Sometimes when you ask a question, you know an honest answer might be tough for somebody to give. Perhaps it’ll be embarrassing for one or both of you, or critical, or not politically correct. You worry that, to avoid awkwardness, they may not give you the full truth.

Plenty of situations fall into this category:

• You suspect they haven’t finished a report and fear they will act like they have then give some lame excuse when you expected it to show up.
• They may not know how to do something but are embarrassed to admit it.
• They know you want to see them and don’t want to disappoint you, but have something else they need to do and will likely bail at the last minute.
• They forgot to do something for you and now worry it’ll look like they didn’t care enough to bother remembering (and don’t want you to see it that way).

If you want to be sure you get a truthful answer (rather than an ugly surprise at some future date), give them both an easy and a tough answer when you ask the question……with an acceptable way to say the tough part.

So, for example:

• “Are you likely to be able to get us the report by Friday or are you just slammed?”
• “Do you know how to set up that spread sheet or can you use a little help?”
• “Have you told Ed about our decision on the Blue Bonnet account or do you think it would be better for me to do it?”
• “Do you want to stop over for a beer on Friday or has this week turned into a horror show?”
• “Given all that’s been going on, were you able to call Leslie, or did you get buried in that dip-shit Jones project?”

Giving them the hard answer as well as the easy one signals that you can accept the negative outcome and makes it easy to give it to you by just parroting what you’ve already said.  They may still hide out of course, but at the very least, you have given them the courtesy of a little extra time to think of something truthful, but acceptable, on their own.

In short: if you want the truth, give them options.