What we did as kids we should do today
We often laugh when young children ask so many questions. We laugh because their “what” or “why” questioning can be incessant and despite our attempt to provide answers, the questions continue. This is their instinctive way of learning. As we get older, this shifts from a focus of asking questions to providing the answers. On the surface this makes sense based on the experience we gain. But at its root, it’s a problem as it pertains to leading our businesses relating to building company value, or as we refer to it, company worth.
The journey of building the worth of your company must include a healthy balance of asking thought provoking questions with your team and having a process for finding the answers. But for too many business owners and CEO’s, their focus is racing to the answers when the first step should be to determine if we’re even asking the right questions.
If we were kids again today but still running our businesses, here are some questions we’d be asking and should be asking now as adults:
- As a result of COVID, is our value proposition (the value we bring to our customers) and our unique selling proposition (how we deliver the value uniquely versus our competition), that worked for us prior to the pandemic, still relevant now going forward?
- What technology trends in our industry were accelerated in terms of being adopted and are we prepared to leverage them?
- What is different now relating to our workforce and have we developed a plan to manage it?
- Have we captured our COVID learnings so that when the next crisis hits, we have immediate access to the playbook we developed in terms of what we did well and what we would do differently in the future?
- Are there new opportunities to build the “stickiness” with our customers (increase our importance to them) – which in turn builds the worth of our business?
These questions could continue, and if we were kids again they would! But for now, you get the gist. Reinvigorate the internal dialog with your team and be the leader that asks great strategic questions of your team and in so doing, build new company worth.
