Why better questions might be the key to better culture.
Why can't we keep a list of questions that are common "around here" just like how we keep a list of beliefs, values, and behaviors?
Since I've worked in culture and leadership, it's always been this way. The people I look up to, the people I admire, the people I read about, talk about culture in a very cognitive fashion. They focus mainly on the cognitive purpose, vision, values, behaviours. This journey that I've been on with The Emotional Culture Deck and riders&elephants is flipping that and saying there's another conversation we need to have.
Emotional culture is how we are feeling or should be feeling at work. This includes the emotions we express on a daily basis and the emotions that are suppressed in our organization and teams.
The more I work in the cultural space, the more I realize there is another piece missing - questions.
"Better culture starts with better conversations," said Gustavo Razetti. That got me thinking. Better listening leads to better conversations. But better questions lead to better listening. And that leads to a better culture.
Your questions signal to people what's important to you and your team. When you ask these kinds of questions, you're going to look at the work (and world) differently.
The questions you ask and the answers you receive will demonstrate who you are, what matters deeply to you, how you work, and what's most important.
Your list of questions might also give you the courage to have the tough conversations you're afraid to have because you don't know how to approach them. Your culture questions might prompt challenging discussions or prompt discomfort, but they will give you permission – "Hey, this is a question we ask around here because..."
Is there a list of questions you share, that you ask everyone, that you show to new people when they join your team and say, "Hey, these are the questions we ask each other?"?
Below is a picture of the questions that we ask at riders&elephants (they're separated into three categories).
This should give you a feel for our company, how our team works, how we work with our community, stakeholders, suppliers, and everyone else in the world of riders&elephants.
What do you think? What are the common questions you ask in your company that shape your culture and how you do things?
These are the most common questions we ask ourselves at R&E:
Customer/Community Questions:
- What's the smallest thing we can do that will have the biggest impact?
- How will the customer feel if we do this?
- What can we do to surprise and delight our customers/community?
- What would a generous person do here?
- What would I want to happen if this happened to me?
- If money wasn't an object, what would we do here?
- Have I set expectations that we can exceed?
Product/Service & Design Questions:
- Is there a simpler solution?
- Where will people get stuck?
- What's the counterintuitive approach?
- What assumptions are we making?
- What’s the reverse of our assumptions here?
- What are the pros and cons?
- What are we missing here?
People & Team questions:
- What are your hopes and fears?
- What's holding you back?
- Did you do what you promised?
- What did we learn?
- What will we do differently next time?
- How can I help?
- What might be driving that behaviour?
- What are we most proud of?
- If I rethought this belief, what would that look like?
