My friend Kathryn Jeffers wrote a book called Don’t Kill the Messenger: How to Avoid the Dangers of Workplace Conflict. In the Introduction, she paraphrases Aristotle’s words on anger. He believed that anyone can become angry, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, for the right purpose, and in the right way, is not easy. If you know how to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, for the right purpose, and in the right way, and if you have asked three people who care enough about you to tell the truth for verification of your skill set, skip the rest of this question. If not, read on.

Anger in the workplace is a tricky thing. It is most often misused, misdirected, and misunderstood. Most of us are not comfortable dealing with raw emotions. We get uncomfortable with glad, sad, and mad and go to great lengths to avoid them. We haven’t been educated to react appropriately when we’re either the giver or the receiver of these emotions. Learning to understand, control, and utilize conflict in a positive way takes commitment, practice, and hard work.

Unfortunately, leaders often think they are exempt from the commitment, practice, and hard work it takes to make anger a tool rather than an outburst. In many organizations, the stories about a leader’s rage are legendary, and they’re usually not stories with happy endings. It is highly unlikely that you or any other members on your leadership team will succeed by using anger as a management tool. If you or one of your colleagues uses anger or rage as a technique, this would be a great time to stop it.

This does not mean that you shouldn’t think about or talk about what makes you angry. Even though you may pride yourself on containing your anger (trust me on this), people around you know when you’re angry. Knowing what makes you angry is helpful for both you and the people around you.

Several years ago I realized that having to go over information or instructions people had already agreed upon made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. All of my ability to help a learner learn, and my ability to keep calm and display infinite patience, disappeared. When people ask me to go over old agreements, my jaw clenches, my breathing gets shallow, and I start talking in short, clipped sentences. I don’t yell, rant, or rave. The effect, however, is the same. People know I’m angry, and I know they don’t know why. This is my problem, as anger so often is, and I’ve learned that letting people know what’s happening to me—and that it isn’t their fault—is helpful for both of us. So, answer this question. It will be good for you and for others!

Crisis creates fear, and the only way I know to quell fear is with information. Your job as a leader during a crisis is to be visible, approachable, accessible (see the comments on the previous question), and the fount of all information. Impossible, you say. I guess I agree. It’s impossible, and yet a leader needs to figure out how to make it happen during a crisis.

As I see it, the only possibility of pulling this one off is a combination of two things. First, you need to have your own support group that is made up of the smartest people you can find and that can be mobilized quickly. Some need to be people-smart. These are the individuals who know the soft side of leadership inside and out. Others need to be technology wizards in whatever technology makes your business run and makes it special. These people won’t necessarily be leaders; in fact, some of them will be frontline doers. Just make sure you know who they are and how to get them close to you in a hurry. With your team assembled, you can go to work.

You’ll be the point person, talking to people and asking them what they need to know. Some responses you’ll be able to answer immediately. Some answers will come from the members of your team. There are some things you’re asked for that you or your team won’t be able to provide right away. That’s where the second part of the strategy comes into play.

Make it the job of those soft-skills experts to keep track of the unanswered questions and the people who asked them. As information becomes available, research is completed, and answers found, it is the job of the soft-skills people to get those details out—delivering the right answers to the right people. If there is a significant time lapse between questions being asked and answers being available, these people will also have the responsibilities for periodic updates and check-ins so no one feels as if the information they’ve requested isn’t important, or even worse, as if they’re not important.

If this feels like a lot of work, it is. The scope of your crisis will determine the complexity of your information distribution process and system. Just don’t lose sight of what started the need for all this in the first place. You’re the leader. You and your people are living through a crisis. You asked the question a good leader would ask: What do you need to know?

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.

If you don’t ask this question shortly after you meet a new employee, if you don’t keep silent long enough for them to respond, and if you don’t answer truthfully any questions that they do ask, you’ve lost any chance for them to react positively to your questioning leadership style in the future. More than just providing information, this question is designed to begin the process of establishing trust.

Trust is a leader’s stock-in-trade. Without trust, it is impossible to be a leader. You can be a manager, a boss, a dictator, or a ruler. You can order people to do things, require rules to be followed, inspire behavior from fear, or demand obedience, but you won’t inspire confidence, encourage creativity, or be proud of yourself. You can’t be a leader.

Trust is built and maintained through actions both big and small. Respectfully asking questions and taking appropriate actions based on the answers is one of the ways trust is built between leaders and followers. Demonstrating your willingness to really listen to all the people on your team or in your organization is another. Asking questions that go beyond the expected offers another path to trust. Trust takes time to build, but it can be lost in a minute. As a leader who asks questions, you need to watch out for these trust destroying behaviors:

* Asking a question without listening to the answers

* Expecting followers to take the time to answer your questions without taking the time to answer theirs

* Treating their questions or answers as trivial

* Missing an opportunity to ask the all-important follow-up question

* Not treating answers to questions with confidentiality (unless you’ve asked for permission to share an answer)

If you ever, because of an enormous brain cramp, come close to behaving in one of these ways, apologize at once, apologize repeatedly, apologize publicly (unless, of course, that would betray a confidence and dig the hole you’re in even deeper), and then get to work rebuilding the trust you’ve lost.

Remember, even if the person involved accepts your first apology with a “Don’t worry, it’s not a big thing,” don’t believe him. Smile, nod, and do the trust-building work anyway.

More words adding up to longer answers do not necessarily provide more insight. Sometimes questions that force brevity can provide interesting answers that are easy to compare. This question falls into that category. Imagine asking this question of all new hires for six months. Depending on the size of your organization and your rates of turnover and expansion, you could develop and keep track of the one-word answers pretty easily. What would be the value of that? I can think of three.

1. As your list of descriptive words grows, you can compare them and look for consistency of expectations from those who join your organization or department. What do you think it means if half the people respond with words like “fun,” “energetic,” and “creative,” and the other half of the people you’ve asked respond with words like “stable,” “traditional,” and “respectable”? My analysis of those responses would be that half of the people who responded were going to be disappointed. It’s up to you to decide which half. A split response like this tells you that you haven’t established a consistent image in your marketplace. A consistent response that you like tells you your image is intact. A consistent response you don’t like means you have some actions to take.

2. As your list of words grows, you’ll gain insight into the way people feel about your organization or department. Leaders have responsibilities for feelings as well as facts, and you might as well find out how people are feeling as they join your team. Waiting until later isn’t exactly stellar leadership behavior.

3. Keep track of whom you’ve asked, how they answered, and when you asked them. Use a milestone—four-to six-month anniversaries would work—and ask the question again: Now that you’ve been with us for a while, what one word would you use to describe our organization? Asking and comparing these answers will give you insight into the consistency of experience your people have as they become part of your team.

Don’t let the fact that my imagination was limited to three possibilities stunt your thought processes. What are other ways you could use this information? Think about it.

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. Leaders who believe that they can focus their work on the tasks at hand and leave the “soft stuff” to the human resources department shouldn’t really call themselves leaders! If you choose to continue to accept my challenge and focus your attention on the way people feel about working in your organization, the next several questions are the perfect place to start. Remember, the process is simple—ask, listen, and say thanks. Take the risk. I know you can do it.

Remember those questions on intelligence tests that give you a list of words and then ask which word doesn’t belong? Try this one: Enthusiasm, Passion, Excitement, Fun, Work. What is your answer? Hopefully, you came to the conclusion that this was an example of a poorly constructed or trick question. They all go together, don’t they? Or, maybe you’re wearing your Dilbert hat and wonder why anyone would bother to ask such an obvious question. Work has nothing to do with those other words. If that’s your response, shame on you! Think of the energy an organization would have if everyone in it agreed that enthusiasm, passion, excitement, fun, and work were synonyms. What could your organization accomplish if just half your employees believed that? Has it occurred to you that even 15 percent would be an improvement? Are you clueless about how people feel when they enter your doors? Believe me, how your employees feel as they start their workweek provides great insight about how they’ll interact with each other and with your customers. When you decide to start talking about the feelings that fill your workplace, make a commitment to find, support, and showcase the positive ones. Don’t read that to mean you should ignore or dismiss the negative emotions; just don’t make them the center of your action. Look for ways to increase enthusiasm for solving problems, ignite passion for learning, encourage excitement around success, foster fun as a stress reliever, and discourage seeing work as a four-letter word. You’ll be 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 jobs elsewhere because they believe that no one in your organization cares enough to fix internal systems? Dr. W. Edward Deming,the man whose name is forever linked with quality, believed that 85 percent of quality problems in the workplace are caused by systems, not by an individual’s inefficiencies. Our organizations are filled with policies and procedures that prohibit people from doing their best to satisfy our customers, and you need to know where it’s happening in yours.

This is the first risky-to-answer question we’ve encountered in our list. The answer to this particular question can often be a department or a person’s name. Please remember that an answerer may need some time to decide whether or not it is actually safe to tell you the truth. Describing an outdated policy or explaining an easy to streamline procedure is a fairly safe answer. Identifying a bottleneck department or an obstructionist co-worker is another decision process entirely. You will have to consider time and place when you venture forth with this question. A comfortable pause after asking a high-risk question will facilitate your receiving a thoughtful and productive answer.

A word of caution: One of the ground rules of good questioning is that when a question is asked and an answer is given, the questioner does not (and often should not) respond. Given an answer, you should simply acknowledge the information, clarify any ambiguities, and assure the answerer that their opinion is valuable and will be considered. If you express an opinion or make a promise based on a single response to your question, you might find yourself in the middle of something more complex than that one answer indicated. This is especially problematic when a response to your question points a finger at an individual. An emotional reaction from you may satisfy the answerer but cause great difficulty for the other person mentioned. Your best response to this situation is “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. As I understand it, your situation is [restate the problem]. You have my word that I will look into this matter and will get back to you with a resolution. Please know that I appreciate your efforts to make our organization better.” Now your job becomes one of detective. By asking more questions and listening to the additional answers carefully, you’ll be able to fulfill your promise to deliver a resolution to the original answerer. It may not be exactly what they wanted or envisioned, but they will appreciate the fact that you kept your word and followed through.

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, for the most part, they are expected to learn about shops, restaurants, and local attractions on their own time with their own dollars. That got me thinking about how organizations learn about their competition.

(If this apparent leap in subject is uncomfortable for you, get used to it. Not because it is a fault of mine, but because it is a common occurrence when you get serious about asking questions all the time. One interesting question seems to fire brain activity that may appear to be random but with close scrutiny is connected. My experience has been that the effort to find the connection brings little insight, so I’ve learned to ignore the leap and focus on the seemingly new topic. I suggest you do the same.)

I can remember only one time in my corporate career when my employer asked what I knew about our competition. As it happened, I knew quite a lot about a new product that was being introduced by one of our hottest competitors because one of my customers had just gotten a bid from them and had given me a copy. I had read and filed the information. I’m ashamed to admit that it had never occurred to me that this might be important information for the whole organization, and if I hadn’t been asked, it would have remained buried in my file.

Employees are consumers before they are employees, and many of them choose to do business with the organizations that vie for the attention and the dollars of your customers. Or they know people who regularly interact with your competition. How are you mining the information they have?

Even more interesting, there is the possibility that your employees may have some insight that you don’t into who the competition really is. I remember attending an American Booksellers Association BookExpo in 1995 without hearing one bookstore owner mention Amazon.com. I have to believe that many of them had heard about the new company, but most seemed to dismiss it as a fad for the few. They were focusing on the growth of the large bookstore chains, a serious threat to be sure, but nothing compared to the impact of Internet book buying.

I’m pretty confident that out there somewhere is an Amazon.com like competitor for at least part of your business. Asking this question might just give you the heads-up you need.

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 fast you can mentally turn someone off when you decide that what they’re talking about doesn’t apply to you? It’s amazing to me how many people believe that if the words “customer service” aren’t in their job description, customers aren’t their responsibility. I decided recently that I wouldn’t return to a particular restaurant because of misleading menu copy. The last complaint I heard about an e-business was over their packaging materials. Menu copywriters and purchasers of packaging materials are examples of people who may not realize that they are responsible for customer relationships. Leaders who ask questions about customers help people in all positions understand that learning the needs and wants of customers is everyone’s job.

So, the questions you ask about customers direct, remind, and encourage your people to get and stay curious about your customers. The answers you get from your staff will provide a virtually unlimited supply of information to act on. Answers to this question will fall into four categories.

1. People will not be able to answer. Don’t panic. This response tells you that you and your leadership team have some work to do. Some people will need to be reminded that they have a responsibility to understand their customers. Some people will need to learn the concept of serving internal customers. Some people will need help to see how their work links to the work of others within the organization to ultimately serve your external customers.

2. People’s answers will be wrong. Don’t get mad. This is a perfect time for a follow-up question. What leads you to believe this? would be a good possibility. People may have been given incorrect information, may have jumped to a conclusion from a single encounter, or may be relying on old data. Helping people learn their customer responsibilities and fostering continued dialogue can clear up this misinformation.

3. People’s answers will confirm things you already know. Don’t get complacent. These responses, while comfortable, need to be looked at carefully. Do you really know your customers well or are you collectively operating on old data? Funny how one question leads to another, isn’t it?

4. People’s answers will surprise you with insights you’ve never had. Don’t be embarrassed. These are the most exciting answers of all. Insights are a function of viewing the status quo with new eyes. If you lead an organization filled with people who consistently scan their environment, think about what they see, and draw insightful conclusions…well, things hardly get better than that!

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 to be used in. Even at eleven that didn’t make much sense. “How,” I asked, “can you tell if what you’re making is right?” “We can’t,” my Dad replied. “We just wait for them to tell us how close we are to getting it right and then we do it over again.”

This is the partnership question. Leaders who want to deepen their relationships with their customers ask this question often. In fact, it quickly becomes one of their favorite questions to ask. Understanding your customer’s view of their future helps you get a glimpse of your future. Asking this question will get you lots of data. First, there’s the basic information. Information that will give you insights into how you’ll have to innovate or modify your processes and products to meet your customer’s need in the future. Customers who can’t articulate their view of the future may not be a long-term asset for you.

Next, you can judge the excitement level. The future is a funny thing. People and organizations that are excited about the future generally have a promising future. People who are pessimistic about the future often face bleaker times. Who would you rather have on your client list?

When you combine the quality of the information you get from the customer with the enthusiasm level generated by giving the answer, you’ve got impressive insight into your own crystal ball. Targeting those customers who think and plan for the future and are excited about the possibilities the future hold for them seems like a great way to plan your future success. These are the customers you’d like to partner with. But you’ll never know who they are unless you ask the question.