Deb Calvert doesn’t believe the axiom that “there’s no such thing as a bad question.” While good questions can yield targeted solutions, a poorly framed one can alienate customers or employees indefinitely, she said. “When somebody is asked a question that’s a little bit off-putting or puts them on the defensive, they back up,” she explained. “They literally put distance between themselves and the other person.” It’s so important for a sales floor employee aiming to secure a sale, a small business owner interviewing job candidates and others to consider the questions they’re asking carefully.

Calvert, author of DISCOVER Questions for Connections, Clarity & Control and president of People First Productivity Solutions, talked with ICSC Small Business contributing editor Rebecca Meiser about the power of asking the right questions, unpacked the factors that make up a good question and offered helpful questions to drive success.

Why is it so important for small business owners to ask good questions?

For any business owner who wants to be efficient rather than doing guesswork or making assumptions, questions will get you there a lot faster. Asking questions dignifies the customer and gives them that voice that helps to increase their buy-in and make sure you are their vendor of choice. That’s where you get the good word of mouth: because they have a great experience.

Can bad questions really affect business outcomes?

Yes. Not just my opinion but research bears that there are bad questions. When somebody is asked a question that’s a little bit off-putting or puts them on the defensive, they back up. They literally put distance between themselves and the other person. That’s the opposite of what we want. We want to make people lean in. We want to have a bond. We want to have a connection. If you read the physical signs, you’ll know which questions are bringing you together with your customers and which ones are creating distance.

Can you give an example of a bad question from a small business owner might be?

Try to avoid the throwaway question. People are busy. It’s interesting to me as a researcher how often I’m now hearing negative responses to strangers asking: “How are you today?” Everybody says it, but nobody really answers it and nobody really listens to the answer, either. It’s truly a throwaway placeholder, a social nicety that really isn’t so nice anymore.

What would you say instead?

If we’re having bad weather, you could ask: “How were the roads on your way here today?” or “What brings you in today?” Or maybe it’s a comment that precedes a question like: “I don’t know about you, but I’m having a tough Monday. What’s your Monday looking like?”

Anything else to avoid?

A shame-or-blame question. Say someone has taken a lot of your time and they’ve gone way down the road with you and you’re upset because it looks like they’re going to walk away. Maybe it’s tempting to say something that causes them to feel a little bit bad. If you’re an insurance salesperson, for example, you might be tempted to say: “Becky, what would it mean to your family if suddenly you were gone?” These are questions that are manipulative, and people recognize them for exactly what they are. If there’s something that needs to be spotlighted that’s negative, don’t do it in the form of a question because that has that feeling of being manipulative or backing someone into a corner. Questions are wonderful tools for communication and bonding, but they’re not meant to replace statements of how you’re feeling. Better to be forthright and say instead what it is you’re actually feeling in that moment, like: “Oh, I’m disappointed. We spent a lot of time on this.”

What makes for a good question? Are there certain qualities of a good question?

For one thing, good questions are singular. There are some bad habits out there about compound questions. They mostly happen because we don’t think before we ask. We ask a question, somebody’s thinking and doesn’t answer right away, we take it as confusion [and] we pop out another question, which takes them in a different direction and scrambles their brain just for an instant. Then, typically, we get an answer to the second question. The first one, which might have been the better one, vaporizes into thin air. So one question at a time. If you don’t like the question that you asked, at least pause long enough to see what comes from it. You can still ask your follow-up a few seconds down the road.

Good questions are also purposeful. They’re backed up by a little forethought: What do I really want to know? Then you won’t have wild fishing expeditions. You won’t have sloppy wording and compound questions. You’ll just have exactly what you were thinking, phrased in a way that’s intelligible. Because people are busy, because they sometimes in a selling situation feel like questions are going to ensnare them, a statement of intent is something to [think] about. A statement of intent is a short, simple sentence like: “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions because I want to understand your situation better,” or “I’d like to make sure I’m fully understanding you before trying to solve this problem for you.” This buys time, and it brings people into the conversation differently than the questions might be received if you started launching them without the preface.

One more: easy to understand. This is especially true for people who are running a business. They don’t need to confuse customers. They don’t need to confuse themselves. They just need to put it out there in ways that make it easy to understand so it’s easy for customers to say and describe what they want.

Is there a best way to get answers? Say you’re trying to make sure your inventory is right or your customer service is great. Should you do surveys or in-person questions?

It depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to talk to a lot of people and you do have very simple, straightforward questions, then absolutely, surveys are a great way to go. We’ve all gotten used to surveys, and most people have a fair tolerance for them, especially if there’s a perceived benefit. But when it comes to anything with a little more depth — and this applies for employees, too — it’s helpful to do face-to-face questions. That way they can tell you’re really listening with true intent to hear, to understand and potentially make a change. None of us get this often enough, not even in our personal lives, and people like it. We researched buyers for 20 years and that’s what people said: When someone asks them a genuine question, they’re grateful. It’s a gift.

So listening is just as important.

The best question in the world is worthless if you’re not listening well to the answer.

When some people conduct surveys, they ask questions that reinforce what they already think. How do you make sure that’s not what you’re doing?

You’re talking about confirmation bias, a very common unconscious bias that causes us to hear what we want to hear, to have fast thinking interrupt true information exchange, to phrase our questions and selectively hear what confirms what we already believe or wish. That echo chamber keeps us from success in just about every aspect of life, certainly in business. Being able to ask yourself questions is the skill that helps you to recognize those unconscious biases and then to check yourself.

What should you ask yourself before sending a survey to customers?

Why am I asking this question this way? And if your honest answer to yourself is I want to get survey results that prove gold and purple are the best display colors that we could possibly ever use, well, you slanted the question. Your own motivation is driving something here.

If you want your employees to interact with customers, are there certain questions you recommend them asking?

It’s a bad idea to give people a list of too many questions. You [might] say to your employees: “We want to know these five things from everybody who walks in the door: Will they become a member of our club? Is there anything else you need today? …” If you have certain canned questions and you expect everyone to get through all five of them, they might not truly listen. That might not allow freedom for anything else because they’ve crowded the conversation. Better to tell people: “These are the objectives. Did you accomplish these two things with every customer today?”

I like that. I’ve heard you say that when talking about a situation that happened in the past, “why” is one of the worst words you can start with. Why Is that?

This is a narrow caution. It’s not that the word “why” is always bad, but when it comes to a decision that someone has made, the word “why” triggers defensiveness. If you say: “Why did you do that?” the word “why” makes them personally feel questioned, as opposed to the decision that they made.

What would you ask instead: Say you saw an employee being rude to a customer. What would you say later when addressing the situation with the employee?

Think about what you want. You want to understand [the decision], but you also want the other person to understand it. It starts with a command statement like: “All right, I observed this. Walk me through your thought process as you were conducting that conversation.” That way, you’re promoting awareness for all of us and breaking it down. It’s a neutral question. It’s not going to put somebody on the defensive right away. And because they took time to think it through, they have options for next time and you have options to figure out what was missing. What did they need? What training, what coaching?

On a different note: Hiring and retaining employees is so hard for small businesses right now. Are there good questions you should ask during an interview to suss out who will make a good employee?

Behavioral interviewing is one of the best strategies for really knowing who you’re hiring and understanding what that person’s traits are. You want to ask about past situations. It doesn’t even have to be in a workplace. How did they respond or behave in that situation? You want to get to an understanding of how they define great customer service because past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. Ask questions during the interview that get them to reveal real scenarios, real stories that help you to get to know their responses.