Cleaning up after a meeting, I asked, “where’s your recycling?”

I wasn’t that surprised to find out they had no recycling bin in that office, so I simply took the can home with me. No big deal.

I wasn’t trying to be “that annoying guy with an agenda”, but trying to move the needle, even fractionally.

This is especially important when you have employees or are in some other leadership capacity. If something is important, you’ll be talking about it. You’ll be asking questions which result in people thinking more on that topic.

Let’s imagine that you’re wanting to improve market awareness of your organization, and would like your employees contributing to that. I would expect you might be having conversations like:

  • What would you like customers saying about us on Facebook?
  • I was wondering how important word-of-mouth is to the kind of thing we do.
  • What kind of mentions do you see about us in YOUR social media?
  • It sure feels like the way people get recommendations has changed a lot in the last 5 years.

Notice that these are all open-ended. Often not even questions, just conversation-starters.

But the point is to help focus peoples’ attention on what’s important and have a great conversation on the topic. You’ll probably even learn something!