Questions that great managers ask

First Break All the Rules
by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman

Imagine a friend recommending a powerful and fun mystery book that they recently read and knowing you read mysteries, thought you might like it too.

You rush to your local or on-line bookseller and purchase the book. During some scheduled reading time you finally pick it up with much anticipation since you trust your friend’s recommendations.

You begin reading and find that on page 28 of the 270 page book the entire (or so you thought) plot is revealed.

This is exactly what happened to me with First Break All the Rules. When I reached the page mentioned the entire results of a major project on management were revealed. The Gallup organization surveyed hundreds of top performing managers and thousands of employees to create the keys to better management. What they found was that if employees are asked a specific series of powerful questions and managers are evaluated on the answers to this simple list of questions, amazing results are achieved.

The good news is that there are only 12 questions. The questions measure the most relevant information about how a workplace is run and what the employees feel about their jobs. I was stunned how few questions there were and by the differences in corporate performance between those firms that had employees that had higher scores and those that did not. Great information.

Much further in my reading I discovered that Gallup had interviewed over a billion (that is with a big B!) customers attempting to discover what customer service looks like in multiple industries from the customer’s perspective.

That is a strange strategy don’t you think? Ask customers what they want. Much to everyone’s surprise there are only 4 attributes that customers looked for and they must be satisfied in order. In addition, they are very similar across many, many different types of service providers from your physician to the bottler of your energy drink. They are accuracy, availability, partnership and advice. The section on these four attributes is a must read.

I am loving the material presented because it is based on research, not on someone’s opinion. Opinions are great but data driven decisions make more sense to me. You should have opinions and it is best if they are current and based on information that is drawn from those that are being impacted or served.

Opinions should not come from two or more people sitting around a table dreaming about what they want to be true or the way it has always been. The way we have always done things is no longer relevant in most situations in today’s customer driven information rich society.

Read First Break All the Rules. You won’t be disappointed if you wish to grow your business and increase your employee’s satisfaction and your profit.

Hurry and order this book: First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman

To your continued success,
Reg Gupton