Two hours into a leadership session, I asked the room one question. What is currently broken here? Silence. Then a supervisor in the back said that her team and the customer service team had not spoken directly in months. Everything went through email, and half of it never got answered. The room came alive after that. Every leader was hearing about issues for the first time, and for the first time, they had practical solutions for improving the workplace.

I run a Bar Raiser Workplace Improvement Audit with almost every team I work with. It consists of only four questions. That’s it. And I have never once run it without a leader walking out saying, “That session was a game changer for our organization.”

Nobody Told You Because Nobody Was Asked

Your people are not hiding anything from you. They just have no structured place to say it. Complaints get labeled as negativity. Ideas get raised in a hallway and forgotten by lunch. People stop offering ideas, and leadership starts believing quiet means everything is fine. Then a competitor moves faster than you on something your own team flagged two years ago.

The 4 Questions of the Bar Raiser Workplace Improvement Audit

1. What Is Currently Working?

Start here because your people know which parts of this company are helping, and leaders cut those by accident all the time. A team will tell you the fifteen-minute Monday huddle is the only reason anything ships on time.  You cannot protect what you never knew was working.

2. What Is Currently Broken?

This is the question leaders brace for, and it is almost never the gripe session they fear it will be.

What comes out is usually ‘poor communication.’ Two departments that stopped talking. A handoff nobody owns. A customer getting three different answers from three different people, each one assuming somebody else had it. 

3. What Are We Doing That Is Outdated?

A friend told me she always bakes her lasagna in two pans. One large, one small. I asked why? “That’s how mom taught me to do it.”

So she asked her mom, who said that is how her grandmother taught her.

So she went to Grandma. “Back in my day, we only had one large pan and one small pan, so we split it to make enough. Today you can buy one giant pan. You two just never thought to ask.”

Every company is baking in two pans somewhere. I call it an ‘Inherited Process’. An approval chain, a report nobody reads, or an outdated leadership program built for a workforce from 20 years ago. All of those are kept alive by one simple phrase every one of us dreads hearing:

“That’s how it’s always been done.”

Your competitors are not beating you with better people. They are beating you with updated processes.

4. What Can We Do to Raise the Bar?

Now you go wide. Customer experience. Culture. Training. Technology. One area at a time, on purpose.

Here’s the truth about standards. If you never look at an area, the bar in that area cannot rise. It settles wherever it landed the last time somebody paid attention.

Asking Is a Promise

These four questions are not the hard part. Anyone can read them off a page and run the meeting. The hard part starts the moment your team answers.

Asking is a promise. The second somebody says the thing they’ve been sitting on for three years, you have made a commitment, whether you meant to or not. Do nothing with it, and you have not run an audit. You have handed your people a documented list of everything you are choosing not to fix.

That’s worse than never asking. Silence costs you information. A broken promise costs you the person.

So do not run this until you are willing to act on at least one answer. One. That is the entry fee.

Bar Raisers™ Do Not Defend the Way It Has Always Been Done

The leaders who get real answers here have one trait in common. They treat change as an opportunity instead of a threat.

That is what I call Creative Adaptability. It’s #8 out of 12 Bar Raiser™ traits, and it belongs to the leader who makes improvements instead of relying on outdated processes.

Here’s the ROI of running this meeting. Question 3 alone usually pays for the exercise, because inherited process is money and hours leaving your building every week for no reason anyone can defend. Question 2 catches communication breakdowns before a customer does. Question 4 turns the payroll you already pay into your innovation department.

Tomorrow’s Move

Pick one team. Book forty-five minutes. Ask the four questions in order, and resist the urge to explain or defend anything you hear. Write every answer where the team can see it, and before anyone leaves the room, choose one item you will fix, name who owns it, and put a date on it.

That last step is the whole difference between an audit and a complaint session.

This Week’s Challenge: The Two-Pan Test

1. Find one Inherited Process this week. Just one.
2. Ask your team a single question about it. If we were starting this company today, would we build it this way?
3. If the only answer anybody can give you is that this is how we have always done it, you found your two pans. Now go buy the bigger one.

SHARE THIS!

Send this to another leader who is about to cut something their team would have told them was working. These four questions take forty-five minutes, and they will save your company thousands to millions down the road.

So tell me, which of the four questions would scare you the most to ask out loud? Go ask it anyway, and keep raising the bar! 💪

Bring the Bar Raiser™ Movement to Your Company

Want the Bar Raiser Workplace Improvement Audit run inside your organization? Book a keynote, or build it into your managers through Destination Workplace® leadership development.

About Betsy:

Betsy Allen-Manning is the wake-up call you didn’t know you needed. She’s a high-energy leadership keynote speaker and creator of the Bar Raisers™ Movement: a proprietary system redefining how organizations are approaching performance, leadership, and culture. Featured on FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, and TEDx, Betsy works with organizations across corporate, franchise, association, nonprofit, and government sectors. She’s the lead researcher behind the National Workplace Trends Study, and delivers programs around her Bar Raisers™ and Leadership Mastery frameworks. She is the founder of Destination Workplace®, an award-winning leadership development firm in Dallas, Texas.