Confession: my wife and I have been going to couples therapy. And we love it. Ok, maybe that’s a little strong. I love it, and while she does admit that it’s helpful, she’s not crazy about opening up every personal nook and cranny to strangers that give the same empty stare no matter what is uncovered in those dark and scary places.
I love it because we are forced to confront all the good things and the bad things about our relationship. We are free to criticize, but we learn to convey our criticisms as feelings, not as personal attacks. Instead of saying, “You spend too much money,” you might say, “When you spend $200 on a pair of shoes, I worry that we’re not saving enough for retirement.”
During couples therapy, we are also free to complain, but it’s a different kind of complaining than we are used to. When you complain about your wife to your buddies at the bar, they listen and empathize and call for another round. But they never tell you that you’re wrong or being unreasonable or overdramatic, and they’ll rarely help you solve the underlying problem. Maybe that’s ok for some people, but personally, I want to know when I’m wrong and I love solving problems. When you lodge a complaint during therapy, you’re always at risk of having the finger pointed back at you, and you’re always at risk of having to change in order to solve the problem.
Therapy also helps to highlight all the good stuff in a relationship. When we dig up all our bones, we invariably find some treasures too. We rediscover the reasons we’re together in the first place. We become more empathetic and more forgiving. We feel grateful for what we have. And at least for us, we gain a stronger mutual desire to make the other one happy.
The desire to make someone else happy is the foundation of most relationships, whether it’s with a spouse, a boss, or a customer. If we strive to satisfy the other person’s needs or desires, then there is a good chance that they will return the favor. So simply being committed to making someone else happy is the first step and it might be enough for a successful relationship, right? Maybe not.
It turns out that, despite best intentions, most people simly don’t know what makes their partner (or their customers) happy.
Dr. Bill Harley is a well-known psychologist and marriage counselor who has interviewed thousands of husbands and wives. He specifically set out to learn about their most important emotional needs by asking them one simple question: “What could your partner do for you that would make you the happiest?”
He classified their answers into categories, and nearly all of the emotional needs described fell into one of ten categories: admiration, affection, conversation, domestic support, family commitment, financial support, honesty and openness, physical attractiveness, recreational companionship, and sexual fulfillment. Very few ever named a most important emotional need that was not included in this list of ten.
Here’s where Dr. Harley made a fascinating discovery: Whenever he asked couples to list their needs according to what they needed most, men would list them one way and women the opposite way. Of the 10 emotional needs, the five listed as most important by men were usually the five least important for women, and vice-versa.
What an insight! It’s no wonder that husbands and wives have so much difficulty meeting each other’s needs. Even if they are willing to do what makes each other happiest, their efforts are misdirected. What they appreciate the most, their spouses appreciate the least!
After making this discovery, Dr. Harley created the “Emotional Needs Questionnaire” and asked husbands and wives to complete it independently and then share with each other.
[Here is the Emotional Needs Questionnaire, compliments of Dr. Harley.]
So what does this all have to do with meeting our business needs?
Organizations exist to solve a specific problem for a specific customer segment and to be compensated for delivering a solution that customers are willing to pay for. But in my experience, many organizations really don’t know what its customers’ biggest problems are, what a solution is worth to them, or what the risks are if they don’t find a solution. In many cases, I see businesses assuming that they know this stuff, or worse, they assume that being committed to solving the problem is sufficient to keep their customers coming back.
Similarly, CEOs have teams of managers and employees that are supposed to help achieve the goals of the company as dictated by the CEO. But a staggering number of employees, about 70%, are “disengaged” at work, according to Kevin Sheridan, author of Building a Magnetic Culture. He claims that one key reason for this is that they don’t know the driving purpose of the company and they don’t know what they need to do to make their managers or their customers happy.
There are dozens of examples of people that should be interacting for mutual benefit, but they often fail because they don’t know how to make the other person happy.
Managers and their direct reports are often at odds as a result of unclear expectations on both sides. Managers may want quality, timeliness, respect, obedience, and loyalty. But their employees might value praise, flexibility, fulfillment, feedback, professional advancement, and maybe just a smile. If managers and their employees had a better idea of what each other wanted, there might be better results all around. Maybe managers and their teams need to ask each other questions about “what would make them the happiest”?
Software developers and product managers are another classic example. Development teams and developers often have big egos and presume that they know what customers need (yes, I’m stereotyping, but there’s a lot of truth here). But product managers (who presumably speak for customer needs) would beg to differ.
How many of us know exactly what our clients, our boss, our employees, and our customers really want? If you describe their most important needs, are you describing what you think is their needs, or are you describing what they’ve told you?
If businesses and their customers filled out something similar to the ENQ, would they find that they are catering to the exact opposite needs?
Great companies do go to extraordinary lengths to understand their customers, and I believe this is one of the most important hallmarks of great companies vs. all the others.
So to help good companies become great companies, I’ve created a version of the ENQ for organizations and their customers, called the Customer Needs Questionnaire. Download it free here and ask your customers to fill it out, or use it as a template for customer interviews. In the same way that my wife and I were motivated to find out what our most important emotional needs are, you too have to take action to find out what makes your customers tick. Don’t just think about it, do it!