Asking great questions in your client interviews
As a management consultant, conducting stakeholder interviews is a crucial part of your work. We share three key tips on how to ask great stakeholder interview questions so you can uncover greater insights for your clients.
How do I ask truly great questions to client stakeholders? Is a question that every consultant has had at some point.
Questions are seen as the lifeblood of the stakeholder interviews. But that doesn’t mean they’re easy to craft.
Here's a few tips from my experience on how to ask truly great questions.
Follow a structure for each topic.
Before every interview, we know exactly how it’s going to pan out - in theory. Then reality kicks in. Stakeholders go off on all sorts of tangents, topics blur from one into the next without you necessarily getting what you need from each. That great plan you had for what to ask in what order goes straight out the window.
One way to avoid this and bring control to your interviews is to use a simple structure of questions for each topic you want to cover. We’ve coined it O(pen), D(ig), C(larify and move on). And yes - the world needs more acronyms ok!
We’ve all been taught about open questions and clarifying - but typically we think about it for the interview as a whole. Instead, we recommend using this structure for each of the 3-4 things you want to find out about during your interview. For each topic, introduce it, ask a starting open question. Dig deeper and then use the clarification to both close the discussion on this topic and move onto the next.
Use relativity questions.
As a consultant, many stakeholders will give you lots of opinions. If you aren’t careful, you end up with loads of insight but no idea of which parts actually matter most to that stakeholder.
Use relativity in your questions to make sure you separate the critical from the interesting e.g.,
“What is THE biggest challenge your team faces?”
“How would you rank those in order of importance”?
As soon as your stakeholder starts machine gunning views at you, use a relativity question to make sure you’re narrowing down on what really matters..
Keep questions short.
Like no more than 10 words short.
Long questions are confusing. They massively increase the chance of wasting a few minutes whilst your stakeholder starts answering something you didn’t really want to know. They also make you sound like you’re not sure what you’re asking.
There’s a reason for that. We typically start asking long questions when thinking on our feet - when we’re still formulating our question in our mind.
That’ll happen. But when it does you need to fix it before your interviewer starts answering. If you’ve just rambled a long question, stop. Then ask a shortened version now you’re clearer what you’re asking.
Be the stakeholder whisperer...
Conclusion
Being one of those consultants that always asks the right questions during stakeholder interviews can seem like a bit of an art, but it’s actually a methodical science.
Use a structure that keeps you in control, use relativity to always focus on what matters and even when thinking on your feet, always find a way to ask a concise question.
Then you’ll be the one others call the stakeholder whisperer.