Page 96 - Company Excellence

Part II: Chapter 2 ‐ The Personality Match

that encourage him to talk. While closed questions are fact
questions, open questions are opinion questions.

In most cases, the answers to open-ended questions
allow us to draw conclusions about the views, attitudes
and motives of the interviewee, of the interlocutor. And
that is always helpful in matching helpful!

Open-ended questions usually begin with a question word (such as "who",
"what", "how", "why", "where", "when"), they actively drive the
conversation. A variant is the evaluation question, in which you ask
the interlocutor to give a detailed assessment:
"How do you assess the benefit of ... for you?" The as-if question is
designed to develop the conversation by presenting a fictitious
situation as an option: "Suppose you were to choose.... What benefits
do you hope to gain?" And while the information question helps to
obtain more concrete information on the topic and, for example, to
narrow down the motivational situation of the interlocutor, the
confirmation question serves to secure an answer: "Did I understand
correctly that it is particularly important for you...?" The clarification
question points in a similar direction:
"You just said ... - what exactly is important to you?" Finally, the
alternative question is a more pointed version of the information
question, formulated in such a way that the interlocutor can choose
his answer from the alternatives given: "Do you prefer variant A or
rather variant B?
Some types of questions should be avoided: The rhetorical sham
question touches on the area of manipulation if the questioner uses it
to give his own statements the appearance of objectivity. Although the
counter-question serves to concretize the facts, it is often perceived
as unfair, because the questioner avoids an answer in order to
unsettle the interlocutor. The subliminal question also has a
counterproductive effect,

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