Have You Asked?

Posted on Nov 19, 2018

There is a great scene in the 1962 movie “That Touch of Mink” where Cary Grant is running a meeting with his senior leadership. He wants to buy a company owned by a Mr. Benson and so far his leadership team has been unsuccessful in making the acquisition happen. They explain that they’ve talked to Mr. Benson’s lawyers, his board of directors, and his executive assistant, but Mr. Benson won’t sell, even though Cary Grant has offered him more money than his company is worth.

When Doris Day accidentally crashes the meeting and hears this conversation, Cary Grant somewhat jokingly asks for her opinion.

She asks, “Have you talked to Mr. Benson?”

As you can probably imagine, the answer is no. Spoiler alert: Cary Grant goes in person to talk to Mr. Benson and successfully closes the deal.

It’s a funny scene in a fantastic movie, but it’s also extremely applicable to business today.

When a client shares their frustration with me about a person, or even an entire team, who is “resisting” a change and asks me how to get them on board, my first question is always, “Have you asked them?” And the answer is almost always no.

It never fails to amaze me how much time people are willing to spend in a conference room hypothesizing about what a stakeholder cares about, but it doesn’t occur to them to just go ask! Not only will you save a whole lot of time and energy in getting to the root of the problem, as opposed to just sitting in a conference room conjecturing, but you will often uncover a legitimate concern with the change you are trying to implement.

To make things even better, the person who has the concern will very likely help you come up with the solution IF YOU JUST ASK. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have seen this happen.

Too often, project teams put unnecessary pressure on themselves to have all of the answers, but my response to this is always that you first need to know what the questions are — in other words, you need to know what the people you will be affecting care about.

And do you know the quickest way to find out what people care about? You guessed it. Just ask.