In this Episode, I discuss how asking better questions of our teams and organizations leads to better focus, alignment, and better results.
We are excited to discover, with you, the key commonalities and best practices that allow both public and private organizations from capital intensive industries to become stronger at managing their assets over time.
Learn more at: www.durablecapitalindex.com
Ben Parker:
If you ask better questions, you get better answers. Today, we're going to talk about how asking the right questions can help your organization build a stronger, more durable future.
Welcome to the durability podcast. This is for those that are passionate about helping their organizations plan and prepare for the inevitable future. My name is Ben Parker, management consultant, chemist, creator, entrepreneur, co-founder, and member of the Durable Capital Group. I'm excited for you to join me as we discover what successful organizations do to build long-term durability. We explore the tactics and strategies that allow great organizations to combine the financial wisdom of asset management, the practical street smarts of the maintenance subculture with the real-world paranoia of managing risk to ensure their organizations last. We uncover what great leaders are doing from all types of capital intensive industries to make decisions, build strong management teams, and prepare to meet the future in whatever form it comes. This is The Durability Podcast.
Welcome, welcome, welcome back to the Durability Podcast. I'm excited to be with you today. Thank you so much for joining us. Today, we're going to talk about questions and how asking the right questions can really drive clarity, focus, and alignment in your organization. It can also, if they're the wrong questions, or not quite adequate questions can drive disharmony, unorganization. And misprioritization, that leads to a lot of waste when you were looking at the longterm and really taking a step back and asking the right questions across the board from your executive leadership teams, all the way down into your management, your supervisors, and operations teams that really help people understand the why behind what they're doing on a day-to-day basis, as well as the trajectory of the overall organization's strategic goals and main objectives.
And these questions can really be challenging. Sometimes they are not easy, and it's really Important that organizations ask the hard questions and sometimes they can really vet out their major needs, strengths and weaknesses by asking some of those really tough questions. And there is a difference in the types of questions we ask, ask better questions, you will get better answers. I've firmly believed that and I have seen that over and over again in my own thinking, as I think about long-term capital asset management projects, a variety of just general business operations, engineering and finance goals and objectives, because what questions really do is they get to the heart of our why and our purpose. And once we align those pieces, we know what action we need to take. So, better questions in my experience leads to better action and better action leads to better results. Here's a couple examples. If you look at any type of organization, that's focused on an ROI, right?
There is a difference in what your ultimate actions would be. If you ask the question, how do we increase our ROI this year, return on investment this year versus a question that has a different time dimension to it? How do we ensure we have consistent ROI over the next 10 years? Or, how do we make sure we have the right return on investment metrics in our business? Those types of questions really do matter because it helps us focus on the right thing and take the right action. Here's another example, a plant manager who ask the question, "What do I need to do to make sure this plant runs smoothly?" Is an interesting question, probably one that happens all the time. If you have a lot of larger corporations move around their plant managers, they have different experiences.
They come into a new situation where they're looking at, how do I make sure that things run smoothly while I'm here, is a very different question than what equipment, if it fails, could shut this plant down. Which would ultimately lead to the plant running smoothly or not, but it changes the dynamic from a broad risk-averse question that says, "What things do I need to keep doing to keep the status quo versus what are my true risks? What are those things that can really impact the long-term functionality of this plant?" And it's been my observation is I've worked with a number of managers, a number of executives and leaders, that the ones that can really focus on asking clear, concise questions of their teams, of their superiors, in some cases of their boards, many good CEOs have a very unique way of vetting out what the true needs of the board, or the ownership team really wants.
And funneling that down into a clear why, so that their management team, their VPs, and their other leaders in their organization can align what actions they take with the long-term board strategies and needs. And so, making sure that we are taking time to ask the right questions of ourselves, of the organizations that we are working in, that we own, that we are building and making sure that we can use those questions to vet out the underlying assumptions that can weaken our organization long-term.
This is one of the longstanding challenges with the public investment cycle on a quarterly reporting basis with earnings reports and various incentives for organizations to align to various investment strategies that may be good in the short term, but kind of chip away at the expense of it's long-term growth. And there's a lot of dynamics there, but the organizations that ask very tough, poignant questions of themselves, of their managers, of their owners, what their priorities are, and what they need to do, are the ones that in my experience have been able to take the right action at the right time and have good strong management teams run and build their organizations. And it's amazing to see how the mindset shifts once we ask better questions. That's all for today. Thank you for joining us. Have a fantastic day and we'll catch you next time here on the Durability Podcast.
Everybody, I just wanted to share with you something that has been super effective at helping organizations to really kickstart the conversation around how they're going to build a long-term durability into their management practices. And if you stop what you're doing right now and go to www.durablecapitalindex.com, that's durablecapitalindex.com, you can sign up to take a very special assessment. This is the Durable Capital Index Assessment. It's a baseline assessment, and it'll show you exactly where you're at, currently with fundamental best practices for building durability. And it will give you a very detailed feedback report that you can take and share with your team. So if you go to www.durablecapitalindex.com, sign up, take the assessment and share it with your team, and really start that conversation around building long-term durability into your organization.