Four Questions Every Leader Should Be Asking
Most leaders know something is off. These four questions tend to make it clear where the problem actually lives. And it is probably not where you think.
We work with leaders at every level — companies, divisions, departments, work teams. And in all that time, we have found that four questions cut through faster than anything else. They are not trick questions. They are not meant to embarrass anyone. But when you sit with them honestly, they tend to reveal a lot.
The first one: do you trust your work systems to deliver reliable performance? Not do your systems look good on paper. Do you actually trust them? Because if you do not, you are filling that gap yourself. You are in the details, micromanaging, handling things that should be handled by a system that works. That is not leadership. That is survival mode.
The second: is everyone in your organization working smarter than they were a year ago? Not just your top performers. Everyone. If the answer is no or not sure, your intellectual capital is standing still while your competitors are compounding. We have to keep growing, or we start to fall behind.
If people are not growing, then fire them, get some new ones. Well, that is going to be ugly. What we actually need to do is engage in continuously increasing our intellectual capital and our ability to do the work.
The third: do you have a culture of proactive engagement by everyone? And I mean everyone. Do not turn around and say yes, except for those young people, or except for those old people. The data is clear on this. Every single generation is disengaged right now. Not some of them. All of them. When engagement is missing, everything that needs to happen falls back on leadership to push it forward. That weight adds up fast.
The fourth: is your organization making smarter decisions than it was a year ago? Decision quality is the compound interest of leadership. If it is not growing, something is draining it. If we are not growing, we are dying, folks. It is that straightforward.
If any of these questions caused you to feel uncomfortable, remember that is not a failure of your people. Dr. W. Edwards Deming proved that 94% of failures come from the system, not the worker. The fix is building systems that actually work, and then trusting people to run them. When those systems are working, leaders can focus on what is next and get back to leading. And that is exactly where they belong.