Don't Be Afraid to Ask

Sometimes a seemingly innocent question uncovers a touchy subject. But it can also put you on the road to a breakthrough

by Liz Ryan

If you've ever spent time with a 4-year-old, you know that kids that age ask questions. Lots of them. "Why does the cat do that?" "What makes the sun stay up?" It's proof that their little brains are developing. Many a parent has found the journey from "How sweet to see his curiosity about things" to "Enough with the questions, kid" distressingly short but revealing. Along the way, we realize how children learn: by asking.

So it's a strange experience, as a working adult, to ask a question that no one wants to answer -- or even wants to hear. This may happen when you start a job and make innocent inquiries about how things work in the new shop. Or it may be that after you've worked somewhere for a while, you develop a cognitive dissonance around some element of the work or the organization. So you ask: "Why do we do it this way?"

Instantly, you sense that you've erred. People look at their shoes, or give you the eye-roll/teeth-suck that signals: "What a doofus, to ask that question." Now you've done it; you've broached the forbidden topic. What, you wonder, is up?

BOLD ENOUGH.

The unaskable question is the one that makes people instantly angry. There's a force field around it; no one goes near it. This is different from the elephant in the room, which everyone sees but no one mentions. An elephant question could be: Will the coming reorg eliminate my department? Or: Why is everyone afraid of the circulation manager? People know these questions exist; they just don't want to ask them.

The unaskable question isn't on everyone's mind. The issue that underlies it is so much a part of everyday reality that no one questions it. That's why you garner contemptuous looks just by bringing it up. People think: "What kind of an idiot would ask that?" The answer seems obvious: an idiot.

Such contempt keeps people from opening their mouths, unless they're new enough not to not know better or bold enough not to care. The problem is that the unaskable question is the one that desperately needs to be asked -- and answered.

TOUCHING A NERVE.

One time, I was consulting for the CEO of a consumer-products company on organizational issues. I read the company's mission statement on a boardroom plaque. Among other things, it declared that employees would be handled with the utmost respect and trust.

"How do you manage that?" I asked. "What do you mean?" said the CEO. "I mean, how do you know that you handle employees with respect and trust?" I replied. "How do you gauge that? How do you know whether you're succeeding in that goal?"

The CEO reacted with barely disguised annoyance. "It's obvious," he said. "It's in our culture." "How is it in your culture?" I persisted. You can always tell that you've asked an unaskable question when people get annoyed. Of course, there was no answer. The question had never been asked.

As it turns out, there are plenty of ways to find out whether trust and respect exist in an organization. You can interview employees, poll them, ask them to share stories that illustrate these concepts at work. You can even declare that trust and respect are two of the company's core values and leave it at that. But it's good to know which of these paths you've chosen. That's where the unaskable question comes into play.

LOOKING FOR GUIDELINES.

Another time, I joined an Internet discussion community for entrepreneurs. About a year later, I was asked to leave the group because I had failed to meet its standard for "active participation." I have great respect for groups and the rules they set for their members, but I couldn't understand how such a vague concept as active participation could be used as a metric for inclusion or exclusion.

So I asked. "How do you define active participation? How will I know when I've reached it? Should I be posting messages at a certain frequency, or are there other guidelines?" There were none and, in fact, my question was unwelcome. "Oh, come now, Liz, you are smart enough to know what 'active participation' means," wrote the group leader. "You are lawyering."

I was not lawyering, though.