What Twenty Years of Police Interviews Taught Me About Asking Better Questions
The single biggest thing two decades of interviews taught me is that the question matters less than what you do after it. Most people ask something reasonable, then stop listening because they are loading the next question. The honest answer almost always lives in the follow-up nobody bothers to ask.
I spent twenty years with the Los Angeles Police Department. A large part of that job was sitting across from somebody and getting a straight account of what happened. Not a confession, not a gotcha. An account.
People assume that work is about pressure. It is not. Pressure is what you use when you have run out of patience, and it produces the least reliable information of anything in the toolkit. Somebody under pressure will tell you whatever ends the pressure.
Why most interviews fail in the first ninety seconds
Watch almost any interview and you will see the same failure. The interviewer asks a question, the person starts answering, and you can see the interviewer stop listening. Their eyes go somewhere else. They are reading the next item on the list.
The moment the person being interviewed senses that, they stop reaching. They give you the version they have given ten times before, because there is no reason to give you anything better. Nobody is going to notice.
The follow-up is the whole job
Here is what I actually learned. The prepared question is a door. It is not the room. Everything worth having is in what the person says next, and the only way to get there is to have genuinely heard the thing they just said.
Somebody tells me they started the business in 2009. The lazy move is to nod and go to the next question. The useful move is to notice that 2009 was the bottom of a recession and ask what made them do it in the worst year of their working life. Now we are somewhere real.
- Listen for the detail they did not have to include. Volunteered detail is where the story lives.
- Listen for the sentence that speeds up or slows down. Both mean something.
- Listen for the thing they mention once and move past. That is usually the thing.
Open questions beat clever questions
A clever question is about the person asking it. An open question is about the person answering it. Who, what, where, when, why, how. That is the entire toolkit, and it has not changed in a century because it works.
The mistake people make is thinking a good question has to be sharp. It does not. It has to be roomy. Give somebody room and they will walk into it. Give them a narrow question and you will get a narrow answer, and you will have earned it.
Silence does more work than any question
The most useful thing I ever learned costs nothing and takes no skill. When somebody finishes an answer, wait. Do not fill it. Count to three in your head if you have to.
Most people cannot tolerate a silence they did not create. They will fill it, and what they add is almost always more honest than what they just said, because it was not planned. It is the closest thing to a free lunch in this line of work.
What this has to do with a business podcast
When I sit down with a Santa Clarita business owner on The Honor Roll Show, I am not looking for a headline. I am doing the same thing I did for twenty years, which is trying to get a real account of how something actually happened.
The difference is that nobody is in trouble. There is no case. There is just a person who built something hard, and a conversation with somebody who knows how to listen. That turns out to be a rare combination, and it is why guests tell me afterward they said things they had never said out loud.
Questions, answered
Is interviewing the same as interrogation?
No, and the difference matters. An interrogation has a target and an outcome someone is trying to reach. An interview is an attempt to understand what happened. The listening skills overlap heavily. The intent does not.
What is the single best interview question?
There is not one. The best question is almost always the follow-up to whatever the person just said, which means it cannot be written in advance. If you must have a starter, "what happened next" is undefeated.
How do you get someone to open up who does not want to talk?
You usually cannot, and trying harder makes it worse. What works is lowering the stakes, being genuinely curious rather than extractive, and being comfortable with silence. Most people want to be understood. They just need to believe you are actually listening.
Know a business that belongs on the Honor Roll?
Seats are by invitation and a seat is never for sale. Tell me about your Santa Clarita business, or recommend someone else's. I read every one personally.
Or call and text 661-400-1720