When Your Team Keeps Asking the Same Question

It’s tempting, when your team asks the same question over and over, to think that they’re bad listeners. But it’s possible you’re just not answering the question they’re actually asking.

Does this sound familiar?  You explain a new process in a meeting and at the end of your explanation, someone asks when the process will start and you say, “the first of the month.”  Five minutes later, someone else asks when it will start and you repeat “November first.”  Then, after the meeting, you get an email with the same question.  And two weeks later, the start date question is back again, like a bad belch.

If you’re like me, your inner voice wants to say, “I literally just answered this.”  But before blaming your team's listening skills, consider another possibility:  They heard your response but it just didn't answer their question.

Embedded in any question your team asks may be three other questions: 

·        Decision: Has the decision been made?

·        Implication: What does this mean for me/my team?

·        Certainty: Is this actually happening, or is it still being discussed?

For example, someone may ask, “When is the new hire starting?” but what they're actually asking is, “Has the start date been selected, agreed to, and communicated to the new hire?” (decision) or “When will the new hire take some of the massive workload off my plate?” (implication) or “Have we really locked in a new hire?  Is the contract signed?” (certainty)

You might answer the first (“next week sometime”) while they're desperately looking for the second or third.  Good communication isn't just answering the words asked. It's understanding the need underneath them (which sometimes takes reading between the lines or asking more or better questions).

Instead of wondering why your team keeps asking you the same thing, ask yourself what the repeated question is telling you.  It might mean several things:

1)     You delivered the message at a time they couldn’t digest it

Sometimes people need to hear an answer more than once.  I see this all the time when organizations try to make a big change, send one email, and think they’ve communicated the whole thing.  The sad fact is that you can communicate something perfectly clearly from your own perspective and still leave people confused.  (This is why I like to say that if you don’t understand me, that’s my fault.)

2)     Your message wasn't clear

Maybe you used spin or “leader talk” and didn’t deliver the message as explicitly as you could have.

3)     You buried the answer in too much blah blah blah

Giving your employees too much information all at once can muddy the waters.  Lead with the relevant answer first and then, if need be, provide context. 

“The typical human brain can hold about seven pieces of new information for less than 30 seconds,” John Medina writes in his book, Brain Rules. “If something does not happen in that short stretch of time, the information becomes lost. If you want to extend the 30 seconds to, say, a few minutes, or even an hour or two, you need to consistently re-expose yourself to the information.”

4)     People are hearing different answers from other leaders

If you’re working with another team or leader on the project or decision that’s driving all the questions, make sure you’re aligned with them and confident that the way you’re explaining the information is the same way they’re explaining it.  Confusion at the top tends to trickle down.

5)     People don't understand how the decision affects them

People can understand a decision in the big picture – we’re going to reduce the amount of time we bill the client for scheduling, for example – but what does that mean to an employee who spends 50% of her time scheduling?  Will her work be decreased?  Or will the rest of the team stop doing their own scheduling and her workload will increase?  What’s In It For Me is most people’s default receiver mode and being able to share that will reduce your questions. 

6)     They don’t trust that the answer will remain the answer

As I’ve said before, changing your mind is a leadership superpower.  But if you’ve changed your mind on this decision before, your team can’t be confident that you won’t change it again.  Questions they repeat may be an attempt to gauge how final and concrete the decision is.

7)     They heard the answer but don't like it

If you've clearly communicated that we’re not pursuing an option and someone keeps asking “but what if…?” you may not have a communication problem, you may have an acceptance problem.  And another explanation isn’t going to change anything. 

In this case, a smart leadership move is to tackle the resistance head-on.  “I hear that you disagree. The decision is still XYZ.”  That's where communication intersects with decision-making and accountability.

8)     They're looking for permission, reassurance, or certainty

That last one is particularly important.  Sometimes a repeated question isn't a request for information; it's a request for reassurance.  They want to know they’re doing the right thing the right way and potentially giving you feedback about how you react to mistakes.

What can you do differently?

Brain researchers recommend these three things to make your message really stick:

Don’t drown them in information. While it’s tempting to give people all the information you think they could possibly need all at one time (think drinking from a firehose), it can be more valuable to pare down your information to its core and leave out all the research, fluff, and distractions.

Once is not enough. Repeating information intentionally is something we do in training to overcome the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve (or what I like to call “job security”).  Ebbinghaus’ research showed that, if you want new information to stick, it needs to be reinforced regularly and spaced out intentionally.

Engage your audience. People need to interact with the information and internalize it their own way rather than just reading it once.  If you want a message to stick, start a dialogue about it or refuse to move on to the next topic until you get at least three questions about the information.

I take another tack, too, which is reminding the employee that this isn’t the first time they’ve asked the same question, and I’ll only answer it for them three times.  So since this is the second time they’re asking, what do they need to do to make sure they remember the answer?   If they need to take notes, record my response, or wait for the answer until they can really concentrate on it, then we do that.  This combines some of the elements above with an accountability component, letting them know that I expect them to be able to answer this question for themselves going forward. 

(I’m a little more lax with new hires, but the accountability piece does tend to stick.)

The next time someone asks you the same question for the third time, resist the urge to wonder why they’re such a dummycat and instead ask yourself if you’ve been clear.  And if you’ve been as clear as you can, ask yourself a different question:

“Are they looking for information?  Or are they looking for certainty, reassurance, permission, or a different decision?”