From classical Greek philosopher Socrates to TV attorney Perry Mason, skilled interrogators have shaped people’s reactions through the kinds of questions they’ve asked. Can a manager use similar strategies to motivate underperforming workers?

In a recent consulting call with John Daly, professor of management at Texas McCombs and professor of communications at the UT Moody College of Communication, officials at a research institution complained that it was hard to get scholars to collaborate. They pointed to obstacles like geographic distance and scarce funding. After listening awhile, Daly framed the problem another way: What could they do to encourage more collaboration?

“It was just a slight change in how they were talking about it,” says Daly. “But after a few minutes, they came up with some interesting ideas they had never thought of before.”

Daly’s inquiry was an example of an empowering question: a query that focuses on solutions rather than blame, on what might work rather than what’s not working. In recent years, motivating people through such questions has become a hot management topic. As a scholar of business communication, Daly was surprised when he looked for earlier research to back up the tactic and didn’t find much.

To explore the issue, Daly and University of Texas at Austin communications graduate student Elizabeth Glowacki surveyed an online group about exercise. All 93 subjects were asked first to write about their habits, overall health, attitudes, and diet. Then half were asked an empowering question: “What could you do to exercise more?” The other half got a disempowering one: “Why aren’t you exercising more?”

Two independent raters scored the written answers for the presence of 11 different qualities, from a low of 1 to a high of 7. Some qualities were proactive, like taking responsibility or seeking solutions. Others were passive or defensive, like blaming outside forces or making other excuses.

Answers Mirror Questions

The results showed yawning gaps between the responses of subjects who got an empowering question and those asked a disempowering one.

For the empowering question, respondents scored low for making excuses, with an average of 1.58. They rated high on giving solutions, scoring an average 6.63. One subject wrote, “I could start walking slowly and for short periods of time every day.”

Those asked the disempowering question were almost mirror opposites of the first group. They rated a 5.63 for excuses and only 1.79 for solutions. Wrote one respondent, “It is hard enough to juggle our work lives and our home responsibilities, yet alone find extra time to go and work out.”

The same yin-yang pattern played out for other qualities. Empowered respondents were more hopeful, more likely to look at their internal motivations, and more prone to focus on the future. Disempowered ones tended towards pessimism, blame, and dwelling on what had not worked in the past.

To check their results, Daly and Glowacki ran a parallel survey on a second group of 89. This time, the variable question was about diet: why they weren’t eating better, or what they could do to eat better. Again, the two questions produced opposite scores on most of the 11 dimensions.

“It was amazing how changing a few words changed their response to the questions,” says Daly. “Basically the same results came from two separate studies. That makes them a very reliable set of findings.”

Practical Implications

When it comes to motivating workers, bosses are used to giving praise and encouragement or criticism and threats. This study offered empowering questions as another tool, says Daly, which can be used everywhere from pep talks to performance evaluations.

“S uppose you’re a manager, and you have an employee evaluation to do,” Daly says. “Most evaluations look at what’s wrong with somebody, at what their weaknesses are. You could say, ‘What’s wrong with him? or you could ask, ‘How do we make him better?’ If you ask how to improve things, people have to be creative, and they generate interesting solutions.”

Daly notes that his survey measures people’s intentions, but not whether they live up to their intentions. He and Glowacki are designing a follow-up study to find out how much actions change over six months of asking empowering questions.

“I would never expect one question to shape an employee’s behavior. But if there’s a pattern of questions asked over time,” says Daly, “I bet it would have an impact. I’m getting you to think differently. If I can get you to think differently, maybe you’ll change your behavior.”