Do you like my hair?
In the corporate setting, CEOs seldom get rated by a third party research group doing approval ratings surveys.
Even when it’s clear your opinion won’t change anybody’s mind, it is still sought as if it could. And does it really matter if you are not informed enough to offer an opinion in the first place? (Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.)
It’s not just survey companies that track approval ratings for products, services, and politicians.
On a daily basis we are asked questions. These solicited opinions fill up conversations — do you like my hair? Or maybe, it is just a request for culinary preferences — do you like pepper with that? The waiter always has a big pepper grinder to twirl over anything you order.
Solicited comments are sometimes meant to fish for compliments — what do you think of my car? ( Well, it’s a bad shade of mustard and what you got is the low end of this luxury brand.) Questions are social fluff, not a desire for feedback at all but just small talk lubricating the moving parts of social interaction.
The time gap between question and answer is measured as well as the effort put into a well considered reply. A monosyllabic “yes” or “no” is curt, maybe even hiding some contempt. The same goes for a nonverbal grunt or a “hmmm.”
Given an opening like — how was your day, a short reply will do: It was fine. To actually describe in detail the spate of meetings, the agenda, and how these impact on your career trajectory can derail the social exchange. (They liked the doughnuts I brought.) The questioner has neither the time nor appetite for too much information.
More formal queries that depend on a segmented sample of respondents to represent the whole country track preferences for certain institutions and those who head them. This quarterly exercise by at least two companies that seemed to have talked to different sets of people get a lot of media play. The ups and downs in approval ratings of newsmakers seem is a periodic check on the nation’s blood pressure.
There are also requests for feedback in a corporate setting. Where are these questions coming from? Why are they being asked at this particular time? Have your usual critics and rivals been having golf with the boss or watching basketball games with him, grinning and even waving as the TV cameras pan the VIP section?
In the corporate setting, CEOs seldom get rated by a third party research group doing approval ratings surveys. Still, there are surveys on the corporate climate — do you see a future in this company? The annual performance rating too has introduced the 360-degree evaluation that allows subordinates to rate their bosses — I hardly see him.
Internal surveys in companies deal with business processes.
Take a simple question like “What’s our present procedure in handling customer complaints?” Before walking through this potential minefield, it is important to elicit the context of the question and get more clues on where this is going. What customer has been pissed off ?
Answering questions is part of life. From school days when we dreaded quizzes and exams to old age, we are asked questions — have you taken your medicine? And the first thing to understand is when honest, even brutal, feedback is valuable, say from your doctor doing a diagnosis — oh that may just be a silly headache. Get some sleep. We have to do more tests.
Questions should be categorized according to the responses expected and the context of the interrogation. Most times, a truthful reply is still the best option. And there are ways of being ambiguous even with facts and what to withhold.
Still, even the most impartial surveys only reflect the answers of respondents to the questions being asked. What happens to the non-respondents in the sample who feel that answering questions in surveys are a waste of time — hey, I need to grab a doughnut? Their views are not reflected in the results, not even as a footnote — one respondent refused to answer even after his doughnut break.
Questions are not always answered, even when the interviewer is persistent. Anyway, those pestered for a reply don’t always give straight responses. Sometimes, the curt answer is just intended to get the survey over with… as well as get rid of the pest conducting it.