The Better Leadership Team Show
The Better Leadership Team Show
10 Questions Every Leadership Team Should Be Asking
In this Mike on the Mic episode, I’m diving into 10 powerful questions every leadership team should be asking—again and again. These questions are your roadmap to clarity, alignment, and innovation. Whether you’re just forming your leadership team or have been together for years, these prompts will challenge your thinking, expose blind spots, and drive your company forward.
Let’s raise the bar—because building a great leadership team is never done.
🎧 Tune in and ask yourself: Which question do we need to focus on next?
Thanks for listening! Connect with us at mike-goldman.com/blog and on Instagram@mikegoldmancoach and on YouTube @Mikegoldmancoach
I hate status meetings where everybody's just going around the table telling everybody else what they're up to, and everybody else is looking at their watch because they need to get the hell outta that meeting and get some real work done. Do you have an agenda? Do you have an effective agenda? One great way to do it is instead of an agenda being topics on a list, but have the agenda. Be focused on what questions need to be answered in that meeting. Some of these questions could be on your agenda, You made it to the better leadership team show, the place where you learn how to surround yourself with the right people, doing the right things. So you can grow your business without losing your mind. I'm your host and leadership team coach, Mike Goldman. I'm going to show you how to improve top and bottom line growth, fulfillment, and the value your company adds to the world by building a better leadership team. All right, let's go. Instead of just focusing on solutions, great teams need to focus on asking the right questions. So. What I wanna do in this episode is focus on 10 questions every leadership team should be asking themselves in order to improve 10 essential questions to help you focus on clarity, alignment, and innovation. So let's start the first one, first question, are our best people focused on our top opportunities? I know as a leader for most of my career, I overinvested. My low performers and underinvested in my high performers, and I see leaders doing that all the time. So in my mind, what, when I ask are our best people focused on our top opportunities? I really mean two things. One is the obvious. When you think of your top priorities, top opportunities as an organization, do you have your highest performers? Focused on those things, or are they focused on things that are less important? But there's a sub question to this too, which is, which people are you as a leader spending most of your time with? Do you find you're spending most of your time with the people that need you most? Which sounds logical, right? I should be spending most of my time with the people that need me most. But man, if you want. A great company, you need to spend most of your time not with the people that need you most, but the people that have the best ability to take your company to the next level, which is not the people that need you most. It's probably the people that need you the least, but you need them the most. So are our, this is the question. Are our best people? Focused on our top priorities. Question number two, what one to two areas should we stop focusing on immediately? Every time leadership teams get together, and I bet this is the case for your team, every time you get together with your team, you identify more things you all need to do. There are probably three or five or seven ideas that come out of that meeting that people say, you know, I'll do it. I'll take care of it, and that's all great. Of course, there should be action coming out of these meetings, but what winds up happening when we don't ask the question, what should we stop focusing on, is all that stuff just piles on. We get overloaded, and when we get overloaded, either we. Actually work on too many things and we just don't do them all that well, or we can't get to everything, which is normally the case. And very often it's some of the most strategic, high priority things that fall off the list. So we need to cut the excess noise. We need to figure out where we have objectives are misaligned. Do we have a priority that's not effectively moving us forward to where we want to go? Are there meetings we're having that we should stop having? Are there reports being produced or analysis being done or products or services being. Created or products and services that are already out there that are just not adding value and we ought to stop. So the number two question is, what one to two areas should we stop focusing on immediately? Third question, is our current meeting rhythm serving us or slowing us down? Now, that could mean. Questioning meetings that you have and challenging whether those meetings are really adding value. It could also be, you know, the it could focus on the fact that you have stopped having certain meetings and because of that you're losing the ability to be aligned, or you're losing the ability to hold people accountable. So. The question is our current meeting rhythm serving us or slowing us down? is really, I'd say three sub focuses of that. Number one, do we have the right meetings? Are we having meetings we don't need to have? Are we missing meetings that we should have? So number one, are we having the right meetings? Number two, do those meetings have the right agendas? Are we getting together for a status meeting, man. I hate status meetings where everybody's just going around the table telling everybody else what they're up to, and everybody else is looking at their watch because they need to get the hell outta that meeting and get some real work done. Do you have an agenda? Do you have an effective agenda? One great way to do it is instead of an agenda being topics on a list, but have the agenda. Be focused on what questions need to be answered in that meeting. Some of these questions could be on your agenda, so, so number one, do, are you having the right meetings? Number two, do you have agendas? Do you have the right agendas with the right objectives for those meetings? And number three, do you have the right people in those meetings? That could mean, you know, are there people that should be in the meetings that are not? But more often the problem is we just have too many damn people in meetings because we want people to learn and observe, but meanwhile, they're sitting in meeting where they're not adding any value and they could be hurting the meeting I have seen, fairly. Junior level folks in a senior leadership team type meeting, and the senior leaders are not free to talk about what they really want to talk about because there's people in the room that shouldn't be hearing it. Certain information can't be shared, so more often than not, I've seen too many people in meetings. I forget if it was, may have been Amazon, may have been, you know, Jeff Bezos said, had a two pizza rule where any meeting where you couldn't feed the group with two pizzas, there were too many people in that meeting might be a way to do it. So is our current meeting rhythm serving us or slowing us down is the third question. Right? Meeting right people. Right Agendas. Fourth question. How are we gathering feedback worth acting on in order to move our companies and our teams forward, we need feedback. We need feedbacks from our clients. we need feedback from our, our team members, from our vendors, feedback in the form of key performance indicators about how we're doing. How often are you talking about the voice of the customer or the voice of your client? In your weekly meetings, in your monthly meetings, is there an agenda item focused on asking What are our clients thinking? Too often we don't. Listen, or we don't share that information until there's a big problem. Well, we need to share that information all the time. So, so how are you gathering and how are you discussing, communicating and taking action on the voice of the customer? What about the voice of your team members? How are you gathering that information? How and when are you taking action on that? You know, one way to do that is for your clients, a net promoter score for your employees and employee net promoter score. But it's not the only way. It's not even necessarily the best way. It's just one way. You know, skip level meetings are another way. Having effective one-on-one discussions is another way. So, so that fourth question is how are we gathering feedback worth acting on? Fifth question. Are we effectively moving towards our long-term and our midterm vision? And by long-term, I mean 10, 15 years, midterm, three years, are we effectively moving towards our long-term and our midterm vision? Sometimes we can get so caught up in the day to day, the month to quarter, even the year to year that we lose sight, of long-term where we're trying to get to, especially as the world is changing so fast. So maybe the first kind of sub-question under this is, do you have a long-term vision and a midterm vision? Do you have a company purpose? A big hairy, audacious goal, a three year a highly achievable goal, a vivid vision of what you want the company to look like, sound like, taste like, smell like, feel like over the next three years. How clear is that vision? How well communicated is that vision? How aligned are people towards that vision? All those are kind of pre-questions to this.'cause it's pretty difficult to effectively more move towards your vision if people aren't aware of what that vision is. So get clear on the vision, communicate the vision, align around the vision. Make sure your quarterly priorities or your rocks, make sure your annual priorities, your financial targets, your non-financial targets, all of those should be moving you closer to your vision and make sure you're monitoring all those things. To make sure you're moving towards that vision. So the fifth question, are we effectively moving towards our long-term and our midterm visions? Question number six, how aligned are we on this year's top three priorities? So similar question, but this is focused not on the long term or the midterm, but look out. To the year or the remainder of the year and you know, are your top priorities clear? If I ask you what your top priorities for the year and you list out 10 things you have not prioritized, we need to be aligned around a small number of annual priorities. Quarterly as well. But let's talk about annual. We need to align around a small number of annual priorities, two or three or four, no, certainly no more than five. So are you aligned around those priorities? Are they clear and clearly communicated up and down the organization? Does everyone understand how these priorities relate to their job, to their larger objectives? Does everybody understand how, what they're doing and what their individual or team top priorities are? How does that relate to the annual priorities? Those are all, again, pre-questions to if you're moving towards those, but the key question here is how aligned are we on this year's top three priorities? That was question number six. Question number seven, and this is an interesting one. What would failure look like and how do we prevent it? So one way to think about that. We normally. Think about what success would look like. but man, a powerful question is what would failure look like? and the way I want you to think about it is if you've got a key initiative or a top priority for the year or the quarter, or maybe you're implementing a new CRM system, or maybe you're launching a brand new product or launching a current product into a new market, when we think about what failure would look like. It uncovers potential mistakes. It uncovers. Potential areas of focus that we never would've thought about. and I like the term pre-mortem. most of us know the term postmortem when you are, when you've completed something and it's either gone well or not well, especially if it hasn't gone well. We do a postmortem is, Hey, let's look back at what we did and what did we do well and what did we not do well, and how is it gonna make us better moving forward? But a pre-mortem. Says, let's imagine the worst. We've got this brand new product that we're launching, or a brand new service that we're launching. If six months from now this is a colossal failure, let's think about all the reasons that might be the case. And we might uncover things like, you know, that could be the case if there's a lack of alignment or a lack of leadership buy-in. That could be the case if we haven't effectively. Beta tested, you know, or, you know, or had enough discussions with our clients about this potential product that could be, you know, we haven't effectively, calculated and communicated the return on investment of this brand new service or this brand new product line. I mean, there, there are dozens of questions, dozens of potential reasons why it might fail and all, although we like to think positively. Sometimes it is really important that we do a pre-mortem and ask the question, if this fails, what might be the reasons? And you're gonna come up with a whole lot of, a whole lot of areas to focus on and actions to take that you never would've thought about before. That was question seven, question eight. How are we empowering our mid-level talent effectively? I hear all the time from senior leaders that they're stretched too thin, that, you know, we don't have enough people. We are, we're doing too many things, and maybe you are doing too many things. And that comes back to aligning around a small number of priorities. But are you empowering your mid-level talent effectively? Are there. Really high performing, high potential mid-level leaders that need to be challenged. Could you, should you increase their responsibility? Could you, should you raise the bar? On their targets. I've talked in other podcasts about the idea of what, Keith Cupp from Gravitas, impact coaches. a longtime mentor of mine, introduced to me something called an accelerator session where you're getting your highest performing mid-level leaders together and asking them to. Identify what they think the top three priorities of the company ought to be. Asking them to do a stop exercise. What are the three things we ought to stop doing as a company, asking them to do a SWOT exercise, strains, weaknesses, opportunities, threats for the company, asking them to talk about the core values and how well you're living the core values and what you could do as a company to better live your core values. There are, so many ways to better empower your mid-level talent. To make sure that the company's moving in the right direction to help you as a senior leader do your job. And also to prepare them for leadership. So that eighth question is, are we empowering our mid-level talent effectively? Question number nine, where's the next growth opportunity? And how are we preparing? For it. So this one's about innovation. What are you doing to spot trends early? Now some of that gets back to the voice of the customer or maybe the voice of the industry. But what are you doing to spot trends early, and how often are you discussing those things? Do you only spot a trend when ev, when all your competitors have started leveraging that and you say, Ooh, maybe. Maybe we ought to, maybe we ought to do that. You know, AI is a great example. I'm not sure AI is a trend anymore. I mean, it's here, you know, what are you doing to leverage that before it makes you. Not a necessity anymore. How are you positioning your team to seize on those opportunities? Are you fo so focused on the day-to-day tactics that there's no time to seize on opportunities? Are you as lead as a leader spending any of your time just experimenting with new ideas? Very often when my clients create their quarterly priorities, their rocks, they focus so much on creating rocks they know they can commit to. They know they can achieve, but sometimes it makes sense. To play a little bit to say, man, I don't know if we can get this done. I'm not sure how we would do it, but man, we ought to give it a try. Imagine if we could, and that's why with my clients, very often we say it's not a hundred percent achievement of your quarterly priorities that's success, Google actually says it's 70%. Because It's 70%, a hundred percent. You may be sandbagging, it's 70%. It means you're trying some new things and failing. Failing is okay. You're gonna learn. If you don't fail, it means you're not trying hard enough or you're not trying new things. So question number nine, where's the next growth opportunity and how are we preparing for it? And then question number 10. Are we living our core values daily? Very often we get caught up in productivity. We get caught up in making sure we're making the revenue numbers and making the profitability numbers and getting to our labor efficiency ratios, and do we have enough marketing qualified leads? All those things are obviously critical, but sometimes we can get so caught up in productivity. We forget about the culture fit. We forget about the personality of our organization. We forget about our non-negotiable core values. Okay, are we living our core values daily? And that doesn't mean just beating people up who aren't living the core values. It means raising people up, patting people on the back who are living the core values. Someone does a great job in the meeting. You could say, great job in the meeting. Or you could say, Hey, I gotta tell you, that was a great example of our, we lift each other up, core value. You were such a help in there. Or someone does a crappy job in a meeting and you could say, I'd like to see you improve, you know, your behavior meetings. Or you could say, I gotta tell you, you know, collaboration is one of our core values. And if I heard you say, it's not my job, one more time, my head's gonna explode. Are we living our core values daily? and when you think about core values, remember there are three tests of a core value. Sometimes we're not living our core values'cause our core values aren't the right core values. So there are three tests to make sure any core values is a real core value, a non-negotiable behavior that anchors your culture. And the first test is that core value. Is not living that core value a fireable offense. There are. There are situations where companies have created core values that sound nice, create a core value like creativity. But when I say, so, if your one of your accounts payable clerks isn't creative, you're gonna fire them. Well, no, of course not. Well, then that's not a core value. Your core values are non-negotiable behaviors. So if someone is blatantly and repeatedly violating a core value, that needs to be a fireable offense, you need to be committing to, committed to firing anyone, even a top producer. They are repeatedly and blatantly violating the core value. So the first test is it a fireable offense? Second test is, are you willing to take a financial hit to uphold a core value? If core values only make sense when they increase your profitability, then it's not a core value. If you have a core value of respect, and one of your clients is disrespecting all your people. Working with that client because they're bringing in revenue, is you violating your core values. So the first test is it a fireable offense? Second test, are you willing to lose revenue? Are you willing to take a financial hit to uphold the core value? And the third test is it alive in your organization today? Core values are not aspirational. it can't be aspirational and non-negotiable at the same time, or you'd have to fire half your people. So 10th question, are we living our core values daily? So real quickly, let me remind you of the 10 before we wrap up. Number one, are our best people focused on our top priorities? Number two, what one to two areas should we stop focusing on immediately? Number three is our current meeting rhythm serving us. Or slowing us down? Number four, how are we gathering feedback worth acting on? Number five, are we effectively moving towards our long-term and our midterm vision? Number six, how aligned are we on this year's top three priorities? number seven, what would failure look like and how do we prevent it? Number eight. Are we empowering our mid-level talent effectively? Number nine, where's the next growth opportunity and how are we preparing for it? Number 10, are we living our core values daily? Maybe ask these 10 questions in your next monthly or quarterly meeting. Maybe take. One or two of these questions, and in each of your weekly meetings, ask those questions, but ask these questions not once. Ask them again and again. If you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. I hope these 10 questions get you closer to that great leadership team. And by the way, if you already feel like you have a great leadership team, congratulations. But you know what? Raise the bar. Creating a great leadership team is something that never, ever ends. Look forward to seeing you again soon.