This is the BIG question, and only you can answer it. But answer it you must. Leaders owe it to themselves as well as the people they lead to go deeper into their own motivations, their hopes, and their dreams. Business schools don’t require a course in “Understanding Your Personal Mission” for graduation, nor do many family conversations involve parents sharing their purpose in life with their children. Most of us grow up believing that scores get kept based on things like home runs hit, beauty contests won, and amounts on annual W-2 forms. What a pity.
Think of a person who had a great positive influence on your life. How did that happen? Was it the size of their office that so impressed you that you decided right then and there that you were going to strive to be a great leader? Was it the tale of an exotic vacation, a fancy car, or a prestigious title that convinced you to follow someone’s footsteps? I rather doubt it. More likely it was a quiet word spoken at the right moment, an encouraging smile after you spoke up at a meeting, or a short note of congratulations for a job well done that caused you to say, “This is a person I want to emulate.”
My friend Mary Marcdante said, “When you’re on purpose, life fits.” How does your life fit these days? If tomorrow were your last day on this planet, would your list of regrets be longer than your list of accomplishments? People who are clear about the meanings of their lives find it much easier to make decisions about the big things, to prioritize the activities that fill up their days, and to know, really know, what’s important. There is great peace of mind in knowing how to answer if someone asks, What gives your life meaning?
In a recent interview on the Today show, the musician Jon Bon Jovi told Matt Lauer how much he enjoyed working as an actor with Matthew McConaughey on the movie U-571. As an inexperienced actor, Bon Jovi looked to McConaughey as a leader and wasn’t disappointed. Bon Jovi said that it wasn’t what McConaughey said but what he did that helped him. Leaders teach by example whether they know they’re doing it or not. Do you remember the first time an adult said to you, “Do as I say, not as I do”? Did it strike you as ridiculous at the time? If it didn’t then, it certainly should now. Your development as a leader won’t go very far if you don’t learn this lesson. People inside and outside of your organization will learn more from you about leadership, for good or ill, from what you do than from what you say.
Learning about learning is a hot topic in many workplaces. Businesses in general have reached the conclusion that if they’re not learning about their customers, themselves, and their future on a daily basis they’re losing the race. I’ve observed many management team meetings where leaders have discussed learning strategies and opportunities for their people to get smarter. I haven’t listened in on conversations where they’ve challenged each other and reported on their personal earning goals. And that’s a problem. People will believe that learning is part of their job in your organization by watching whether or not you’re learning.
So, let’s talk about what you’re learning. I hope you can answer this question with two things in mind. First is that you’d be excited to share the skill you’re learning that will make you better at doing your job. It would be great if you could also share how you’re learning. Is it a formal process or a self-study situation? You would tell how you were taking what you’ve learned and practiced and applied it in a real-life situation. You would be willing to share how you might have failed as you tried new skills and how you appreciated the feedback you got from others as you practiced. You would look and sound excited as you described how this learning was making your work easier, more efficient, and more fun.
Then, you would move on to telling us about what you were learning in your personal life. Your face would light up as you described your movement into uncharted waters. Who your teacher was. How often you got to practice what you were learning. How you realized that this personal learning was giving you insights about your business situation—an unexpected bonus. How something could be frustrating and fun at the same time.
After a conversation like this, I’d know you were a lifelong learner and I’d be challenged. Way to go, leader!
I’ve always understood the expression “Can’t see the forest for the trees.” It wasn’t till I moved to northern Wisconsin that I realized not everyone does understand it. It’s easy, in this land of wonderful woods, to miss the beautiful expanse as you focus on one scruffy pine—wondering why someone hasn’t pruned it. The same thing happens at work.
People get caught in the daily cycle of “Write the to-do list, work on the to-do list,” and get frustrated by how many things remain on the to-do list at the end of the day. It would be silly to expect that cycle to be anything but a permanent part of our work life. There will always be more tasks than there is time. There will always be interruptions that usually end up dumping more tasks on our desks. Fast isn’t fast enough. Remember when you could blame things on the post office? Overnight delivery services, fax machines, and e-mail technologies have changed forever what we mean when we say, “I’ll do it right away.” More than ever, we need someone to help us break the cycle of tasks and encourage us to see beyond the day-to-day. Leaders are those people.
Most employees don’t have the opportunity to attend trade association meetings or have access to and the time to read industry forecasts, but they need the information obtained by doing both. That’s where you come in. As a leader it is your job to understand the bigger picture. How does your organization fit into your industry? How do you rank against your competition? What changes are affecting the way you and your competition will do business in the future? You need to know these things in order to make wise decisions and chart a course into the future. The people at all levels of your organization need to know these things, too. They need to know so they have a better context for understanding management decisions. So they can help customers understand changes in policies and practices. So they can think about their own future. So they have hope.
People get so focused on the task in front of them (the next deadline, the next round of budget cuts) that they seldom lift their heads to look at the big picture. It is in the bigger picture that we can find the hope that will lift us out of daily despair. If you want to call yourself a leader, you should know about the bigger picture, so talk about it.
You don’t ask this question so you can hear the answer, you ask it so your mentee can hear their answer. This is a question designed to help people understand that they should dream about their future. Isn’t it sad that we need to be encouraged to dream? Ask a six-year-old and they’ll give you a list of all the things they want to be and do. Ask a thirty-six-year old, and they’ll usually stammer and stutter. Don’t let them duck it. “I don’t know. Guess I’ve never thought much about it” can’t be an acceptable answer when a leader, acting as a coach, asks this question.
Push. Make them think about it. Make it perfectly clear that there is no right or wrong answer. They aren’t committing career suicide if they admit to a secret passion that involves writing the Great American Novel or starting their own business. You won’t take them off the promotion list if they reveal that they want your job. Let them know you’ve got five-year dreams too.
Business, any business, is about people. I will defend that statement at any time, in any place, under any circumstance. Leaders know more people, usually because they’ve been around longer and had more opportunities to meet and converse with more people inside and outside their organization. When a leader leaves one company to go to another, it is more likely that they can—in the course of their business day—keep in touch with people from their prior organization. Part of the leader’s job is to help others make connections. Nowhere is this more helpful than in a coaching and mentoring session. This question is designed to get your mental Rolodex going. You listen to the response to this question and search for a person you can recommend as a connection.
People need to find other people for information, perspective, or advice. Each of these three situations has its own set of requirements.
* Looking for information. Here you need to help your mentee construct her own questions well so that when she asks for information, she’s asking for the right information. Usually you can suggest a phone contact unless the desired information is detailed or lengthy. Make sure you give your mentee permission to use your name as a reference.
* Looking for perspective. When perspective is the goal of an interaction between two people, a face-to-face meeting is probably required. This is asking for more than a quick answer, and you are sending your mentee to impose on someone’s most precious commodity these days—time. In this case, you will probably need to make a phone call of explanation or facilitate the meeting yourself.
* Looking for advice. I once coached a woman who was struggling with issues around balancing her career with her young children. I can remember my own issues of balance well, but my experience was years ago, and things have changed. I called a friend, a successful working mom I know, and asked if she could spend some time with my mentee, helping her figure out some strategies to keep her sanity. Advice is a bigger request than information and perspective, and I needed to put some skin in the game by asking my friend what I could do to repay her. The night I spent having pizza with her kids while she worked late on a critical report was really quite fun.
No matter what form your connection takes, make sure you remind your mentee about the basics of good networking. You learned them from your mother or, if you didn’t, borrow my mother’s lessons: Please, thank you, and the asker picks up the check.
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 but not in their view, to challenge people to think for themselves, and to let people know that they are expected to engage their brains on the job. Look at it this way. Pretend you don’t do the grocery shopping in your household. In fact, you very seldom even go into a grocery store. The balance in your checking account is running lower than usual, and you notice that the checks made out to the grocery store represent a significant percentage of your monthly expenditures. So you sit down and develop a strategy to lower your grocery cost and present your plan to the family shopper for implementation. If you had to guess, how’s that going to work for you?
Okay, try this approach. You catch the shopper as you walk through the kitchen and say, “You’re spending way too much at the grocery store. I expect to see smaller checks in the future.” And as you walk out of the room you add, “By the way don’t let the quality of our meals suffer.” Is that better?
Please tell me you didn’t think that either of these approaches would work well. Please tell me that, as you read the last two paragraphs, you were shaking your head and grinning. Unfortunately, we act that way at home way too often. This behavior (as expressed about grocery shopping, punishment for children, and other areas too numerous to mention) has far-reaching implications—ask any-one you know who’s gone through a divorce. Don’t kid yourself. If you do it at home, you do it at work.
The problem with this behavior (in case you’re not certain) is presuming that you know better than the person closest to the issue does. When you ask about saving the company money, you send a message that you expect and value your employees’ expertise because they’re the ones who do the work, day in and day out. Of course, the reasoning goes, they have ideas and I want—no, need—to hear them. The more you ask this question, the better the answers you get will be.
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 something, fixing someone’s equipment allows an organization to present an invoice but does not ensure that anyone makes any money.
Most people have never been taught how business works, a fact that has fueled the Open-Book Management philosophy. In an article in the June 1995 issue of Inc., John Case describes the three elements that make Open-Book Management different.
1. Every employee sees—and learns to understand—the company’s financials, along with all the other numbers that are critical to tracking the business’s performance.
2. Employees learn that, whatever else they do, part of their job is to move those numbers in the right direction.
3. Employees have a direct stake in the company’s success.
Employees in an Open-Book Management organization know how their organization makes money. But, I can hear you saying, “We’re not an Open-Book company and I don’t have the authority to make us one. True. But you can do your homework by asking this question of the members of your team, evaluating the responses, and establishing a plan to help your team see the big picture when it comes to the bottom line.
This could be scary if it occurs to you that you don’t actually know the answer to this question yourself. Don’t use that as an excuse to not ask the question. Use it as a reason to ask it of someone who knows and learn from them.
This may be hard for male readers to understand, but when a woman moves, finding a skilled hairdresser is a critical, top-of-the-to-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 styled my hair, I never had a bad hair day. When I’d mention that I knew someone who was moving into town, or someone who wanted a new look, she’d hand me a card that offered 10 percent off their first visit. I counted. Over the ten years I went to this hairdresser I brought her twelve customers—all of whom visited her at least once a month. (You do the math.)
On the day that I had a hair emergency and she couldn’t fit me into her schedule, I started thinking. How come she was rewarding the new customers I was recruiting for her and I wasn’t getting any reward? Why wasn’t I worthy of even some consideration for an emergency appointment? It was the beginning of the end of our client/hairdresser relationship. (Have you ever noticed how quickly resentment can build?) It didn’t take me very long to find someone else who solved my bad-hair-day situation. The next month, as my possible replacement hairdresser cut my hair, I mentioned it was my birthday that week. “Oh,” she said. “You’re in luck. I give my clients a 50 percent discount on their birthdays.” Guess who has been cutting my hair for the last ten years.
Showing that you’re grateful doesn’t always involve giving something of monetary value. Businesses that express their gratitude do so in many ways. They use their customer’s names—all the time. They keep track of preferences and make suggestions that solve problems. They send cards on days without a holiday attached. They make eye contact and listen. They anticipate. They’re creative. They fall in love with their customers and show it.
How do you reward your clients? Often, in an attempt to build new business, we forget to value the business and clients we already have. Asking how to show gratitude is key to avoiding that trap. Not only will you hear about ways to say thank you, you’ll discover which thank yous are most meaningful for your customers.
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 policies. You’re asking your customer to tell you the truth, and that’s a big deal. An even bigger deal is what you do with the answer to this question. Listening and asking for clarification are acceptable responses. Explaining why you can’t or won’t try the suggestion isn’t.
A note of caution. If you ask a customer this question about change, don’t be surprised if your customer asks it back at you. What would you say? And if this original question-and-answer session turns into an ongoing dialogue, you may find yourself facing a partnership waiting to happen.
Actually, you’ll have better luck asking this question of a customer who considers you a partner rather than a vendor. As the world of business has gotten more complex, customers are looking for the opportunity to work with their suppliers instead of just buying from them. Working together in a partnership relationship, seeing the world from a broader viewpoint than either one of you could ever envision on your own, allows both parties to gain. These partnerships go beyond the traditional working toward a win/win situation. They exist to create. Create new ways of going to market, new ways to solve problems, and new ways to define success.
Partnership carries with it the desire for two-way feedback. In fact, the only way partnerships work is when both parties are willing to make the commitment to a continuous stream of feedback—what’s working and what’s not. Terry McElroy from McLane Company is quoted in Dance Lessons: Six Steps to Great Partnerships in Business & Life by Chip Bell and Heather Shea as saying, “We are constantly asking ourselves, ‘Are we doing business at the level we want to? Are we worthy of this partnership?’ And we want partnerships with people who ask themselves those same questions.” Another set of good questions.
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 tabs. Snack from the gift shop. Each form has three lines, one for your room number, one for your signature and one for the PRINT YOUR NAME command. The other day I realized that, because I paid attention in penmanship class, my signature is perfectly legible. So I declined to follow the PRINT YOUR NAME command. The server who picked up my check noticed this omission and asked, nicely, if I would print my name. “Why,” I replied, “since my signature is perfectly readable?” “Because you have to,” he announced. “Not necessary,” I answered. “I’ll have to call the manager,” he said. “Give the check back to me,” I demanded. With the offending charge slip back in my hands and tempted to lower his tip, I scribbled my name illegibly in the heavily disputed PRINT YOUR NAME space. Why, if my handwriting is a nonissue when I pay for a meal in the hotel’s restaurant directly with my MasterCard, does it become a matter of state security when I want to charge something to the hotel bill that will eventually be settled with the aforementioned MasterCard? Not a big deal, but enough of an annoyance to encourage me to find a restaurant outside the hotel for dinner the next time.
Your customers never encounter a policy or procedure problem when they do business with you, right? When was the last time you checked? Every business needs systems, policies, and procedures to function. Employees need to understand their jobs, the technologies that support their work, and the boundaries that limit their authority. Leaders need to deliver decisions in context, envision opportunities for the future, and watch budgets. Where is the voice of the customer heard? Internal systems are seldom viewed from the outside, and until they are, you can’t call yourself customer-friendly. The only way to understand how your systems and processes feel is to ask a customer. Just as it is impossible to proofread something you’ve written, it is impossible to judge your own systems with a clear eye. Asking this question of lots of customers can be an eye-opening experience, and the answers might provide some clear directions for changes that need to be made to your policies. Making things hard for your customers, even when it’s by accident, isn’t a good idea.
