With so many of my clients, one question has been coming back to me again and again, in almost the same words every time: "What do I do if the person just never really replies?"

I ask a question and get silence. I get one-word answers. I never find out what they are really thinking, even when I keep asking.

Diane, you keep telling me how to ask a powerful question, but what do I do with their silence?

Notice what the question is asking for: a technique. A better question, a smarter follow-up, a magic trick to unlock this person. I get it - I also wish it were that simple. I teach powerful questions and active listening, and these leaders have genuinely been working their hardest to do both.

But when I listen a little longer, I almost never hear a technique problem.

There is trust in the room. Just not the kind that gets real answers.

Here is the part that surprises people. These two usually do trust each other. But it is trust of a certain size: just enough for the transactions. They trust each other to hand work back and forth, to hit the deadline, to answer the email. This is the flow of the day-to-day tasks at hand.

What does not flow is the interactive side: debating an idea together, brainstorming strategy, bringing each other the real problems they want to solve, confronting an issue directly. The trust covers the work. It does not cover the sharing.

What is missing is what Patrick Lencioni calls vulnerability-based trust. In plain words, it is the answer to a question none of us say out loud:

Do I trust you enough to give you a real answer?

Every silence after a good question is someone answering that question with a no. The conversation is not failing in the moment. It was decided before the moment. Sorry to break it to you, but there is no magic technique to get a real answer if the relationship is still at surface level.

The narrow trust is mutual

Here is the harder part. When the leader keeps talking, I usually discover the narrowness is mutual. The leader receiving small answers is also giving small answers. They do not share what they are fully thinking about. They have not let this person "see" them. Neither side has done anything wrong. Both are simply staying inside the trust they have.

And it is not only in coaching. When I run a training, someone almost always tells me: "I think the person who really needs this is not me, it is these other people. Are they going to get this?" The problem, wherever it lives, always seems to sit across the table.

And when there is no real knowing of each other, something else fills the space: biases, stereotypes, and excuses, with no real data behind them. "They are just quiet." "That generation does not speak up." "Some people are not proactive." Each one is a conclusion about a person the leader has worked beside, sometimes for years, and never actually come to know. You can trust someone's work completely and know almost nothing about how they think.

So the question "why do they not trust me?" has a mirror question, and it is the one worth sitting with: "what have I given them to trust?"

Try the two lists

Before your next 1on1 with the person who never really replies, take five minutes and write two lists.

1. The first list: what I actually know about how this person thinks. Not their output. Their thinking. What they worry about, what they want, how they decide. This must be based upon direct knowledge (they actually told me this).
2. The second list: what I am assuming about them. These are all the things I believe to be true, but have not yet been validated by the person themselves.

It is important to normalize having a longer second list. We are all observing those around us, and using these observations to come to some conclusion. Where it becomes dangerous though is when this second list is believed to be "yes, definitely correct" and absolute. You might recall my earlier article, "everyone is right, partially", speaking to where we feel absolute certainty is precisely where we should dig in further.

Then take one step further. This part takes some bravery. Pick one thing from your second list, and in that same 1on1, put it on the table:

I was thinking about you recently on this, and I realize I have been assuming something. I am really curious what your view is.

You have just done three things at once:

• shown them they are on your mind
• admitted your picture of them might be incomplete, and
• asked a question they can tell you actually want answered.

Now it is their chance to step toward you as well. There is no guarantee this works. But here is another thing I always tell my clients: "We can only control ourselves. We can choose to take the first step, or no step. If we do not take it, we probably will not make any progress. If we do, the possibility of progress opens up."

The answer to 'what do I do when they never reply?' is not a better question. It is one brave sentence that trades an assumption for the real view. That is how a relationship starts moving toward a different kind of trust.

I have written before about what makes a person worth trusting. This is the layer underneath: before anyone gives you a real answer, they decide, quietly, whether you have ever really tried to know them.

If this has sparked some curiosity, I would love to continue the conversation at diane@ptminsights.com.