409 Posts Found

If you’re a chief exec or even an executive leader:

• Do you have a comprehensive understanding of the groups that most affect the organization’s ability to reach its goals?
• Do you know who your top customers and most critical employees are?

Now that you’ve identified them, ask yourself:

• Why do those customers and employees choose your company?
• Why do they stay?
• What is the likelihood of their future loyalty?

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Chris Jones, Jake Herway | Source: The Biggest Mistakes New CEOs Make and How Not to Make Them | Subject: CEO / Executive Questions

• Do we shelter toxic leaders?
• Do we have the right people in the right places (especially managers)?
• Is our work environment transactional or relational?
• Are our benefits aligned with employee priorities?
• Employees want career paths and development opportunities. Can we provide it?
• How are we building a sense of community?

Authors: Aaron De Smet, Bill Schaninger, Bonnie Dowling, Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi | Source: ‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours | Subject: Human Resources Questions

1. Who should I meet with outside of our team? Your ability to figure out how to influence others will improve if you can get to a quick understanding of the unspoken or informal networks that govern the social dynamics of your new team or organization. Your boss is ideally placed to provide you with this intel.
2. How do you prefer to communicate? It is

… [ Read more ]

Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: 7 Questions to Ask Your New Boss | Subject: Personal and Career Development

1. Is it now, or will it likely be, a winning ecosystem?
2. How well do the purpose and culture of the ecosystem resonate with your own values and preferences?
3. Are commitments required (exclusivity, for example, or ecosystem-specific investments) that could limit your future flexibility?
4. Do you have the transparency and decision rights to understand and influence the development of the ecosystem?
5. To what extent do regulations for input,

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Balázs Zoletnik, Martin Reeves, Ulrich Pidun | Source: How Do You Succeed as a Business Ecosystem Contributor? | Subject: Strategy Questions

Before having a 1:1 meeting with a direct report, reflect on these types of questions.

• Does the person you’re managing feel invested in your company or team goals? Why should he/she be? Have you clearly explained the vision or goals, and his/her part in achieving them?
• Does he/she feel as if you’ve got his/her back?
• Do you know what motivates him/her?
• In every relationship, both parties must get

… [ Read more ]

Author: Maggie Leung | Source: Managers, Take Your 1:1s to the Next Level with These 6 Must Reads | Subject: Management Questions

Purpose defines our core reason for being and the positive impact we have on the world. It shapes our strategy, inspires our people, engages our customers and community, steers choices at moments of truth, and is fully embedded in our culture. Whether we are reappraising an existing purpose or designing one for the first time, we need to wrestle with challenging questions such as the … [ Read more ]

Authors: Arne Gast, Bill Schaninger, Bruce Simpson, Nina Probst, Pablo Illanes | Source: Purpose: Shifting from Why to How | Subjects: Management Questions, Mission / Vision / Values, Organization Questions

1. What is our mission? The mission captures the purpose of an organization’s existence. It has to encapsulate something that you believe in, at a deep and personal level, such that everyone in the organization understands and lives it.
2. Who is our customer? Only when you have clearly identified your customers can you focus on satisfying their needs.
3. What does the customer value? It’s common for

… [ Read more ]

Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Book Summary – The Five Most Important Questions You will Ever Ask About Your Organization | Subject: Management Questions

1. What’s important?
2. What should be the same?
3. What needs to change?

Author: Jason Fried | Source: Nailing the Next Five Years | Subject: Strategy Questions

Questions to help unpack pivotal transitions

1. What do you want to do differently in your next role?
2. Imagine yourself in three years. What do you hope will be different about you then compared to now?
3. For the last few companies you’ve been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it?

Questions … [ Read more ]

Source: 40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know | Subject: Human Resources Questions

By asking core questions along these dimensions, it is possible to determine the cornerstones of a next-generation operating model.

Processes

• Process design. How should we design functional, cross-sector, and support processes? How can we best integrate innovations? How can we accelerate decisions?
• Performance management. What are our most important KPIs? How do we set and track targets? How do we encourage decision-orientation and collaboration?
• IT systems and technologies.

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Andreas Seyfert, Christoph Kuntze, Tim Lange | Source: Next-generation supply chain—transforming your supply chain operating model for a digital world | Subject: Management Questions

1. What is our company’s story? What is our pitch?
2. Which market segment should we pursue?
3. How do we differentiate our product from competition?
4. What is the best way to assure a successful new product launch?
5. How should we respond when customers ask for discounts?
6. How much customization do we offer?
7. How can we reduce or maintain cost of customer acquisition?
8. How can we retain our customers for longer?
9. Which of our

… [ Read more ]

Author: Tomasz Tunguz | Source: The 13 Critical Questions to Answer about Your Startup’s Product Marketing | Subjects: Entrepreneurship Questions, Marketing Questions

To nail the delicate chemistry required for a successful mentoring match, eight questions have proven to be particularly telling, says Narcisse — four that mentors should ask, and four that mentees should ask:

For mentors

1. Can I clearly be helpful to this potential mentee? Have they reached out with clear reasons or intentions for why they’d like my help? Are there specific needs they have

… [ Read more ]

Author: Whitnie Low Narcisse | Source: We Studied 100 Mentor-Mentee Matches — Here’s What Makes Mentorship Work | Subject: Human Resources Questions

Follow up with candidates — both those who got offers and those who didn’t — to get their feedback. You want all candidates who didn’t get the job to still have an incredibly positive impression of your company and your process. The world is small. Reputations are long. You want them to have wished they would have gotten the job — so much so that … [ Read more ]

Author: Dan Pupius | Source: Develop Your Hiring System Like a Product to Eliminate Bias and Boost Retention | Subject: Human Resources Questions

The best approach to measuring leadership is to evaluate a leader’s performance in the three areas in which all great leaders must excel: clarity of thought / communication, judgment about people, and personal integrity / commitment. Measuring leadership in this way requires gathering data from employees, but most startups have never done this in a systematic way.

Eventually, all companies need to develop methods to gather … [ Read more ]

Author: Ali Rowghani | Source: How Do You Measure Leadership? | Subject: Leadership Questions

Joseph L. Badaracco’s book, Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work, suggests asking five basic questions to help make hard decisions when the analysis, facts and data fail to provide a clear answer.

1. What are the net consequences? That is, if you have to make a decision that has a lot of uncertainty and significant human stakes,

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Joseph L. Badaracco, Tom Fox | Source: A Harvard professor on the five questions to ask when facing tough decisions | Subject: Decision Making Questions

1. Direction. Do leaders communicate a clear and compelling vision of where the organization is headed, how to get there, and what it means for people?
2. Accountability. Do leaders in the organization ensure individuals understand what is expected of them, have sufficient authority and feel accountable for delivering results?
3. Coordination & Control. Do leaders consistently measure and manage business and risk, and act to address problems when

… [ Read more ]

Source: Organizational Health Index | Subject: Organization Questions

To understand where to focus on your sales operations transformation journey, start by asking yourself and your organization a few simple questions:

• How much of your sales resources are in sales-support roles versus front-line sellers and sales managers?
• To what degree is your sales-operations function centralized or dispersed by customer segment, business unit, or region?
• What are the metrics and reports you use for sales-performance management activities?

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Bertil Chappuis, Brian Selby | Source: Looking Beyond Technology to Drive Sales Operations | Subject: Sales Questions

A lot of companies don’t decide how they want to grow until they’re well into their growth phase. For a long time, your actions pull your company along, and then all of a sudden it switches — your existing business starts pushing your behavior. External forces like feature requests, the need for more customer support, the need to create a team to do X when … [ Read more ]

Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: To Grow Faster, Hit Pause — and Ask These Questions from Stripe’s COO | Subject: Management Questions

Great strategies answer five critical questions (“the strategic five”) in ways that are unique to your company:

1. What business or businesses should your company be in?
2. How should you add value to your businesses?
3. Who should be the target customers for your businesses?
4. What should be your value propositions to those target customers?
5. What capabilities should differentiate your ability to add value to your businesses and deliver their

… [ Read more ]

Author: Ken Favaro | Source: Why Popular Strategies Always Fade | Subject: Strategy Questions

Since innovation is a complex, company-wide endeavor, it requires a set of crosscutting practices and processes to structure, organize, and encourage it. Taken together, the following eight essentials constitute just such an operating system. These often overlapping, iterative, and nonsequential practices resist systematic categorization but can nonetheless be thought of in two groups. The first four, which are strategic and creative in nature, help set … [ Read more ]

Authors: Erik Roth, Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston | Source: The Eight Essentials of Innovation | Subject: Innovation Questions