-smoking. Smoking was a privilege rarely granted by the Monsignor, and permission had to be granted.

One day, both monks had an insatiable desire to smoke, so they each separately approached the monsignor to ask permission to smoke. One monk returned shortly with an anger he could barely control, saying the monsignor had denied him the opportunity to light up. The other monk returned to their dorm and immediately lit a cigarette.

The denied monk was furious. “How did you get to smoke and I didn’t?” he queried. “I asked if I could smoke while I prayed in the chapel–I was flatly denied; what in providence did you ask?” The other monk smugly answered, “I merely asked the Monsignor if it would be all right if I continued to pray while I smoked!”

The art of asking good questions is essential in learning about, connecting with, and relating to the people in your life where relationships matter.

In the mid-1950’s, a Hungarian endocrinologist, Dr. Hans Selye, wrote a seminal book called The Stress of Life, in which he conceptualized the physiology of stress. One of the many findings that intrigued him involved individual differences in the reaction to, and coping adaptations to stressors. In one of his anecdotes, he relates the story of twin sons who grew up with a raging alcoholic father — one son was also a chronic alcoholic, but the other twin was a complete tee-totaler. He asked both sons a question, “Why did you turn out the way you did?” They both gave a virtually identical answer, “With an old man like that, what do you expect!”

His exemplary case illustrates the importance of “explanatory style” with respect to dealing with both positive and negative events in our lives. In order for an event or situation to be stressful, it must be appraised as such. 

Viktor Frankl, Nazi concentration camp survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, observed a critical relationship in survivor rates in the death camps. At one camp, the guard would inform entering prisoners that they would never leave the compound alive. According to Frankl, those who bought into this belief died soon after.

Among those who were not killed, those inmates who rejected their captor’s ominous prediction of death and defeat and who believed that this horror would one day pass, survived this unbelievable ordeal. However, the moment the prisoner lost hope, according to Frankl, was the day that they did not rise out of their bunk bed — and this was the day of their death.

One of the most predictive variables of resiliency is one’s thinking style — how one explains adversity, especially as that relates to explanations of optimism vs. pessimism. As the cliché goes, the optimist sees the glass as half full, the pessimist sees it as half empty. 

Study after study have shown that an optimistic approach to most of life’s challenges results in the most positive adaptations. Optimistic salespeople outsell pessimistic salespeople; optimistic managers outperform pessimistic managers, optimistic students make higher grades than pessimistic students, optimistic sports teams have better records than pessimistic teams, and longitudinal studies have shown that optimistic people even outlive pessimistic people!

We’ve recently survived a tumultuous political election, re-grouped after Hurricane Sandy, mourned the loss of innocent school children in the middle of holiday celebrations, were spared the Mayan apocalypse, faced the fiscal cliff, and mercifully saw the series finale of Jersey Shore. 

In the mid-1990’s, I had the sad privilege of working with a crisis response team that responded to the Oklahoma City bombing tragedy. One of the best-known survivors was a young woman named Daina Bradley. That fateful April 19th, she and her mother, sister and her two young children were in the Federal building getting a social security card for her 4 month old son when the bomb went off. Floor after floor collapsed, pancaking down to the basement, eventually creating a body-crunching coffin in which Daina waited in the midst of moaning, crying, and pitch-black darkness.

When doctors finally reached her, they freed her arm but could not free her crushed leg that was pinned under a massive slab of concrete. With several scalpels, a surgeon took 10 minutes to amputate her leg. After her traumatic rescue, Daina learned that her mother and her two children were dead; her sister, Felysha, was recuperating at a nearby rehab hospital. 

As she left the hospital, she paused on the hospital steps as some of the press corps asked her questions. One reporter asked her what she had learned from this tragedy. She replied, “Never take your parents or anything for granted; treat everything you have like precious china, because someday it will be gone.” So here’s to a new year, a new beginning, and renewed optimism and perspective about what’s important in life.  

Gone are the days when all job seekers had to worry about were their résumés and cover letters. Today, those documents still remain a staple of the job search process, but they are joined by a significant and growing pre-screening phenomenon: reviewing an applicant’s social-networking websites (SNW). Some job seekers are even being asked for their Facebook passwords during or right after an initial interview. Even Terror outfits are using Facebook as a recruitment tool to recruit loners from Western nations to their cause, claims a leading counter-terrorism expert.

Employers are increasingly turning to Facebook and other social-networking sites to pre-screen new hires because it may be a fairly accurate reflection of how good they’ll be at the target job, according to a study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology last month.

Researchers hired HR types to rate hundreds of college students’ Facebook pages using questions that reflected Big Five personality characteristics (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience). The researchers asked HR professionals to rate the Facebook profiles to predict how well the students would fare as employees.

Six months later, the researchers followed up by contacting the current employers of the people whose profiles had been rated. They found a strong correlation between the predictions made by the Facebook raters and the actual performances as rated by the employers.

Furthermore, the psychometric properties of the study were fairly decent:

• First, SNW ratings demonstrated sufficient inter-rater reliability and internal consistency.
• Second, ratings via SNWs demonstrated convergent validity with self-ratings of the Big Five characteristics.
• Third, SNW ratings correlated with job performance, hirability, and academic performance criteria and the magnitude of these correlations was generally larger than for self-ratings.
• Finally, SNW ratings accounted for significant variance in the criterion measures beyond self-ratings of personality and cognitive ability.

In this virtual day and age, it is critically important to remember that what you put online, even if it’s a mistake, may not be reversible and may not go away. The red flags for most employers seem to be drugs, drinking, badmouthing former employers, and lying about one’s credentials or qualifications. Yet, Facebook profiles usually contain a wealth of information that employers are prohibited, under federal, state and local laws, from using in discriminatory ways. Photos and posts can reveal race, gender, age, national origin, disability, even sexual orientation.

Key takeaway? Your online presence may be used as an initial screening interview about your personality or your reputation—be circumspect about what you post and get onto that privacy policy page and limit who can see what about you. In Othello, Shakespeare’s Iago may have had it pegged: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving . . . ”

Jerry Seinfeld once remarked that “the only difference between a job interview and a blind date is that there is a slightly higher chance you’ll be naked at the end of the date – otherwise, they’re not that much different.” Indeed, both share a lot in common; two strangers meeting for the first time, trying to figure each other out, trying to see beyond the facade and evaluate the person.

One of my Hogan colleagues just shared an interesting survey of nearly 7,000 organizations in Canada concerning their use of various selection practices. Of the organizations surveyed, 79% use interviews, 10% use a job knowledge test, and only 9% use a personality assessment.

Yet, the traditional job interview is tainted by a number of factors:

•    Questions Used – logically, the nature of the questions asked is critical to the reliability and validity of the interview (using job-related, structured interview questions doubles validity).
•    Applicant Characteristics – the effect of the interviewer’s personal liking of the applicant has consistently been found to be related to interviewers’ evaluations. (“Wow, he reminds me of Uncle Billy.”) Again, it has been shown that this similar-to-me effect is much less pronounced when the interview is structured and job requirements are clear.
•    Nonverbal Behaviors – most studies have concluded that nonverbal cues are, in fact, related to evaluations. Eye contact, head movement, smiling, hand movement, and general body posture (rigidity versus movement) are cues that are related to favorable interview decisions.
•    Verbal Facility – articulate and verbally-capable individuals can create strong positive impressions, leading to what communications experts call the “halo effect.” Poor or inconsistent articulation can lead to negative summations; just witness the latest debate gaffes, flubs, and lapses of memory from our current crop of presidential wannabes.  
•    Weighting Information – it has been found that more weight is given to negative information over positive information in the interviewer’s decision, even for experienced interviewers.

One of the big disadvantages of using a typical employment interview is that the interviewees are not given the chance to demonstrate the job-related skills he or she may possess. There is a glaring exception; if the interview context places the interviewee in a situation that mimics the job-related setting, then it is possible to evaluate the interviewee’s ability to handle this kind of job. This can give the interviewer a better idea of whether or not the applicant can truly perform the job.

Up until 1945, National League baseball played with an ugly, unwritten rule of membership: no Black baseball players allowed. That was until Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, interviewed the great Jackie Robinson for the opportunity to be the first baseball player to break the color barrier in baseball. Rickey closely scrutinized Robinson during their first interview and solemnly warned him of the abuse, ridicule, and scorn he would receive from fans, sportswriters, and even fellow players. If he were not able to take the abuse and insults by not fighting back, then he would fail and set integration of baseball back twenty years.

Robinson listened calmly and pondered Rickey’s verbal picture of what life would be like for this pioneering role. Then for five minutes Robinson sat absolutely silent; Robinson thought while Rickey waited. He finally responded that he had full confidence in his ability to play in the National League without incident. Rickey hired him. Rickey was very impressed with Robinson’s silent control, his obvious ability in demonstrating he would not be provoked.

So whether you’re preparing for a job interview or blind date, you might heed some advice from Henry Kissinger, who once opened a press conference with this famous line, “I hope you have questions for the answers that I’ve prepared today!”

The political season is upon us again and we are being presented with the latest episodes of SYTYCD—So You Think You Can Debate.

A recent study from Harvard offers the following research-based advice: If you’re stumped by a question in an interview, fake it. You’ll have a better chance of making a good impression if you respond eloquently and slightly irrelevantly than if you answer truthfully but with a dozen “uhs” and “ums” thrown in, according to the study.

Subjects were shown different videos of a political debate. In the first, one of the candidates answered the question asked. In the second, he dodged it by answering a similar question. In the third, he dodged it by answering a completely different one. When the candidate answered a similar question, subjects failed to notice the switch. They also liked him better if he answered a similar question well than if he answered the actual one less eloquently.

People who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish. The take-home message for job candidates is that interviewers may not remember if you avoid a question, as long as you do it eloquently. As many high-school debate champions know well, people treasure style over substance, and will be inclined to trust you more if you come off looking like you know what you’re talking about, even if you don’t.

HR people look for that sense of collectedness; being able to gracefully answer any question that’s put to you, even if you are not completely sure of the answer, will help convince them of your poise.

Robert McNamara famously said, “Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked.” It’s important to recognize the transition devices. The first 10 words of an answer are key to creating an artful dodge. You’ll hear phrases like “That’s a good question” or “I’m glad you asked that.” This seems to help prime the listener to accept what comes next as relevant.

Many politicians seemed to have mastered this skill. Hillary Clinton was phenomenal at dodging questions. Our current President is deft at sidestepping. And looking back, Ronald Reagan was a master dodger, too. Sarah Palin has a unique approach. She is sort of intellectually honest about dodging questions. She basically states her intention to answer a different question than the one asked.

This verbal judo is not confined to political discourse. It applies to business as well. Think about the leader fielding tough questions about layoffs. Or George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air. He flies around the country firing people. They say things to him like “How can you fire me?” and he doesn’t answer them. He dodges. He says, “This is an opportunity for you.”

Years ago when I was obtaining my license to practice psychology, I was supervised by the first licensed psychologist in Georgia. Hermon was 98 when I met him and he died at 104. He was unbelievably bright, wise, energetic, and embodied a wonderful southern gentility and charm. We interviewed and assessed thousands of job candidates for our clients. In full sight, Hermon had an interesting plaque on his desk that said, “Think Twice Before You Say Nothing.” You could see just about every interviewee pause as they pondered this instructive yet enigmatic message.

I hope I hear straight answers to the debate questions coming up over the next few months. And I hope I’m not impressed by the artful dodger.

Three unrelated events have transpired over the last few weeks that have inspired me to share a message with you that you know all too well: translating meaning from one language to another language (accurately) is very tricky business. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton learned that lesson the hard way when she presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a gift bearing an incorrect translation—one that implied hostility, rather than peacemaking. Clinton presented Lavrov with a orange button which said “Reset” in English and “Peregruzka” in Russian. The problem was, “peregruzka” doesn’t mean reset. It means overcharged, or overloaded. Lavrov called her out on it.

Now, the three unrelated events . . .
Event 1: My oldest son, Elliot, has just returned from a three month assignment in South Korea, teaching elementary school students American English. Though he spoke no Korean at the outset, his total immersion in Korean culture and living with his Korean host “family” forced him to become functionally conversational in Korean in just three months. Though his comprehension is rudimentary, he came to appreciate how translations from one language to another captures part of what was intended, but adds some pretty different subtleties as well. In assisting his students with their school newspaper with a cartoon storyline, he used a caption, “I played a joke on you.” But their translation was, “Ha ha, you have deceived me.” Close, but different.

Event 2: Barbara Billingsley, iconic mother in the old Leave It To Beaver TV series, just died at the age of 94. She played June Cleaver, an idealized mother of two boys whom she loved and protected, was often shown waiting for them to come home from school wearing an apron and holding a plate of freshly baked cookies. She even did household chores wearing pearls and earrings! Forever typecast, Billingsley spoofed her wholesome image with a very funny brief appearance in the comedy Airplane! by volunteering as a person who could speak “jive” in order to assist a physically ill African American passenger whom the flight attendant really didn’t understand.

Event 3: In my most recent Hogan certification workshop, I had a very lively participant from Montreal ask if the Hogan assessment tools were available in French, her primary language. Though she spoke with a thick French patois, her English was very good and articulate, but still, she wondered if she might have scored differently if she had taken the assessments in her native tongue. I told her that we have test translations in upwards of 40 languages, including French. She offered a quick, illustrative example—one of the questions asked her if she viewed herself as a “witty” person. After the testing, she asked her husband, “am I a witty person?” “What is this witty?”

Transferring an assessment instrument to a different culture and language is challenging and must be handled with accuracy and deep cultural understanding. When we (Hogan) have studied cultural differences in testing outcomes, though there are some differences, most are due to two things: sampling error and translation challenges.

Often, you cannot do a simple “forward translation” (word-for-word); when you then verify with a “backward translation,” the content can take on a bizarre Borat-like expression. We use a translation process called Adaptation—altering the translation content so that the meaning is the same in both cultures, even if the words differ. This requires a fully fluent translator who understands both the original culture (e.g., American culture) and the target culture (e.g., Chinese culture). We use fully fluent and bi-cultural translators with psychological training and backgrounds to translate the original test items into the target language. They have to understand both cultures so they can understand the meaning in US culture and adapt as appropriate for the target culture. They also need to be psychologists so they have an understanding of item construction and do not take translation liberties that harm the psychometric properties of the assessment items.

My son continues to study Korean for a return trip next year. I leave you with a Czech saying, “learn a new language and gain a new soul.”