…SO, YOU CAN COME UP WITH THE BEST ANSWERS. What does this blog post title mean to you? There is one of the questions right there… What’s up with you?… What are your hard questions? And do they have answers yet? What Matters Most to you! What do you stand for! What are you working toward and how will you get there? Look at all the question marks in this blog post introduction. It might be possible that here today, there are more questions than answers about some things… But we may be more certain than ever about some others. I have found it important to check in with the person staring back in the mirror. I have learned from experience, that to Be Yourself is to Free Yourself from so many restrictions. Last post was a “Moment of Reflection” … Maybe this post is too!
ASK THE HARD QUESTIONS!
As I have learned, unfortunately within most business meetings, even in high-level meetings, people spend too much time selling and posturing themselves to look cool. It’s different than the kind of “looking cool” that we all practiced in high school, but the motivation is the same: we want people to like us and think that we matter.
That sense of personal value and the pursuit of it starts pretty early. We recognize when Grandma loves us, so we naturally want to be around grandma. We notice when a certain teacher thinks we are smart, so we seem to do better in that class. And, when our girlfriend or boyfriend bends over backwards for us and makes us feel good, we want to keep dating.
Well, business, and churches, and marriage, and politics, and corporations and martial arts, and boxing, and Airline travel, and just about any social circumstance you need to….
👓 1) prove that you are smart, for an example…
…you ask complicated questions. You string together some unnecessary sentences to broadcast some newly acquired knowledge…. Or
📝 2) You need to prove that you were paying attention…
…you repeat what the last person said, and then add something new. (Often done with a terrible phrase, “Let me piggyback on what she said…”) Or…
😘 3) You need to prove that you and the boss are so much alike…
…you agree with everything that the boss says. Or you ask questions that you know that the boss will want to answer. (You can easily become THAT DUDE!) Or also…
📅 4) You even need proof that you attended the meeting…
…so, you talk a lot. You ask random questions, add comments, and then ask some more questions.
My first thought about all this is… Don’t be that dude!!
I’ve always seemed to be that other dude… the one who wants the answers to the Hardest Questions. The answers I have gotten over the years, have gone from soup to nuts, and I have learned a great deal about human beings. I’ve learned that we’re not always paying attention to what we need to see. We just seem many times to simply follow the trend and get in line. Again, personally I don’t do lines very well.
So, as it stands through all these years of listening and learning and growing, one conclusion that could be considered is that… If you really want to fix the problem of a broken meeting, (or broken company), or broken marriage, or broken system, try this. Ask the hard questions… So, you can get the important real answers! Here’s one of my favorite questions. A question that is deceptively simple:
“Is what we’re doing working?”
If you are a leader at your company, or on your team, or even in your house… if you want to be a leader, it’s your job to ask this question all the time. Your job is not to “manage people” or exert power. Your job is to make things work better. Every day, ask this question: is what we are doing working?
- Is this meeting working?
- Is this team working?
- Is this project working? Is it worth our time?
- Is this goal realistic?
- Are we on the same page…
- And in effect… How’ We Doing?!
We should continue to work together, but… Just In Case, is there a better way to do this?
Sometimes it’s a question you ask out loud, other times you don’t. But if you are the leader or the manager, or what some would call “the Boss, then you should ask yourself this every day, before every plan, before every meeting and certainly before every new journey or especially every new risk. Look at the faces of the 1, 5, 10 or even more people you’ve called into the conference room and make yourself certain that that the way you’re going about things is the best for all concerned in especially the proverbial long run. And don’t forget to make sure it’s good for YOU! Because going along, to get along, can be awfully wrong sometimes!
Anyway. When you ask hard questions, people may not always like you for it, but they WILL respect you. And maybe just maybe, you can avoid a lot of anguish, challenge, confusion, doubt and even danger. When you ask the right questions, especially of the right people , and even more at the right time… you may find yourself, and others may even find themselves, working uniquely together for a purpose that benefits everybody, and not just the dude in the room… who tries so hard to be like the boss, benefiting nobody… and losing himself!
Contributing thoughts: Matt S. Smith MBA, “Be Brave. Ask the Hard Questions.”
