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Questions Questions Questions

Written by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: Relationship building is the most important activity for all management and supervisory roles.

Questions Questions Questions

Relationship building is the most important activity for all management and supervisory roles.

Without having your people with you, in full rapport with you, it is likely to be an uphill struggle for you to lead a team effectively. And to be at that level of relationship with them, you have to work towards their trust steadily, consistently.

There are a number of tactics that you can adopt in order to make the most of working with your people and one of the best if by getting to know them really well. By spending time with them and understanding them well.

One of the best ways to get to know your people is to make sure that you get into regular and light conversations with them. It's all about having the ability to talk and listen to almost anything they might have to say, with an emphasis on what turns them on, and less on you.

This can be quite a challenge, as many managers are brilliant at doing all the talking, dealing with their agendas, yet less capable at getting to their people's own interests. Bear in mind that employees live most of their lives away from their place of work, and usually they have far less fun with you than they do with their friends and family!

So by letting them tell you about what's important to them, rather than boring old work all the time, you will develop relationships much better and much more quickly if you listen to who they are, rather than focus on business all the time.

As they speak with you, listen for clues of topics you can open up with them. Look for when they get passionate about something and ask more about that. Subtly using open questions to find out more, such as Who, Why, Where, When, How and What, enables them to get into their flow, which is a great place for them to be - and they love it that you are interested in them, for them and not just the business.

If people go on way too long about the big interest in their lives, you will develop skills that will help you gently cut short those stories and move you on.

Being able to have such engaging conversations will help you introduce business issues much more easily and your people will have a level of trust in the caring, understanding and interested person you have become than they ever did before.

In Dale Carnegie's great book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People", he relates a story of a 2-hour dinner he attended. He listened to the woman sitting next to him and said no more than half a dozen things all evening.

Yet three weeks later a mutual friend told him how engrossed his dinner partner had been and how she found him such an interesting man. Indeed the time he listened, he created such rapport that he was the interesting one.

It is a great skill to develop!

Hot Tip!

When trying to ask questions, try other ways, like, "Say more about that", "Tell Me More", instead of or as well as the open questions above. Whatever suits you best!

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Re: Marketing ideas? - Questions will set you free... And make you Rich [quote="KH_Global":349pds7c]Just ask ask ask. That is it.[/quote:349pds7c]
Re: Contact Information - Another idea would be to have an email form in place to accept "ticketed" inquires (if people are afraid of spammers seeing their email address). However, I hate how some sites try to persuade you out of sending an email by bombarding you with lists of "Frequently Asked Questions & Answers" as I find they're rarely helpful.
Synergy and Other Creative Insights - Truth is that there is [u:2iwgooi1]C[/u:2iwgooi1]ollaboration - on a formal basis and [u:2iwgooi1]c[/u:2iwgooi1]ollaboration which is informal. Let's say that you have a great new product. Before it launches you get loads of buddies in the same business as you to tear it apart and let you refine it. Creative people will get others in as well. people from outside the business - or those who are in the business who might not have anything to do with it and seek their input - listening hard. These aren't focus groups, they are way beyond this - they are real outsiders and thus have very open minds, asking the dumb, the stupid questions, which are often the most valuable. Questions like these help me be a good coach too! I once worked in a business where the backshop (the store room) was always untidy. They held a team meeting and had the cook in as well (you know the one who ran the employee facility). She knew nothing about the storeroom and its processes, but boy did she ask some tricky questions of them. Sometimes, little 'c' collaboration is real good at the mocro level, without which the big 'C' collaboration would be worthless.
Re: link exchange strategy - [quote="RussellWebb":2xvcpjwz]Questions that pop into mind... Does PR ranking effect 'who' you would exchange links with? Do you really need thousands of links to rank higher in the SE's? Are one-way links better than reciprocal links?[/quote:2xvcpjwz] Hi Russell, While I know you posed these SEO questions for Samin, I thought I'd help you get the conversation started by putting in my 2 cents. 1.) I think it's all about getting "quality" and high ranking/trusted sites (that are related to the content of your site and industry) to link back to you. 2.) While it's somewhat true that the more links you have the better, I'd suggest focusing on "quality" links rather than quantity. Poor sites and ones that aren't related to your field can actually hurt your rankings. 3.) Absolutely, it's much better if someone only links to you. However, reciprocal links are still good for those who have just launched a new site and are getting started. If I'm wrong about any of these comments, please feel free to correct me.
How to protect my trade mark? - Affirmative commercial action might be, for example, to increase spending on advertising, in order to make better known his use of the mark, or it might be to attend a national trade show associated with his business for the same purpose. Maybe he's just been lazy and hasn't had any serious lack of means. None of the questions was rhetorical. But I readily can imagine that you found the questions irrelevant to the legal discussion. I do not think that they are. Questions about the fairness of outcomes seem to me to be always relevant to legal discussions, with this reservation: that usually nothing can be done about clusters of unfair outcomes from within a particular legal system (ours, or canon Law, the Sharia, continental statute law, etc.) at a particular time. They need to get addressed politically first. In this connection, a lobby-related forum might be useful. Many patent and trademark related issues get very heavily lobbied. It's not that I found your points irrelevant to the legal discussion, it's just that most of your points missed the mark. I represent the "little guy" almost exclusively, and my clients have been very able to protect their marks against infringers large and small. You should educate yourself on the way things actually work, not how you think they might work, and then come back for a real discussion. I'd gladly discuss policy issues with you.


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