What did you study? Where did you graduate? Where do you stay? Are you married?
I’d just started working with a new company and every meeting started this way. I felt like I was being interviewed all over again! But it was just their way of getting to know me – it was a way to get to know me and establish some common ground.
And after a while I realised that it was perfectly fine to be curious, I found out things about individuals that would have taken me months in other companies because we English people can be a little too polite.
I was at a virtual networking event last week and the host asked us to introduce ourselves and say what our special power was and I said: “I’m nosy”.
Now I’m not nosy just for the sake of it, I like to understand how things work and why things are done the way that they are done. Ask me to do something and nine times out of ten, I’ll ask you a question to make sure that I truly understand what you want and why you need it.
It’s because I’m aware that we don’t know what we don’t know, so if you tell me the background, I’ll be better placed to give you the solution that you need. The same applies to when I communicate with my team, I could make assumptions about their knowledge and aspirations but it is better to ask the question and be sure.
I had a client who was grooming a member of her team to become her second in command and was crushed when he left to pursue a career in secondary education; she’d assumed that his insight and interest in her pre-school meant that he wanted to continue working with under 5’s, but she hadn’t asked, it meant that she’d wasted time and hadn’t given the opportunity to others in her business. The good thing is that once she started asking the right questions of her team, she was able to identify those who wanted to progress and create a training plan to support them.
So before you start succession planning, have 1-2-1’s with your team, you might get a surprise.
Some good questions to ask are:
What do you enjoy about your role?
What would you like to delegate?
What is your ideal role?
Where would you like to be in a year?
What support do you need to achieve your aspirations?
You don’t have to wait until it’s performance review time.
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