Buckingham's 8 Questions To Ask Your Employees As A Business Owner
I have long recommended Marcus Buckingham’s book First, Break All the Rules.
This is a leadership classic in which he takes us on a journey up a mountain, starting at the base camp of foundational competencies and climbing up to higher echelons of leadership skills.
The key tool from this book that I used with many clients was his Twelve Questions: a set of conversations to measure the engagement of key team members.
In the Summer of 2017, I had the opportunity to hear Buckingham speak in person and learned he has pared his twelve questions down to eight (which I appreciate; fewer is always better).
The point of the questions is to gauge how the team member feels about the organization as well as their role in it.
The best employers, Buckingham argued, encourage their leaders to truly understand their team members’ point of view — not just the organization’s perspective.
By reorganizing and refining his original list, he created the Buckingham 8 Questions, grouped into four categories:
Purpose
Excellence
Support
Future
Just as with the 12, I would highly encourage leaders and supervisors to use these questions to engage with their employees during career planning sessions (such as annual reviews) or even as a simple gut check throughout the year.
These 8 Questions offer a practical way to step into your team members’ shoes, understand what matters to them, and uncover areas where you may need to provide more clarity, coaching, or support.
Leaders who ask the right questions build deeper trust and higher engagement, and often discover untapped potential within their teams.
In today’s world of hybrid teams, rapid change, and evolving expectations around work, tools like this are even more important. Employees want to know that their leaders see them not just as workers, but as people, with unique strengths, goals, and concerns.
Try using the Buckingham 8 Questions with someone on your team this month. You don’t have to wait until the annual review; try making it a conversation starter in your next one-on-one. You may be surprised by what you learn. And if you’d like help building intentional, high-trust conversations into your leadership rhythm, our Executive Coaching team would be glad to walk with you.
