You have just taken over a team you did not build. Some of them wanted your job. Most of them are wondering what you are going to change. All of them are being careful.
The standard advice is to listen. That is correct and almost useless, because nobody tells you what to listen for. Thirty conversations later you have a great deal of impression and not much you can act on.
So I ask everyone the same three questions. Same words, same order, one conversation each, and I send them in advance. The consistency is the point: when everybody answers the same question, the differences between the answers become the information.
Why questions rather than analysis
You could read the org chart, the metrics and the last two quarters of reviews. You should. But those tell you what the organization believes about itself, which is not the same as what is true, and they tell you nothing about how any individual thinks.
All three of mine look like questions about the work. All three are questions about the person. You learn about the work from the content of the answer, and about the person from its shape: what they reach for first, what they measure themselves by, where they put the cause of things.
Question One: what are your objectives, and how do they align to the company’s?
It sounds like a warm-up question. Don’t underestimate how consequential it is.
Everybody makes priority calls all day. Which meeting, which escalation, which of the four things on the list gets finished today and which one slips to Thursday. Nobody supervises those decisions, because there are far too many of them. The quality of every single one depends on whether the person knows what the company is actually trying to achieve.
Somebody who cannot answer this question is not lazy and not careless. They are guessing, dozens of times a day, and some of those guesses will be wrong in ways nobody notices for a quarter.
Two things can go wrong here, and they mean different things.
Some people cannot name their objectives at all. That is rarely a personal failing. Somebody above them never made it clear, and you have just learned something about the organization you inherited rather than about the person in front of you.
More common, and more revealing: they can state their objectives precisely and cannot connect them upward. They know their task list. They do not know what it is for. That person will be busy (often visibly, impressively busy) without being able to tell you what any of it is in service of. And when the tradeoff arrives, they will make it on instinct, because nobody ever showed them the line between what they do and what the company is trying to achieve.
And if five people give you five different versions of what the company is trying to achieve, stop taking notes about individuals. You have found the actual problem, and it is now yours.
Question Two: what are your major accomplishments toward those objectives?
This one looks like a performance question. It is partly that. It is more useful as a test of self-assessment.
Busy and delivering are not the same thing, and the difference never shows up on a calendar. Listen for whether what they are proud of matches what the objectives required. People can work extraordinarily hard on the wrong thing for a long time, and nobody who is doing it knows they are.
Listen for where the answer stops. I sent the account manager the presentation they asked for is a complete sentence and a completed task. Compare it with this: I sent it over, then walked them through it. We reworked it together so it hit what this customer actually cared about, and they asked me to co-present. The customer agreed to a demo.
Both people were handed the same request. One treated it as the job. The other treated it as the start of the job, and kept going until something happened. The second answer is longer because there was more to say, and it ends on an outcome rather than a deliverable. Somebody who answers that way habitually is somebody you can hand a result to.
The gap between question one and question two is itself a finding. If the accomplishments do not map to the objectives, either the objectives are wrong or the work is, and you need to know which before you change anything.
Question Three: what are the major obstacles getting in the way?
The first two questions are about the work and what it is producing. This one is about attitude, and it sorts people into two groups: owners and victims. In my experience, this is the money question.
Everybody has obstacles, so naming them proves nothing. What you are listening for is where they locate them, and what they are doing about it.
An owner describes obstacles they hold a piece of, and what they are doing about them. A victim describes obstacles that sit entirely outside themselves (another team, leadership, headcount, the process) and has attempted nothing against any of them.
Be careful here, because the second answer is not automatically the wrong one. Sometimes the obstacle really is external and the person is completely right about it. The test is not whether they point outward. The test is whether they have done anything within their reach, and whether they can tell you what they would need in order to move it.
And if the whole team names the same external obstacle, take it seriously. That may not be six people making excuses. It could be a constraint you now own, and you have just found it in your first two weeks instead of your second quarter. Or it could be group victim mentality: consensus around negative topics is common in teams that are already struggling.
Everybody has obstacles. What you are listening for is where they locate them, and what they are doing about it.
Control, influence, concern
Obstacles are real and nobody is pretending otherwise. The question is narrower than that: where does a person’s attention go? To what they can control, to what they can influence, or to what they can do nothing about at all.
The three rings are not my invention. Versions of them have been in circulation for decades. What matters is what happens when a team plots its own list onto them.
One of the times I used these questions was with a sales team I had just taken over. The answers to the third one had a pattern. Not one or two people. Most of them. The obstacles were always somewhere else.
So I put the whole team in a room. HR happened to be at the off-site, which turned out to matter.
I asked people to call out every challenge and obstacle they could think of, and I wrote all of them on a whiteboard. No filtering, no pushback, no debate. My HR business partner’s face made it clear she had no idea where this was going and was not enjoying the ride. That was my fault entirely. I had not warned her.
We grouped the similar ones until we had a manageable list. Then I drew three concentric circles. The inner one I labeled control. The middle one influence, the things we do not own, but where we can move the people who do. The outer one concern, the things that mostly just feel better to complain about over a beer.
Then we plotted their own list onto it.
Almost everything landed in the outer two rings. The control circle was nearly empty. Their own words, their own whiteboard, and what it showed was a team that had located virtually all of its problems outside itself.
Nobody had to be told. They could see it.
HR relaxed, and afterwards asked whether she could run the same exercise with other teams. Most of the group, not all of them, changed how they worked from that day. It saved the team, and it gave most of those people the chance to do well at that company.
How they show up is data too
Sending the questions in advance is partly courtesy. Nobody thinks clearly on the spot about what their objectives are. But how somebody handles the advance notice is its own answer.
Some wing it anyway. Occasionally that is confidence. More often it tells you how seriously they take a new manager asking what they spend their time on.
Some arrive genuinely prepared: they have thought about it, they have something considered to say, and they can still go off-script when you push.
And some arrive over-prepared, with a deck or a great many words. That one is worth slowing down on, because it looks like the best answer and frequently is not. Sometimes it is diligence. Sometimes it is a defense built in advance. And occasionally it is a way of filling the time so the simpler question underneath never quite gets asked.
Reading across, not down
The individual answers are the smaller half of what you get.
Line them up side by side and the patterns arrive on their own. Disagreement about the company’s objectives is an alignment problem. Accomplishments that do not connect to objectives is a prioritization problem.
That ordering matters. Before you conclude anything about a person, check whether the system around them made the outcome available. Most of what looks like a people problem in the first month turns out to be structure, and you will not get a second chance at the first impression you formed.
You are being assessed too
One last thing, and it is easy to miss while you are busy evaluating everyone.
The third question asks people to tell a brand-new boss what is broken. How you react to the first honest answer you get will be repeated across the team before the end of the week. If somebody names a real constraint and you get defensive, or you fix it loudly and take the credit, you have just taught thirty people what is safe to say to you.
The questions are not only a diagnostic. They are the first thing you will be judged on.