The good, the bad and the ugly

Whenever I am doing any improvement work for clients, these are the questions I ask of everyone.

You need to know what is going well. Nothing is without something good. Even if you have the employee from hell, always doing it wrong, somewhere in there, you will find something they do well. You will likely find the bad and the ugly in there too!

Even with the best employee, you will find the bad and they will tell you the ugly. I have found that when I ask these questions of anyone in a company, it helps them open up.

It means you are not just looking at one side. You are looking at everything. You want to understand the full picture. You are not focussing on the negative to beat people down with. Equally, you are not focussing on everything being brilliant and feeding back what people want to hear.

The ugly is a way to spot the little gems. It plays on people’s innate need to have a bit of a gossip. It opens people up, it gives you insight. Sometimes the uglies are single situations that are outliers and don’t happen often. Sometimes, they highlight where you can make a change for disaster recovery reasons. And sometimes, it is just a chance for someone to get something off their chest and be listened to.

Tomorrow, how about you go and ask one of your team to tell you the good, the bad and the ugly of their day job.

You will get the benefit of finding out what is going well, badly and awfully as well as giving the chance of someone in your team to be listened to, heard and, if you do it right, make a change for the better.

In the simplest terms, I help people to get ready to profitably scale. What you do with a room full of people is very different to how you do it when they cross cities, continents or oceans.

I am happy to spend a few minutes working through a challenge you have, as an advisor on officehours.io (Officehours connects you with amazing people, for 10 minutes of free 1-on-1 advice).

Check out my available slots here