Your baby is ugly, and you are doing everything wrong!
That was not what I said, and it is definitely not what I meant.
Question: How do you give feedback to an owner and/or leader’s direct question(s) about their business or
operations?
Answer: The most efficient, concise, and clear answer is not likely the most effective answer to entice the
asker to a richer and deeper mutual discovery discussion.
Let me give a personal example as a father of four children now married adults. I wish I learned earlier to ask
curious open-ended questions sooner rather than later. Often, they just wanted to think or process aloud, and
advice offered too quickly was either incomplete at best or wrong at worst and did not invite them to safely
share more and perhaps sensitive information.
I know that approach caused much angst for future discussions if my children were brave and gracious enough
to give me another opportunity.
Back to business owners/leaders. They are typically successful (only 35% of businesses are still around at the
ten-year mark) 1 , have worked extremely hard, and many more hours than most. They are competitive and they
want and know that their business needs to grow and adapt. But change is hard and getting feedback is
usually painful even when it is good and accurate.
What is the answer?
It depends.
What is the problem to be solved or the opportunity to be developed? Are we growing, shrinking, profitable? Do
we know clearly (read meaningful metrics) the status and trends of the business? Is there crystal clarity and
alignment of all the above throughout the organization? Do we have the capacity? The capabilities? The
resources and/or right partners? Do we know where we want to go and how to get there? What are our
customers telling us? What do we know about our competition? Do we care? What is keeping us up at night
and why? What may be coming we are not even thinking about?
If you have the answers to all the above, then I want to ask you! But if your customers, market, employees, and
technology are changing, then I think I can assist you in optimizing your people, processes, and profits.
Your baby is beautiful, and you have clearly done a lot of things right.
- https://www.commerceinstitute.com/business-failure-rate/