This question is probably the most blatantly selfish question in the entire section. Finding good questions becomes an obsession for leaders who learn the value and power of asking questions. What better way to find questions than to ask for them?

Asking for questions within your organization works for a while. Every leader, even those who don’t make questioning a priority, will have a few questions they routinely ask. But you’ll often find that within an organization, questions seem to cluster around certain themes. Asking for new questions from people who come from different organizational backgrounds will provide you with a whole new set of possible questions.

But there is another, less selfish reason for asking this question of a new hire. Their reaction will provide you with insights into their comfort with a leader who asks questions. Some people will eagerly share questions, some will haltingly respond with a question, and others will stare blankly as if you’ve asked the most bizarre question ever uttered.

The eager sharer is telling you either that they’ve joined your team from a question-rich culture or that they understand the power of questions and are happy to share. Work with this new employee to strengthen their commitment to questioning and to encourage them to share new questions as they find them.

The slow responder is letting you know that they haven’t had a lot of experience with leaders who ask questions but are willing to participate. Make sure you thank them for their contribution and encourage them to make others in the future. Keep them in mind for some gentle questioning in the near future so you can help them understand this part of your leadership style.

The blank looker is harder to read. They may be confused by a leader who asks questions, frightened by this level of interaction with their new leader, or genuinely surprised by the action of a leader asking them for their opinion. No matter which interpretation might be accurate, don’t jump to a conclusion. It’s now your job to find out which of these (or any of many other explanations) is the right one.

No matter which situation you encounter with this question, like asking any good question of the right person at the right time, you’ll get valuable information that you’ll be able to use in the future.

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, and a final decision was reached.

“We’ll create a video that tells everyone why they should be happy that they work here,” they decided. “We’ll prove that the future’s bright by showing our grandly produced video to everyone. Spare no expense,” they said. “Just get it done.”

So, the script was written, the actors were hired, and the locations scouted. Production began and money was spent. The final version was shown to the executive team and they beamed at each other. This would do it; things would change now. After all, they had spared no expense.

Employees were ushered into the meeting room and given plastic cups filled with sparkling grape juice. The lights dimmed and the video began. The music was powerful and the videography impressive. The leaders sitting in the front of the room led the applause and raised their glasses in a toast to the renewed commitment they were certain everyone in attendance felt. People filed out of the room talking about their weekend plans. That’s when I heard one of the participants say, “I can’t believe they’re trying to get us to put our hats back on with that crap!” No one else seemed to hear his comment. Curious, I followed him out of the building and asked, “What hat?”

“Oh,” he replied offhandedly, “When I first started, fifteen years ago, we all had hats with the company’s name and logo. I was like most guys; we wore them all the time. We wanted everyone to know where we worked. We were proud to work here. I haven’t worn my hat for a long time.”

Many organizations, in an attempt to improve morale, spend dollars, time, and energy externally and forget that morale is an inside job. Please don’t ask consultants to help you improve morale in your organization. Start by asking this question yourself of the people on your team, really listen to the answers, and go to work.

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.

Audience: employees
Message: Here’s what quality means specifically at our company. We need your commitment to build quality in, not add it on.
Tone: motivational
Timing: 23-24 minutes, depending on insertion of anecdotes and details about quality-control issues at your company

I want to talk to you for a few minutes about quality and elephants. Someone has said, “An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications.” We’ve built a few elephants around here over the history of our company, and not necessarily for the government. Some of the specifications were ours. And, to give you the bottom line on this subject, I guess you could say we’ve found building elephants to be an unprofitable product line.

According to Aristotle, “Quality is not an act. It is a habit.” Although we’re not staging a hanging for our few acts of omission or commission—our mistakes—we are determined to ingrain the quality habit. It’s no longer enough to make the most products or the greatest array of products; we have to make the best products.
And quality doesn’t just have to do with products.

Here’s the way we define it at (company). Improving quality involves all our activities: Products and services…. Customer relations…. Management style…. Human-resource policies…. Community-involvement projects.

Quality is nothing but… continued attention. Continued attention to everything. Every nut and bolt. Every product packaging and coat of paint. Every process and policy. Attention to detail.

In fact, that’s the nature of business in general, says John L. McCaffrey:

The mechanics of running a business are really not very complicated when you get down to the essentials. You have to make some stuff and sell it to somebody for more than it cost you. That’s about all there is to it,… except for a few million details.

Those details are in your hands. As someone has said, “Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence.” You are our quality control. Individually and collectively. Attention to detail will produce profit or put us out of the market.

What kind of detail? Let’s translate all this talk about quality into specifics. To some people, quality means “being American” or “using common sense” or “being ethical.” Vague generalities.

Although quality is easy to talk about in generalities, it’s difficult to define in specifics.

Think for a minute about what the term quality means to you: The lonely Maytag repairman? Exxon’s “quality you can count on”? AT&T phones that don’t fall apart?

Or maybe you think of what it is not: Like “guaranteed” hotel reservations and airplane seats that are not? The full-service gasoline station that isn’t? Department-store clerks who answer “I don’t know—that’s not my department”? Or, maybe “The computer’s down again—we can’t give you that information”? Or how about the bank teller’s “You’ll have to get at the back of the line, sir”? Quality can’t always be measured in widgets per hour or durability alone.

So let’s define it specifically and broadly:

With internal policies, quality means: Are our employees happy with their work environment and benefits? How many people do they have to talk to when they need to get a problem straightened out? How much paperwork do they have to shuffle to get their insurance claims filed and paid? How many forms do they have to fill out before they can arrange for a payroll deduction? Can they come to work in a pleasant, comfortable environment? Do we make it easy for them to handle their family responsibilities as well as their job responsibilities?

With regard to management style, quality means: Does your manager tell you what the department’s goals are? Does he or she give you feedback about how you’re contributing to those goals? Does the manager set realistic deadlines on projects? Does your manager provide you with the necessary training to do your job? Does the manager follow through on promises? Do you get rewarded for your contributions?

With community-involvement projects, quality means: How many of our employees contribute their talent and time to community efforts? How many hours do they devote? Does the community view us as a willing corporate citizen or one that has to be cajoled into contributing? What projects have we participated in and with what success?

With our internal customers—say, the people in Public Affairs—here’s what we mean by quality: Do they get the information they need from Data-Processing on time? Does it make sense? How many times do they have to ask for an interpretation of the computer printout? Does the VP—the internal customer—get the results of an internal audit in a form that he or she can read? Is it timely information?

These are the definitions of quality with internal customers.

In customer relations, here’s what we mean by quality: How many times does the phone ring before we answer it? How long does the customer have to wait on the phone or in person to talk to one of our reps? How many people does the customer have to tell his or her story to in order to get some action? Are we courteous? Are we reliable when we say we’ll do something? How easy is it for the customer to buy from us? How often do we make billing mistakes? Do we ship fast enough to meet the customer’s expectations? Do the products arrive in good condition?

With products, we’re talking about these quality issues: Does the product work like the instructions say it will?
How often does it break down? How many times does the customer have to call us to ask an operational question? How long will the product last?

Journalist Russell Baker has classified things into three scientific categories: Those that don’t work to begin with, those that break down, and those that get lost. We plan to eliminate the first two categories from our product line. We’ll let the customer worry about the ones that get lost.

These are some pointed, difficult questions to ask ourselves. But ask we must. All of these are the essence of the vague term “quality.” The specifics…. The details that we need to handle effectively to be productive and profitable.

No matter how vague we may think the term “quality,” our customers don’t. They define it specifically, but subjectively: To one quality may mean, “It won’t break when I drop it on the floor.” To another it means, “It doesn’t fade when it’s been sitting in the sun.” To another, it means, “It will print faster than anything else on the market.” To still another it means, “It will impress my colleagues and friends.”

However they define quality, customers are “hopping mad,” as my grandmother used to say, when they don’t get it. Here’s a letter to the editor published in Newsweek from Michael J. Cohen, New York:

Don’t you get it—you big cheese, decision makers, production whiz kids? We consumers are not fools. We want fine design, good quality and long-lasting products. Foreign—read Japanese—products are designed, produced and marketed to respond to those wants. Until American manufacturers wake up to the fact that we consumers are entitled to the very best, we have every right to use our good taste and shopping skills.

Whatever the customer’s subjective definition, we have to define quality to mean all those things I’ve just mentioned.

Quality goes in after the necessary and practical features are already assumed as part of the design.
Someone has been laughing at the customer’s expense. Have you heard this riddle? How can the competition make money selling their products so cheaply? Answer: They make their profits repairing those products.

When I first read that quip, I laughed. Later it wasn’t so funny. That’s been the story in the U.S. at too many companies over the last 20 years. As a consumer, it hurts me to think about the broken gadgets and widgets that I’ve trashed after a few uses because to get them repaired was more trouble or expense than to buy a new one. There’s got to be something unethical in all that—not to mention unprofitable in the long-term.

In fact, there’s a big connection between quality and productivity—that’s why so many industry journal articles lump them together. David Kearns, chairman and CEO of Xerox, believes that “one-fourth of all work in American industry is done to correct errors.” Now, that’s expensive.

You’ve heard the question before: “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, how will you ever find time to do it over?” Another pertinent question might be, “If you can’t afford to build in quality the first-time around, how can you pay someone to add it on later?”

Here is William A. Foster’s definition of quality, written almost a century ago: “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.”

Foreign competition has shown that low cost and high quality are not mutually exclusive terms. Making things right the first time eliminates waste and increases productivity over the long haul.

A recent survey by the American Electronics Association revealed that although 85 percent of respondents had undertaken a quality-improvement effort, fewer than one-third could document significant improvements in quality and productivity.

But these studies showed something else. Most of these quality programs had been designed for “after-the-fact” quality. Finding and correcting errors in things that had already been made. That’s expensive. That’s why we’re aiming to build the quality in up front—not add it on.

I want to outline our framework for building quality in. Within the next few weeks and months, you’ll be hearing a great deal about these quality-assurance programs:

[Insert an overview of the new programs you plan to implement.]

In other words, the quality race is a marathon—not a 50-yard dash to the finish line.

Research by the Strategic Planning Institute, on 3,000 businesses, has shown that as quality increases, so does productivity,… market share,… customer satisfaction,… profitability. To put it simply: Quality pays its own way.

Someone has said, “It’s better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.” We may not have won any world-wide titles for our products—I don’t know that there are any except for the bottom-line title. But we ourselves will know the quality’s there. And our customers know—that’s what really counts.

Well, you may be saying, we do pretty well. We already handle 99.9 percent of the details well. Isn’t that enough? That’s a good question. Here’s how quality consultant Jeff Dewar of QCI International would answer that. He argues for a goal of zero errors or defects with a few analogies. If we accept 99.9 percent perfect as our goal, we’d have to accept the following conditions:

• 2 unsafe plane landings per day at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport
• 16,000 pieces of mail lost by the U.S. Postal Service every hour
• 22,000 checks deducted from the wrong bank account every hour
• 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions each year
• 32,000 missed heartbeats per person per year

That puts our total quality goal in perspective. Our aim is perfection in every way every day. We don’t want to build more elephants.

We can’t let ourselves work in circles. We hit the market with a new product—like our (name of product). It’s successful. That builds pride and confidence. That confidence and pride relaxes our attention to detail. That let-up in attention to detail produces problems. Those new problems in quality destroy our confidence. It can become a circle—a circle that we want to break.

You may have known some people who don’t want it good—they just want it Tuesday. We’ve got to break that line of thinking.

Quality is everyone’s responsibility. That’s not a new statement or idea, but one worth repeating often. There is no job so simple that it cannot be done wrong. I don’t know about you, but some mornings I have problems tying my shoelaces so that they stay tied. But we don’t want to let the simple things trip us up. Simple things such as how we

[Insert details about a few specific, “small” things that need to be done right in your organization.]

In other words, we need to question ourselves on every task—just like the second-grader who questioned her teacher while they were on a class trip to an art museum. They stopped in front of an abstract sculpture. And the second-grader asked, “What’s that?”

The teacher answered, “It’s supposed to be a galloping horse.”

“Well, why isn’t it?” the second-grader wanted to know.

We need to be asking ourselves similar questions about our tasks and products. Why aren’t they what they’re supposed to be?

Customers see a big difference between almost right and right, between good and best, between so-so and superior. That difference is what we want to manufacture around here.

Journalist Sydney J. Harris has observed: “An idealist believes the short run doesn’t count…. A cynic believes the long run doesn’t matter…. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.”

I’m a realist. Quality in the short run determines our long-term profit. Customers often forget how little we charge to do the job. But they remember how well we do the job.

I’m not a prophet, but I have a prediction. In the years ahead, technology won’t win the war. Even those companies who are the first to develop certain technology will lose their advantage in time. Everybody will follow the leader and eventually develop the same products. The competitive difference will be the people who attend to the quality.

That’s you. You will be our decision makers on quality. Every day. With every detail.