How do you balance active listening with asking relevant and probing questions?

1 What is active listening?

Active listening is a skill that involves paying full attention to the speaker, showing interest and empathy, and reflecting back what you hear. Active listening helps you to understand the speaker's perspective, emotions, and needs, as well as to build rapport and trust. Active listening also helps you to identify the key issues, challenges, and opportunities that the speaker is facing, which can inform your questioning strategy.

2 What is questioning?

Questioning is a skill that involves asking open-ended, specific, and relevant questions that help the speaker to explore, clarify, or expand on their thoughts and feelings. Questioning helps you to facilitate the speaker's learning, problem-solving, and decision-making process, as well as to challenge their assumptions and biases. Questioning also helps you to elicit feedback, check understanding, and summarize the main points of the conversation.

3 Why are both skills important?

Active listening and questioning are essential for effective team facilitation, allowing you to engage with participants in a respectful, supportive, and constructive way. Through active listening and asking relevant and probing questions, you can help participants express their ideas, opinions, and concerns freely. This enables them to feel heard, understood, and valued by you and the group. Furthermore, it helps them gain new insights, perspectives, and solutions to their problems. It also encourages learning from each other and collaboration towards achieving their desired outcomes and goals.

4 How do you balance them?

Balancing active listening and questioning is not always easy, but it can be improved with practice and feedback. To help you balance these two skills in team facilitation, you should prepare some questions in advance based on the purpose, objectives, and agenda of the session, while also being flexible and adaptable to the flow of the conversation. Utilize different types of questions, such as open-ended, closed-ended, clarifying, probing, reflective, hypothetical, and evaluative questions depending on the situation and goal of the question. As you listen carefully to the speaker's words, tone, body language, and emotions, use verbal and non-verbal cues to show your interest and attention. Ask one question at a time without interrupting, leading or judging the speaker's responses. Give the speaker enough time and space to answer your questions without filling the silence with your own comments or opinions. Follow up on the speaker's answers with further questions or comments that show your understanding as well as encourage them to go deeper or wider in their thinking. Finally, balance your questions with statements that summarize, synthesize or highlight the key points or themes of the conversation while linking them to the next steps or actions.

5 How do you practice them?

If you want to improve your active listening and questioning skills, it’s important to practice them regularly in different contexts and settings, such as meetings, workshops, coaching sessions, or informal conversations. You can record yourself or ask someone to observe you while you facilitate a session and review your performance later. Ask for feedback from participants, colleagues, or mentors on how they perceive your listening and questioning skills and what they appreciate or suggest for improvement. Additionally, learn from other facilitators who are good at listening and questioning, and observe how they use these skills in their sessions. You can also read books or articles on active listening and questioning skills to learn from experts and practitioners in the field. Apply some of the concepts and techniques that you find useful or relevant to your own practice.