Deeper Questions Leaders Need To Ask Employees

This is a dangerous question to ask and if you haven’t established a reputation as a careful listener, a credible confidant, and a thoughtful leader, don’t ask it. If you do ask it without these credentials, you will be perceived as nosey, intrusive, and even phony. Walk into your favorite bookstore or log on to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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? [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]