Supercommunicators

When we ask a meaningful question such as “What’s the best part of working here?,” it pushes the listener to think before replying, and “that’s sometimes enough to get them to start questioning their assumptions, and start listening more,”21 Heilman said.

“An important step in any negotiation is getting clarity on what all the participants want,” Malhotra told me. Often, what people desire from a negotiation isn’t obvious at first. Sometimes a union leader might say her goal is higher wages. But then, over time, other goals are revealed: She also wants to look good to her members, or one union facti

Elite diplomats have explained that their goal at a bargaining table isn’t seizing victory, but rather convincing the other side to become collaborators in uncovering new solutions that no one thought of before. Negotiation, among its top practitioners, isn’t a battle. It’s an act of creativity.

Perhaps, instead of perspective taking, we ought to be focused on perspective getting,8 on asking people to describe their inner lives, their values and beliefs and feelings, the things they care about most. Epley sensed there was something about asking questions—the right questions—that contained the seeds of real understanding. But which question

Dozens of other studies27 from the University of Utah, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory, and elsewhere have found that people who ask lots of questions during conversations—particularly questions that invite vulnerable responses—are more popular among their peers and more often seen as leaders.

They found that during successful conversations, people tended to ask20 each other the kinds of questions that drew out replies where people expressed their “needs, goals, beliefs [and] emotions,”

“I learned that if you listen for someone’s truth, and you put your truth next to it, you might reach them.” His goal, during sales calls, became simply to connect.

What are two topics you most want to discuss? • What is one thing you hope to say that shows what you want to talk about? • What is one question you will ask that reveals what others want?

Listen for attempts to change the topic. People tell us what they want to discuss through their non sequiturs, asides, and sudden shifts—or, put differently, through the experiments they conduct. If someone asks the same question in different ways, or if they abruptly introduce a new subject, it’s a sign they want to add something to the table and