On Changing the Question

This week’s Book Learning draws inspiration from ‘first, break all the rules’ by Marcus Buckhingham and Curt Coffman.

Mike was always in the top 10 of his company’s top 150 salespeople. But, his manager, Kirk, always felt he had more to give.
Every month, he would try and talk to him about how well the other sales people had done. But, it had no effect. No fire, no burn – Mike just seemed dead bored.

It was then Kirk tried a different question. Instead of ‘What do you plan to do to beat the rest?’, he asked Mike ‘What do you plan to do to better yourself this month?’

And voila! Mike was transformed. It turned out that Mike was not competitive at all (unlike Kirk) but was an achiever who only cared about beating himself! Mike had dozens of ideas and together and Mike and Kirk worked on them. He ended up becoming the company’s top salesperson for 6 straight years!

To get the best out of our teams, it is essential we ask the right questions. And the big learning here is not to ask ONE question to everyone but to change the question to play to the motivations of those in our team. And hopefully, we will also ask ourselves the right question in the process..

Here’s to asking the right questions this week!