Active Listening and Powerful Questions at Work [EN]

What you'll learn

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• Ask a question that produces information rather than the answer the person thinks you want

• Use STAR and CARE to get from a rehearsed story to what actually happened, and notice when it was invented

• Design a questionnaire that measures something: question types, scales, open questions, and the length people finish

• Run a 360 assessment properly — observable behaviour, evaluator bias, response rates, and delivering the result to the person

• Recognise your own emotional state in a conversation and its effect on what the other person is willing to say

• Build a competency profile from what your best performers actually do, not from a job description

• Design an assessment exercise for the cases where asking will never give you the answer

• Deliver findings from a survey or a 360 in a way that produces a plan instead of defensiveness

• Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries

• Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank

Who this course is for:

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• Managers who ask "how is it going" and get "fine" for six months before someone resigns
• Hiring managers and recruiters whose interviews are a pleasant conversation followed by a surprise
• HR and people professionals designing 360s, surveys and assessments
• Consultants and researchers who need information from people with reasons to shade it
• Team leads running retrospectives where nothing uncomfortable is ever said
• Anyone who has to write a questionnaire and has never been taught how
• Coaches and mentors who want the structured side of questioning alongside the intuitive one

Description

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This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most of what you need to know at work is already known by someone who has no particular reason to tell you.

They are not hiding it. You just have not asked in a way that makes answering worth their while.

Where the information stops

You ask a candidate about a project and get a story that has been told forty times, polished smooth, with the difficult parts sanded off. You ask your team how things are going and get "fine", because the honest answer costs them something and the question cost you nothing. You send a survey and get a response rate of nineteen percent and a set of averages that describe nobody. And you run a 360 that produces a number, a defensive reaction and no change.

The common factor is not honesty. It is that asking well is a technical skill, and almost nobody is taught it.

What the course teaches

Thirty-eight lessons across five ways of finding things out. Emotional intelligence first, eight lessons, because the state you bring into a conversation determines what the other person is prepared to say. Resonance, empathy, reading your own reactions, and the difference between influencing through logic and through emotion.

Then the one-to-one conversation with the highest cost of error: the interview. Question design, STAR, competency maps, active listening in the technical sense of clarifying and interpreting rather than nodding, and how to score what you heard without your own bias doing the work.

Structured questioning, and what to do when questions fail

Then competency-based questioning in depth. Building a question set from what your own best performers actually do, behavioural and situational questions, panel formats, and the CARE technique for getting past a rehearsed answer into what happened. Including how to notice that someone is constructing the story as they speak.

Then asking many people about one person. Eight lessons on the 360: describing observable behaviour instead of traits, writing scales that mean something, evaluator bias, response rates, and delivering the result in a way that produces a development plan rather than a defence.

Then asking in writing and at scale — survey types, question wording, scale choice, the length at which quality collapses, reporting, and turning answers into a plan. And finally the assessment centre, for the cases where asking will never work and you have to watch instead: exercise design, training observers, running the session and validating whether it told you anything.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. I have designed surveys nobody answered and 360s that produced a number and no conversation, which is how most of the practical warnings in this course arrived.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

One habit worth building first

After the next answer you get, stay silent for four seconds instead of asking the next question. Most of the useful information in any conversation arrives in the sentence the person adds because the silence was uncomfortable. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.