Monthly Archive for April, 2010

  • What do You do Just for the Fun of it?

  • This is a great question for people who find it hard to listen. Your assignment when you ask this question is to watch even more than you listen. Watch people’s faces light up, their bodies relax, and their voices resonate with energy. Don’t stop listening to what they’re saying, but pay special attention to the [...]

  • What Brings You Joy in Your Work?

  • Some people live their lives as though joy were a very limited resource. As if they were allocated an amount at birth, squandered much of their share during childhood and must now, as responsible adults, hoard their remaining supply for some unspecified time in the future. Given these parameters, why would anyone in their right [...]

  • What’s Something You’ve Learned in the Past Week?

  • Here’s a thought. School’s never out for the professional. How does that make you feel? Excited or depressed? Continuous formal learning, whether in the university classroom or the corporate training room, is a necessity–not a luxury–for all of us. But there is another, informal style of learning that leaders need to encourage. It is learning [...]

  • What Makes You Proud of Working as a Part of Our Organization?

  • The company knew they had to do something. Customer satisfaction ratings were dropping, employee turnover was rising, and nobody wanted to talk about morale. Serious competition was looming. A group of leaders were appointed to do something about the situation and to do it fast. Meeting after meeting produced idea after idea. Consultants were hired, [...]

  • What Volunteer Work do You do?

  • At one time in my life, I worked for a temporary agency. One of the assignments they sent me to was at a large manufacturing plant where my job consisted of answering the phone for a department. (Just a quick aside. Why would an organization put a temporary employee in a front-line, customer contact position? [...]

  • How do You Feel at the End of Your Workweek?

  • Watching people as they enter the workplace at the beginning of the workweek gives you one view of organizational morale. Watching them as they leave at the end of the week gives you a different perspective. That’s why both questions are included as significant questions to ask. What you’re really asking with this question is [...]

  • How do You Feel at the Start of Your Workweek?

  • This question marks a change in the focus of our inquiries. Until now the questions have asked people to share the facts and information they know. Fact and information answers are important–in fact, business runs on them. But they don’t tell the whole story. Organizations are filled with people, and people are filled with feelings. [...]

  • What is it Like to Work on a Team in Our Organization?

  • If anyone is taking a vote on the most misused business word, let me know. I want to place a vote. The word team is often used to describe any group of people working on a task. Team, however, actually means something very specific. A team is a collection of people with a shared, meaningful [...]

  • What’s a Potential Benefit We Could Offer That Would be Helpful to You?

  • This question is very specific, and it might not apply to you, but if you have any input on employee benefits or if you have responsibility for benefit recommendations or decisions, ask away. Over the years I’ve noticed a small, common behavior between partners in successful and happy long-term relationships. When a holiday or birthday [...]

  • If You Could Change One Thing About Our Organization’s Collective Behavior, What Would It Be?

  • Many organizations develop a list of values–conduct they uphold as their guide for the behavior of all employees. These values are often published and distributed. Too often, these values are thought to be real just because they’ve been put on paper, but they become fiction in practice. Values are too important to exist only on [...]

  • How Could We Communicate Management Decisions More Effectively?

  • I can’t remember exactly where I heard it for the first time, but I do remember the general circumstances. There was a group of us seated around a table. Flipcharts covered the walls, and markers and half-used Post-it notepads littered the table. Our work had progressed nicely up until the last agenda item. Our task [...]

  • What’s A Recent Management Decision You Didn’t Understand?

  • Your goal in asking this question is to determine if you need to work on the quality of the decisions you make or the way you communicate your decisions. These are two different things. You need to determine if people don’t understand why a decision was made or find out if the way you delivered [...]

  • What Does Our Leadership Team Do That Gets In The Way Of Your Doing Your Job?

  • One of the most often identified roles of a leader is that of barrier buster. Leaders get into trouble when they fall into a pattern of doing the jobs of the people who report to them rather than creating an environment that allows the right people to do the right things. Successful leaders are eager [...]

  • What Gets in the Way of Your Doing Your Job?

  • For years we have all joked and/or raged about the "it’s not my job" attitudes we’ve encountered in organizations, big and small. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself if there is a customer somewhere who thought that way about your organization? Or have you honestly wondered if you’ve got employees that are looking for [...]

  • Who Do You See As Our Competition, And What Do You Know About Them?

  • The nature of my work requires that I spend a great deal of time away from home. Time alone in hotel rooms provides fertile ground for unusual questions to surface. One evening I got to wondering how a hotel concierge learns about the places they recommend. So I asked. I was amazed to discover that, [...]

  • What’s Something We Could Offer to Our Customers?

  • The best time to ask this question is when you’re talking to a customer. The next best time to ask this question is when you’re talking to someone on your team who regularly interacts with your customers. This is a question designed to generate ideas–lots of ideas from many sources. So your job with this [...]

  • What’s The Most Important Thing You Know About Our Customers?

  • Every successful organization I’ve encountered, as a consultant or as a consumer, is passionate about their customers. When people in an organization hear their leaders at all levels talking about their customers at all times, it’s easy for them to get the message that customers are important. But talking about customers isn’t enough. Ever notice [...]

  • How Could You Make Your Job More Effective?

  • I don’t believe I’ve ever been asked this question. The closest I ever got was on a performance review form that had Where do you see yourself in five years? as the last question on the bottom of the last page. Silly me, I took it seriously. I thought about the work I was doing, [...]

  • How Could We Save Money?

  • Back to the money stuff. Well, one could argue that most of business is about the money stuff, but asking about the money often gets you to something more valuable. This question does that. Leaders ask this question to investigate, challenge, and assign responsibility. They use it to investigate the forgotten areas within their control [...]

  • How Does Your Work Contribute To Our Success?

  • Years ago I was a salesperson for a large insurance company. Sitting in a client’s office (an unhappy client’s office) I asked to use the phone to call the home office to get the answer to his very pointed question. As I dialed our toll-free number, engaging in silent prayer as I pushed each button, [...]

  • How Do We Make Money?

  • A simple question. "We sell things." "We make things and sell them." "We publish books." If you work in a retail or manufacturing environment, those answers should be pretty obvious. What if you provide a service? "We help people solve problems." "We fix things that break." "We show movies." Surface answers all. Printing books, selling [...]

  • How Can We Effectively Tell You That We’re Grateful For Your Business?

  • This may be hard for male readers to understand, but when a woman moves, finding a skilled hairdresser is a critical, top-of-theto-do-list task. When I moved to northern Wisconsin, I asked for recommendations, made appointments with several of those people, and chose one to be my official haircutter. Over the years that she cut and [...]

  • If You Were Me, What’s One Thing You’d Change About My Organization?

  • This question is designed to take the conversation to the level of specific action. This is the What would make us better? question, with teeth. You’re asking your customer to express the thoughts and ideas they had while waiting on hold, fighting to get an invoice corrected, or shaking their head over one of your [...]

  • What Will You Need From Us In The Future?

  • I remember one of my earliest business conversations involved the kitchen table, my father, and a company called International Business Machines. I was about eleven. Dad was telling us that his company had gotten a contract to make a part for IBM, but his team didn’t know anything about the product the parts were going [...]

  • How and When Have We Made It Hard For You to Do Business with Us?

  • Not many organizations choose to have conferences and hold meetings where I live in northern Wisconsin. (Maybe our annual snowfall has something to do with that decision.) That means that, to do my work, I need to travel. When you stay in hotels often, you sign your name frequently. Check-in. Check-out. Room service bills. Bar [...]

  • Why do You do Business with Our Competition?

  • This is the flip side of the last question. By asking this question, you’re seeking information that will allow you to compare and contrast your customer’s opinion of you and your competition. I don’t know any business or organization that doesn’t have competition. I don’t know any business or organization that doesn’t need to know [...]

  • Why Do You Do Business with Us?

  • Remember the song from Fiddler on the Roof when Tevye asks his wife of many years, "Do you love me?" It’s a wonderful moment, and you can tell couples who have been together for a long time by their behavior during that scene. They poke each other, grin, hold hands, or mouth, "Well, do you?" [...]

  • Are You Sure You Want To Ask Questions?

  • As with any new endeavor, starting is the hardest part. Reasons to postpone action exist in abundance. "I’ll start after I finish reading the book." "Mondays are better for beginnings than Thursdays." Even traumatic events that would appear to cry out for changed behavior (the heart attack victim who smokes, the parent whose child gets [...]

  • What Are You Afraid of?

  • Fear is a powerful emotion. It can paralyze you in times of crisis, cause you to cower in the face of an adversary, or lash out in an inappropriate direction. Fear will keep you silent when you should speak. Fear will open your mouth when it’s better left shut. And, worst of all for a [...]

  • Are You Happy?

  • Let me admit it right up front–this is a bias. I believe that fundamentally unhappy people make poor leaders. This statement might cause you to pause. If we were having a conversation, I’d be able to see your reaction in your eyes, and I’d repeat myself for emphasis. So let me repeat. I believe that [...]