You talk. I listen.

Years ago, I began asking employees where they saw money being lost unnecessarily. In one company, the idea sessions generated more than 100 ideas and identified over $500,000 in potential savings.

These weren't big strategic issues. They were the things people saw in their daily work: scrap, rework, downtime, unnecessary steps, and customer problems everyone had learned to live with.

The employees had already found these problems. We hadn't seen them. As they learned more about how the company made and lost money, they started thinking like owners. And we started listening.

What are your people seeing now? And how would you find out?

Ask each member of your leadership team to answer three questions independently.

1. What three outcomes would represent outstanding success for the company?
2. What three accomplishments will you deliver to help produce those outcomes?
3. What three contributions will you make to help your peers succeed?

Have each person write down their answers before discussing them as a group. Then post the answers on a whiteboard or flip chart, organized under each question.

The range of responses may surprise you.

In one company, this exercise produced more than 30 different answers to the first question alone. Everyone was working hard, but they were not working toward the same picture of success.

You do not have to agree on everything. First, see where you stand.

And after that conversation:

What becomes possible now that you have a clearer picture of where you agree?

Bill O’Brien, the former chief executive of Hanover Insurance, believed leaders should create the conditions for people to live more meaningful lives. He saw that as part of building an excellent company.

Years later, a former client, Bill Fonti, described his own company in words I have never forgotten: “We are a personal development company that just so happens to sell furniture.”

Of course a company has to serve customers and produce results. People can help deliver those results when they're trusted, challenged, heard, and given room to grow.

What would change if developing people became part of the daily work?

You ask employees for ideas and don't get much back. Maybe the missing piece is information. Do they know which problems cost money, what customers value, and how their work affects the results?

When people understand those things, they see familiar work differently. Waste stands out. Small improvements matter. Problems stop belonging only to someone else.

You don't have to turn everyone into an accountant. Help people see how the business works, then give them a chance to improve the parts they can influence.

Beyond this year's numbers, what do you hope your company will become? What will people learn there? What responsibility will they carry? What will customers find there that they can't find elsewhere?

The answers show up in daily decisions: what gets your attention, what you tolerate, whom you listen to, how you handle mistakes, and how you share success.

You may never have a final answer. It's still a question worth bringing into the decisions you make today.

Ask five members of a leadership team to describe their company and you might expect five versions of roughly the same story. You may be surprised.

One person thinks the company's priority is growth. Another thinks it is improving profitability. Someone else believes the immediate challenge is developing the next generation of leaders. They may even describe the culture differently. None of them is necessarily wrong. They just may not be as aligned as they think they are.

There is a simple exercise I have used to begin that conversation. Give each member of the leadership team a 5 x 8 index card and ask everyone to answer these five questions independently:

Who are we? What do we stand for? What behaviors define us? What do we want people to experience when they work here or do business with us?

Where are we? What is happening in the business right now? Financially? Organizationally? With customers and employees? What trends are helping us or creating problems?

How did we get here? What decisions, habits, systems and ways of working produced today's results? What have we done particularly well? What might we have allowed to continue too long?

Where are we going? What do we want this company to become? What matters most? What do we care about preserving? What do we want to see happen over the next several years?

How are we going to get there? What needs to change? What should we continue doing? What will we stop doing? What are the few things that deserve our greatest attention? And how will we know whether we are succeeding—financially, operationally and culturally?

Then comes the important part. Don't discuss the questions while people are answering them. Have everyone write independently first. Then put the answers on the table and compare them.

Where are you saying essentially the same thing? Where are the answers different? Where has one person identified something no one else mentioned? And perhaps most importantly: Where have you been assuming agreement that may not actually exist?

Those differences create the conversation. The objective isn't to decide whose answer is right. It is to develop a clearer, shared understanding of the company—where it has been, where it is today and where its leaders intend to take it.

Only after that conversation would I draft the final document. And I wouldn't make it a 20-page strategic plan. Try to get it onto one or two pages. Write it in ordinary language. Make it understandable to someone who joined the company last week.

Then take it beyond the leadership team. Use it to have conversations with managers and employees. Ask them what makes sense. Ask what they see differently. Ask what may be missing.

For a newer employee, imagine the value of being able to understand: This is who we are. This is where we are today. This is how we got here. This is where we're trying to go. And this is how we intend to get there.

That is more than communication. It gives people context. And context helps people make better decisions without waiting for someone above them to tell them what to do.

Five questions. Five index cards. And perhaps a very different conversation about the company you are building.