This Learning Expert Developed a Hack to Get Honest Answers Out of People — 'I Was Shocked. Had I Not Asked He Never Would've Told Me.' Want to know what people really think? Use this "requesting reactions" strategy.

Want to know what people really think? Use a strategy called "requesting reactions."

Here's why: People rarely tell you what they think — which means that employees don't give critical information to their bosses and managers. Without this critical information, teams can become bitter, and projects will stall out. That's why, to get honest feedback, managers need to be more strategic with the questions they ask, according to Jeff Wetzler, who has been studying this subject for years — and who identified the "requesting reactions" strategy.

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Wetzler is the co-CEO of Transcend, an education innovation organization, and was previously the chief learning officer of Teach for America. He literally wrote the book on how to ask questions; it's called Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs in Leadership and Life.

People often don't want to share what they think, he says — either because they're afraid, uncomfortable, or not sure that other people are actually interested in their thoughts. That's why if leaders want to understand what other people are thinking, they need to learn to ask better questions.

Most of our questions are "crummy questions," Wetzler says. That's for a few reasons:

• The question isn't genuinely inquisitive. "It's like when you say what you think and then, at the end, you just say, 'Isn't that right?' or 'Wouldn't you agree?'," Wetzler says. "The way you pose that makes it very difficult for the other person to know what to say. Do you want to know if they disagree or not?"
• The question puts people on the defensive. "That's like asking, 'Why would you think that?'" he says. "The other person can feel that that's an attack question."
• The question seems manipulative. "We see lawyers do this all the time when they're trying to lead the witness in some way," Wetzler says. "But it could also be, for example, 'Wouldn't it be better if we here for dinner instead of there?"

So instead of asking crummy questions, we need to ask "quality questions." Those have a clear and earnest purpose: "It's a question that helps us learn something important from someone else."

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Wetzler has a five-part framework for this, which he calls the Ask Approach. One of the greatest, easiest strategies is the one mentioned above — "requesting reactions."

Here's how it works:

First, you state your point of view. Then, instead of stopping and waiting to see if the other person reacts, you ask for their reaction in a genuine, direct way.

"You could ask: What's your reaction to that? How does that land with you? How does that sit with you? What does that make you think? What might I be missing?" Wetzler says. "Those questions let the other person know that we want their reactions and that we value their reactions."

Wetzler remembers trying this when he first became a manager. He told an employee about a plan to serve their client, and then asked what the employee thought.

"He looked at me for a minute, and he was quiet. Then he said, 'Honestly, if you really want my reaction, I find that completely demotivating,'" Wetzler recalls. "I was shocked. Had I not asked that, he never would've told me. So then we could unpack it. It turned out that he and I had different information about what our client needed, so he thought what I was asking him to do made no sense. Once we got back on the same page, he was motivated and he did a great job. But had I not asked that question, we might have wasted days or weeks and our relationship would've frayed."

Wetzler's reaction there was important. He didn't just ask for a reaction — he also took it seriously, didn't penalize the employee for saying something negative, and then acted to make the situation better.

That's a key part of requesting reactions, Wetzler says: If you request a reaction, you need to create an environment where all reactions are welcome.

"Listen to learn," he says. "It's important to listen for more than just the content of what someone's saying. There's also the emotion. Is someone feeling upset? Are they feeling frustrated, resentful, excited, motivated? We've got be listening for that."

Then you respond — in a way that welcomes future responses, no matter how harsh they might be.