Questions Leaders Need to Answer

What are your products and services and who are your customers?

Do you know the value proposition for each customer?

What perceptions do your customers have of your products and services?

How do you know?

Are you asking your customers the right questions?

Do you believe that waste and quality issues are important to your company?

Why?

Which ones?

What is your company’s current share of the total market?

Can improvement efforts assist you in increasing the market share and/or increasing profits?

How?

Are you actively pursuing breakthrough as well as continuous improvement in your areas of responsibility that link to customer value?

How?

How many hours per week have you actually spent over the last three months and how many hours per week do you currently have scheduled on your calendar that are devoted strictly to the removal of waste and variation?

How often per week do you solicit feedback from the people you manage?

What kind of feedback do you solicit?

What do you do with the feedback?

What are the right knowledge-generating and improvement-oriented questions managers need to ask their people?

What methods or tools can be used to answer them?

Have you deployed and implemented an improvement strategy with a disciplined methodology and toolset and associated infrastructure to predictably generate bottom-line results?

Are your people properly trained to successfully use the latest and best improvement methodologies and tools?

What is your Return on Investment (ROI) from the training?

Do you have a standard procedure for documenting the improvement efforts and results?

What is it?

What barriers do your people face when trying to improve the way your company does business?

What are you doing to remove these barriers?

On what measures of performance that relate to these issues are you evaluated?

Are you held accountable for these metrics?

What are the specific improvement goals for them?

How much waste does your company have?

That is, what is the company’s Cost of Waste or Cost of Poor Quality, both in raw currency amounts and also in percent of revenue?

Is it getting better, staying the same, or getting worse?

How much of that waste exists or originates in your area of responsibility?

Do you have a plan that will, one year from now, show evidence that you made a difference?

And what do you predict that evidence will show?