The Engaging Questions
Marshall Goldsmith; Mark Reiter. Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts–Becoming the Person You Want to Be, The Crown Publishing Group, Crown Business 2015. pp. 111-120.
We initiated a study, with the steady stream of participants in my leadership seminars, in which people answered six active questions every day for ten working days. I “reverse-engineered” the questions based on my experience and the literature on the factors that make employees feel engaged. Here are the six Engaging Questions I settled on—and why.
1. Did I do my best to set clear goals today?
Employees who have clear goals report greater engagement than employees who don’t. No surprise. If you don’t have clear goals and ask yourself, “Am I fully engaged?” the obvious follow-up is “Engaged to do what?” This is true within big organizations as well as for individuals. No clear goals, no engagement. After the 2008 financial crisis I worked with executives at a bank that had gone through three “revolving door” CEOs in three years. The organization was directionless, and it showed in the disintegrating engagement scores of the senior management. The lowest scores were attached to the question “Do I have clear goals?” Tweaking the question into active form made an immediate difference. Executives demoralized by their leaders’ fecklessness became dramatically more engaged after they started setting their own direction for the day instead of futilely waiting to receive it from someone else.
2. Did I do my best to make progress toward my goals today?
Teresa Amabile, in her scrupulous research and in The Progress Principle, has shown that employees who have a sense of “making progress” are more engaged than those who don’t. We don’t just need specific targets; we need to see ourselves nearing, not receding from, the target. Anything less is frustrating and dispiriting. Imagine how you’d feel if you chose a goal and instead of getting better at it, you got worse. How engaged would you be? Progress makes any of our accomplishments more meaningful.
3. Did I do my best to find meaning today?
At this late date, I don’t think we have to strenuously argue that finding meaning and purpose improves our lives. I defer here to Viktor Frankl’s 1946 classic, Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, describes how the struggle to find meaning—the struggle, not the result—can protect us in even the most unimaginable environments. It’s up to us, not an outside agency like our company, to provide meaning. This question challenges us to be creative in finding meaning in whatever we are doing.
4. Did I do my best to be happy today?
People still debate if happiness is a factor in employee engagement. I think that because happiness goes hand in hand with meaning, you need both. When employees report that they are happy but their work is not meaningful, they feel empty—as if they’re squandering their lives by merely amusing themselves. On the other hand, when employees regard their work as meaningful but are not happy, they feel like martyrs (and have little desire to stay in such an environment). As Daniel Gilbert shows in Stumbling on Happiness, we are lousy at predicting what will make us happy. We think our source of happiness is “out there” (in our job, in more money, in a better environment) but we usually find it “in here”—when we quit waiting for someone or something else to bring us joy and take responsibility for locating it ourselves. We find happiness where we are.
5. Did I do my best to build positive relationships today?
The Gallup company asked employees, “Do you have a best friend at work?” and found the answers directly related to engagement. By flipping the question from passive to active, we’re reminded to continue growing our positive relationships, even create new ones, instead of judging our existing relationships. One of the best ways to “have a best friend” is to “be a best friend.”
6. Did I do my best to be fully engaged today?
This gets to the head-spinning core of the Engaging Questions: To increase our level of engagement, we must ask ourselves if we’re doing our best to be engaged. A runner is more likely to run faster in a race by running faster when she trains—and timing herself. Likewise, an employee will be more engaged at work if she consciously tries to be more engaged—and rigorously measures her effort. It’s a self-fulfilling dynamic: the act of measuring our engagement elevates our commitment to being engaged—and reminds us that we’re personally responsible for our own engagement.
Given people’s demonstrable reluctance to change at all, this study shows that active self-questioning can trigger a new way of interacting with our world. Active questions reveal where we are trying and where we are giving up. In doing so, they sharpen our sense of what we can actually change. We gain a sense of control and responsibility instead of victimhood.
Testing on Myself
Adding the words “did I do my best” added the element of trying into the equation. It injected personal ownership and responsibility into my question-and-answer process.
I chose to grade myself on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 being the best score. If I scored low on trying to be happy, I had only myself to blame. We may not hit our goals every time, but there’s no excuse for not trying. Anyone can try.
Since then I’ve gone through many permutations of my Daily Questions. The list isn’t working if it isn’t changing along the way—if I’m not getting better on some issues and adding new ones to tackle. Here’s my current list of twenty-two “Did I do my best?” questions that I review every day:
There’s no correct number of questions. The number is a personal choice, a function of how many issues you want to work on. My list is twenty-two questions deep because I need a lot of help (obviously) but also because I’ve been doing this a long time.
The point is, your Daily Questions should reflect your objectives. They’re not meant to be shared in public (unless you’re writing a book on the subject), meaning they’re not designed to be judged. You’re not constructing your list to impress anyone. It’s your list, your life. I score my “Did I do my best” questions on a simple 1 to 10 scale. You can use whatever works for you. Your only considerations should be:
- Are these items important in my life?
- Will success on these items help me become the person that I want to be?