The best time to ask this question is when you’re talking to a cus-tomer. The next best time to ask this question is when you’re talk-ing 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 question is to ask it of as many people as you can, as often as you can.
The worst possible position to be in when it comes to ideas is to have too few of them. That’s why the primary rule of brainstorm-ing is to amass quantity, not force quality. Unfortunately, many peo-ple forget this rule, ask for ideas, stifle the conversation by judging each idea as soon as it’s mentioned, and then wonder why their peo-ple just don’t brainstorm well. If you want to hear about ideas that might make your customers happy, you need to generate lots of ideas and consider them all—even the ones that are too costly, too time-consuming, or too outrageous.
Creativity is messy. The best ideas never appear fully formed and practical. They are often hidden inside an idea that is impractical and silly. These best ideas need to be coaxed, nurtured, and defended.
Creating an environment that encourages creative thinking isn’t always easy, but it’s usually fun.
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19. 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, 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 employ-ees 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 ques-tion might just give you the heads-up you need.
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❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ WHAT DID YOU LEARN? ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚
It is a dangerous thing to assume what people know. Did that thought cross your mind as you asked these questions? I’ve known young business people with MBAs from top business schools, who lacked what I considered to be a basic understanding of how their organization worked. Leaders ask the questions in this chapter, not to find out how much people don’t know, but to discover where they need to focus their teaching.
Asking these questions and getting less than stellar answers isn’t cause for depression, despair, and another cup of coffee with a col-league drunk to the ain’t-it-awful-what-these-kids-don’t-know refrain.
Leaders take the answers to these questions as an energizing
start-ing point for action. They are excited to develop a plan for their team to get smarter about their work. They work their plan and ask the questions again as a way to chart their plan’s success. They make sure each new member of their team is brought into the organiza-tion with the knowledge and tools necessary for them to be a full participant right from the beginning.
How about you? Think these questions might work in your world? You’ll never know till you ask.
It is a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
—Bertrand Russell, English mathemati-cian and philosopher
❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ CHAPTER THREE WORKSHEET ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚
1.What question in Chapter 3 did you find most challenging? Why?
2.What other questions about the business did they make you think of?
3.What basic business issues does your team need to learn about?
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TE AM FL Y
Team-Fly®
4.What is your plan for making sure that they learn these things?
5.What one thing do you most want to remember from this chapter?
OTHER NOTES
BEFORE YOU rush out and start asking more questions, there are a few things to keep in mind. Asking questions takes time. Asking questions implies that you’re going to lis-ten to the answers. Asking these kinds of questions will annoy some people. Understanding each of these issues will help you formulate your questioning strategy, so let’s take a look at each.
❚ Asking questions takes time. Don’t kid yourself about this one. You can’t approach people with
deeper questions leaders need to ask employees
chapter
4
important questions without allowing for the time it takes to hear the answers. When faced with a good question, most people actually think for a while, formulate their answer, deliver it, and expect a response. Often the response is a fol-low-up question that starts the process all over again. This takes time. It is rude to ask a question if you don’t have the time to listen to and absorb the answer. It is inconsiderate to interrupt someone’s day and ask them a question without determining if they have the time to answer.
Many leaders don’t ask questions because of the time fac-tors involved. When things settle down, they say, then I’ll have the time to ask questions. If you are a leader who’s waiting for things to settle down, you’re going to be wait-ing a long time. You need to make the time to ask questions.
It’s your job.
❚ Asking questions implies that you’re going to listen to the answers. Remember the story about the man who wanted a note to his wife to prove that he’d passed my listening course? Remember my answer? Understanding the process of good listening doesn’t ensure actually applying those principles.
Have you ever had a conversation with a person who kept looking at their watch while you’re speaking? Most of us use the time while another person is speaking to develop our responses to their words (or what we think they’ll say since we’re not really listening anyway). That’s not listening.
Asking a question and listening to the answer involves
stay-ing engaged in the answer from beginnstay-ing to end. No mat-ter how long it takes the answerer to get to the end.
Asking questions and then practicing poor listening skills is a very bad idea. If you’re not willing to sharpen your listen-ing skills, you’d be better off not asklisten-ing questions at all.
❚ Asking these questions will annoy some people. Not everyone will be thrilled with your newfound enthusiasm for asking questions that go beyond the generally expected business questions. Expect some rolling of the eyes, double takes, and downright avoidance behavior. Just don’t let these behaviors
stop you from asking. People are suspicious of leaders who start asking questions because they’re confused by new behav-ior, because they fear the reprisal for an honestly answered tough question, or because they’re just plain cynical.
Don’t let reluctance on the part of others influence your commitment to asking these questions. Acknowledge their existence, explain your intentions again, and keep asking.
Don’t run out and bombard people with questions. Pick the right question for the right person at the right time.
Learning how to ask questions is about strategic thinking.
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Asking the right question takes as much skill as giving the right answers.
—Robert Half, American personnel agency executive
The time you spend thinking strategically about the ques-tions you ask will be time well-spent and the answers you get will be of greater value.
One more word of advice. If you’re having trouble deciding what question to start with in order to go deeper with this behavior, why not try this one: What would you think of a leader who is known for the quality questions they ask?The answers just might provide the moti-vation you need to keep asking.