4 Questions You Need To Ask Your Team Every Day
By Studiowide
"Engagement is an essential factor in building and maintaining an enthusiastic, driven team."
Any successful leader will understand the value of staying connected to your team, and understanding what’s going on for each individual. However, it’s not always clear what to ask and how and when to gather this kind of insight.
When you get into a routine of asking your team the right questions, you can effectively identify areas where issues may arise. It also helps your team to develop themselves professionally and grow within the business. Engagement is an essential factor in building and maintaining an enthusiastic, driven team.
The best time to ask your team questions is at the beginning of each day in a daily review. Having an agenda or a template for a daily review is one of the easiest ways to ensure you get the most out of your team during the day. Check out our 3 Key Benefits of Effective Daily Performance Reviews.
When we put in place the daily performance review as part of The Brilliant Basics programme, we always recommend that you start by preparing a list of questions to ask your team. Here are the 4 questions you need to ask your team every day:
1. “Were there any major wins yesterday?”
This is a great question to lead with because it helps everybody remember that ‘yes’ we are making progress. Sometimes you lose sight of the fact that you’re making little wins throughout your days, weeks and months and calling those out helps make sure everybody feels positive about the work that they’re doing.
2. “What actions are due for completion today?”
This is the main question and the one that encourages the team to be prepared for the day and to do that bit of thinking and improvement. This prompts each individual to remember what their goals are and ensure that they’re aligned with those objectives.
3. “How have the measures behaved since the last time we met?”
This ensures that the team remains focused on the most important numbers in the operation. If these numbers are going in the right direction with no ‘red conditions’ you will have had a successful day.
4. “What new actions do we have to drive today?”
A key piece of information to keep in mind is that the only reason we measure is to drive action. So it’s always worthwhile going around to make sure everyone is on the same page with their priorities. Driving action is the opportunity we get as leaders to help our teams execute their tasks by removing anything that’s potentially blocking them. Some examples of this would be an individual having questions regarding prioritising their work or clarifying any uncertainty that may exist around desired outcomes.
Leaders need to be prepared to step in to answer those questions, remove that work, and remove any blockers to progress as this will allow the team to execute effectively and have more success in achieving the operational goals.
Don’t forget, asking your team the right questions is just one practice part of a bigger mechanism we call ‘Brilliant Basics’.
As part of the ‘Brilliant Basics’ programme, we enable managers, team leaders and colleagues to adopt the essential practices required to achieve world-class levels of safety, quality, delivery, cost and people performance. The practices we teach are interdependent and when done well and done habitually, combine to create this results mechanism. Find out more here.
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