Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

To give you something to think about on this Monday morning, this post applies our earlier discussion on naive questions to our work as individuals.

Naive questions, you’ll recall, are the simple — even childlike — questions that experience tends to grind out of us, but that we should cling to because they bring so much clarity. Questions like “Why are we doing this?” or “How is this going to make us more money?” could save companies untold grief, if we embraced the answers they provoke.

Many of us, when we’re away from the office — or at least out of earshot of the bosses — have no problem asking questions like these of our departmental or company-wide projects. If you’re like me, you’ve known plenty of folks who have made themselves experts at confessing the “sins” of their companies. (Feel free to lob in your own favorite organizational “sins” in the comments.)

But how many of us are willing to turn the spotlight on ourselves?

Suddenly, the chatter stops.

From all of my experience covering business, and from wide personal observation (including, oh yes, painful backward glances at my own performance), I conclude that many of us would benefit from asking ourselves naive questions regularly, both to sharpen the work we’re doing now, and to improve our career paths.

Naive questions work the same way for individuals that they do for companies because we are all managers of our own selves and our own careers. They’re just as hard to face for individuals as they are for companies — maybe harder, since they tend to churn up all sorts of unpleasant emotions.

The good news: you don’t have to convince a team or a department or an HR department or a chain of command to ask these questions when the organization you’re studying it little ol’ you. And when you get your answers, you don’t have to butt your head against companywide policies or decisions to pursue remedies. In many cases, you can alter “policy” for yourself without interference. In fact, if you’re able to dial down the angst and keep an open mind, you can even revolutionize the way you work.

How? Ask a naive question and follow where it leads. Try these short-term questions for starters:

• Which thing that I do at work wins me the most credit with my organization? (Prescription: do more of whatever it is.)
• Which things that I do every day are wasted time? (Stop doing them!)
• Is this meeting necessary? (If not, cancel the meeting if you called it, or beg off from attending if you were invited.)
• Is this project going to make a real difference to the company? (If not, kill it.)
• Which things am I best at in this job? (Do more of them. Beg to be allowed to do more of them.)

There are also plenty of long-term questions that can change not just the course of your working day, but the shape of your entire career:

• If I could write my own ticket, what kind of work would I be doing?
• How much is my current job like the work I dream of doing?
• Am I having the kind of impact I want in my career?
• How much money do I think I deserve to make in my career?
• I say that I want X, Y, and Z out of my career. Would a disinterested observer agree that what I’m doing now is pointing me toward those things?

That last question brings me back to the headline of this post. If you hired a smart, successful stranger to take a look at your life — to audit your work methods, your current job, and the course of your career — what do you think you’d hear back from them? What would be the good news? What would be the bad news?

Just as companies restructure their activities, so can we. Even when it’s emotionally painful, the process can be remarkably straightforward. How many times have you heard, after a turnaround has succeeded, that the new management at a company did crazy things like . . . reducing costs and . . . improving product quality and . . . improving customer service and . . . selling off low-performing businesses?

In many cases, the changes aren’t radical in themselves — they’re often straight out of the Management 101 textbook. The trick is approaching the situation with new eyes and having the guts to ask “dumb” (i.e. naive) questions like “How could we reduce costs?” and “If I were a customer, what would I think of our customer service?” and “Should we even be in this business at all?”

Try it on yourself. Pretend that you are that smart, successful stranger, and carry out a professional audit on yourself. Ask questions like these:

• “How well does she use her time?”
• “Is what he’s doing now likely to help him advance in his career?”
• “Is this behavior likely to win raises and promotions for her?”
• “If he does this project as well as it can be done, will anyone care?”

If the answers are suprising or disheartening, don’t fret — you’ll hardly be the first person to recognize a mismatch between intentions and reality. But if you’ll muster the courage to act on those answers . . . then you’ll be in elite company.

(Photo by Morrhigan.)