by Aaron Levy
All that said, there’s an important caveat to this activity. Don’t do this if you don’t plan to follow through. If you don’t have the desire to do the work to support your employee, if you don’t plan to help them build the skills, or if you’re planning on letting them go next week, don’t hold a stay interview with this person.
Also, don’t hold only one stay interview. I recommend doing these once a quarter with each of your direct reports. People’s lives change, and their perspectives change. What an employee says today will not necessarily be what they want tomorrow.
Tip: Put a process in place to ensure your leaders hold stay interviews quarterly.
WHAT’S THE POINT?
When you take the time to have a real conversation with your employee, you help them feel seen and heard. You gain valuable insights into their needs. It gives you the opportunity to support their growth in ways beyond simply providing a raise or job promotion. You can help them grow today by challenging them to take on skill-building projects.
Even if they don’t know where or how to grow, what you’ve done is create space for them to discover this, to start thinking about their future. You can be sure that the next time you talk to them, they will be better equipped to answer the question.
When you listen, you show your employees you care, and you become a powerful reason for them to engage in their work. Having a manager who is a coach and willing to listen inspires and motivates employees to commit fully to the vision and mission of the team.
Take the time to connect with your people. It’s these human interactions that make the biggest impact.
TOP TAKEAWAYS
• Listening is hard, and we’ve likely not practiced or trained this skill properly, which is why most people suck at listening.
• Sustained motivation over the course of months and years does not come from a sales competition, a rah-rah speech, a ping-pong table, or free lunches. It comes when you show people you care, when you truly hear them, when you listen with intention and attention.
• When your managers fail to listen with intention and attention, you run the risk of alienating your people.
• Noticing and accepting your inner dialogue is critical to becoming a better and more powerful listener.
• We all have listening blind spots, and though they are not all bad, your blind spot is what holds you back from being a truly present listener.
• Holding a stay interview is a perfect way to put your learning about listening into practice right away.
• Listening with intention and attention affords you and your leaders a tremendous opportunity to lead on a whole new level. If you can do this, you’ll not only help them connect to you and to their work, but you’ll also motivate them to give their extra discretionary effort to you and your company.
ACTION ITEMS
• Identify your listening blind spot; see activity from page 66.
• Hold one stay interview with an employee, see page 69 for specific steps.
REFLECTION
• What did you learn from holding your stay interview? How will it impact your approach for that employee? For your next stay interview?
Chapter 5
ASK POWERFUL QUESTIONS
“Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a much better indicator of future success than great answers.”
—Ray Dalio, billionaire investor, hedge fund manager, author, philanthropist
Intention: Curiosity is the secret to unlocking understanding and success.
Every day you show up to work, you are making choices, decisions both big and small about whether to hire candidate a, b, or c; how to respond to a client email; who is the best person to put on a project; whether an investment will be a valuable spend. These aren’t blind choices or decisions you make on a whim. You wouldn’t be where you are if you did that. Instead, for each of these choices, you evaluate—whether you’re conscious of it or not—the candidate’s capabilities versus the needs of the role, the real question the client is asking, the project need, or the cost versus reward of the investment. As a leader, you are constantly evaluating people, situations, and teams. Sound evaluation is indispensable to your success as a leader and crucial to your ability to think more critically about your people, team, and business.
THE PROBLEM WITH ASSUMING
In my early career, I led a team as the director of delivery in charge of rolling out our coaching and education programs to new clients. I’d risen fast in this organization and was arrogant. I thought I had all the answers, and it wasn’t until we had a major client rollout flop that I realized I had no one to blame but myself. I didn’t know the error of my ways until it hit me right in the face.
At the time, “I got this” was my go-to line when I knew what I was doing and wanted to get Marc, my boss, off my back. It communicated that I had all the information I needed, that I knew my team, and that I could take it from there. It indicated that others should stop asking me questions and let me do my work. I remember being annoyed and frustrated that Marc didn’t seem to trust me to roll out this new client. But what I couldn’t see was how “I got this” highlighted a major mistake. I wasn’t evaluating the situation. I wasn’t asking questions. I assumed I knew all the answers, and I was wrong. My assumptions led me to put the wrong team members on the project and not provide enough time for proper customization. We ended up overpromising and underdelivering to our new client. The consequence was the client would likely not buy more from us in the future. My job was to execute these client rollouts, and I had failed. Why?
In a debrief with Marc, he said, “Aaron, when you say, ‘I got this’ and have no concerns about a situation, that is exactly when I get concerned.”
What he meant was that when I stop asking questions, it’s because I assume I know what’s going to work, which means I stop evaluating potential outcomes and solutions. For someone who likes to move fast and make quick decisions and even quicker mistakes, slowing down to ask questions has been one of the hardest leadership skills for me to learn. I’m still working on it.
It’s a tendency we all have when we want to take the quick route to get somewhere fast. And it’s what holds us back from being powerful, strategic leaders. Powerful questions are our way around this pitfall. They provide a means to mitigate our biases and assumptions and allow us to take a deeper dive into the evaluation of a situation, a person, or a team as a whole.
BIASES GET IN THE WAY
I had biases for how the rollout was going to play out. I’d done it before. I knew what was going to happen, so why should I look further into it?
I wish I could say this was unique to me, but we all do this. Our brains are wired to jump to outcomes, to look for shortcuts. In the 1970s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two behavioral economists widely known as the founders of modern-day behavioral theory, worked together to prove the different ways in which our brains trick us. In their work, which Kahneman would later win a Nobel Prize for, they found how as humans we are not as rational in our decision making as we might think.1
Their work highlighted how we make decisions based on our past experiences and the experiences of others. Many times these decisions are illogical; our past experiences are often a limited set of all possible outcomes, yet we see them as a finite set—as all the information for a given scenario. Our brain is programmed to be efficient, always looking for the fastest way to make a decision, so we make a decision based on our limited information instead of seeking further understanding. Even with more time and resources to make a better decision, we can tend to make the illogical one. We systematically make these illogical decisions because they fit a mental model. Often, that mental model serves us and works; but when it doesn’t, the mistakes can be huge.
Take football, for example. Many of us have a mental model of what a quarterback should look like. We look at the player who can throw the ball
the farthest, has the biggest muscles, or runs the fastest, and we think, That’s a football player; he’s going to be successful. Sometimes that’s true, and yet there are plenty of times when our mental models are broken.
Take Tom Brady. He was drafted after 198 other players and six other quarterbacks in the 2000 NFL draft. With a total of only thirty-two teams in the NFL, this means all thirty-two passed up on Brady multiple times in the course of the multiday NFL draft. If you looked at his scouting report, nothing on it indicated he’d be a good NFL player, let alone someone who could become a starting quarterback. He had a poor build—too skinny, lacking the physical stature and strength normally associated with an athlete. He was considered to be too slow and didn’t have a strong enough arm to get the ball downfield.2
Well, as you may know, this skinny, supposedly weak quarterback has become an NFL legend, making it to nine Super Bowls in his nineteen-year career, and three in a row after the age of thirty-nine, winning six of them in total. Because of his record, there’s now, at the start of any given season, an almost 50% chance that a Tom Brady–led team will make it to the Super Bowl. He has the most wins of any quarterback, holds the record for the most passing yards and touchdowns with one team, and is widely considered to be the best quarterback of all time.
And remember, this was the same person who initially didn’t fit the mental model that general managers, scouts, and football analysts had of a successful professional quarterback. This mental model caused thirty-one teams to make an illogical decision about Brady’s capabilities. With the stakes so high and having ample time to assess a group of players with scouts, video analysis, interviews, and even a weekend to compare all players against one another in the same place, how could this have happened? To me, this shows the true power of a cognitive bias—a systematic pattern of thought that causes us to make inferences about people and situations in a highly illogical way.
One of the most debilitating of these cognitive biases is confirmation bias. That’s when we listen only to information that confirms our preconceptions about a person or situation. Kahneman stated that “confirmation bias comes from when you have an interpretation, and you adopt it, and then, top down, you force everything to fit that interpretation.”3 This construction of an idea constrains our future thinking. We limit the list of possible outcomes and thwart our ability to make the best possible decisions for our team and business.
Confirmation bias can be fatal for leaders, limiting their decisionmaking ability and blindsiding them completely. It’s our blind spot to properly evaluating our people, situations, and team.
OVERCOMING OUR BIASES
If our biases so clearly and profoundly impact our ability to make the best decision, to properly evaluate a scenario, what can we do? How do we avoid this pitfall? How do we confront this blind spot?
Like any blind spot, it’s not about going to war with it; rather, it’s about noticing you have it and knowing that it can get in your way. It’s about challenging your assumptions and biases so you can determine their validity. You can only do that when you allow yourself to realize that you might not have all the answers and when you start asking powerful questions.
The act of asking powerful questions is the most effective way around these biases. Smart, thoughtful questions can help us avoid the all-too-common miscalculation our brains often make. By asking more questions, you can pressure-test your biases, learn more about a given situation, and gain much-needed perspective, which helps you better evaluate a situation.
ACTIVITY: COGNITIVE BIAS
Consider Linda, a thirty-one-year-old woman, single and bright. When she was a student in high school and college, she was deeply involved in social justice issues and also participated in environmental protests.
1. Which is more probable about Linda’s occupation today? a. Linda works as a TV reporter.
b. Linda is a bank teller.
c. Linda is a bank teller full time but remains active in the environmental movement.
Quick. What’s your answer—a, b, or c? And in what precise order do you think them most likely?
Here’s the solution: First, ignore how you ranked a, as it is irrelevant to this mind teaser. The key is this: If you ranked c as more probable than b, you are wrong—and in very good company. That is what most people tend to answer when they are given this particular brainteaser. Statistically speaking, it is more probable that Linda is a bank teller, of any kind, than that she is both a bank teller and active in the environmental movement, which is a subset of the whole category of all bank tellers.4
WHAT POWERFUL QUESTIONS LOOK LIKE
A powerful question is one that specifically evokes clarity about a situation. It creates greater possibility through its exploration of an idea or person. It reveals new learning to the person who is asking it and generates some sort of action from the asker, the responder, or both people. There are a few key attributes that make a question powerful.
A powerful question is open ended
Closed questions provide a finite answer to a question; they are a yes or a no. They limit your ability to learn from the response, which is why open-ended questions are often much more powerful.
An open-ended question is exactly what it sounds like: It leaves the answer open to a thoughtful response, beyond a yes or no. It also allows for the possibility that the answer will go in a direction you don’t expect. It helps you to ask for more information without your biases getting in the way and without influencing the person you’re asking.
Instead of asking, “Do you think Jeremy is the right person for the team?” you could ask, “What do you think would make Jeremy a fit here?”
Try starting your open-ended questions with what or how—not why. I suggest avoiding the use of why as a question word for two key reasons: First, when delivered poorly, it can come off as sounding accusatory or judgmental to the person you’re asking, potentially causing them to become more defensive and thus limiting their response. Second, why questions force us to reflect on the reason or cause of our behavior, which can be incredibly hard to do in the moment; it sets off a process of lengthy self-exploration and limits creative thinking. Instead of asking, “Why is hitting your goal important to you?” take an extra few seconds to flip the question to a what or a how by asking instead, “What about hitting your goal was important to you?” or “How did hitting your goal impact you?” Instead of asking, “Why didn’t we think of that earlier?” ask, “What assumptions held us back from exploring that option sooner?” or “How could we avoid making the same mistake next time?”
A powerful question comes from a beginner’s mindset
A beginner’s mindset helps us avoid our blind spot of confirmation bias. When you ask a powerful question while assuming you already know the answer, you inadvertently lead the respondent to give you an answer you want. When you guide a person toward your own conclusion, your leading questions can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In order to ask more powerful questions, try to let go of your biases and start from a beginner’s mindset. Although you may already have an opinion on the situation you’re asking questions about, you can’t truly learn more until you believe there is more to be learned. Asking just to ask will rarely yield new or valuable information.
Gino Wickman, the author of Traction, says, “The mind is like a parachute—it has to be open to work.”5 I believe this is how you must show up to a conversation. Instead of telling yourself that you already know the answer, tell yourself that you don’t (at least not yet). Then, ask yourself what more you could learn and what you still need to know.
A powerful question is clear and succinct
There are many powerful questions that die before they finish. I can’t tell you how many leaders I see ask great, powerful questions but then keep tacking on words or sometimes even asking subsequent questions on top of the first. Confusing questions rarely lead to new insights.
When it comes to asking powerful q
uestions, simpler is better. Instead of asking, “Who would you need to be and how would you need to change to make the difference you want with the team?” ask, “What one change would make the biggest impact for your team?” or, making it even simpler, “What needs to change?” Instead of asking, “How can you use your learning from this data, your experience, and your past client conversations to properly extrapolate and come up with the best possible solution for the client?” cut down the fluff in the middle and ask, “How can you use your learning to come up with the best solution for the client?” Or even, “What is the best solution for the client?”
A powerful question comes in context
A powerful question doesn’t come out of left field; rather, it makes sense to the situation at hand. This happens when your question is related to the topic you are currently talking about. A powerful question isn’t powerful because of the words you use; it’s powerful because of the way it affects the other person and creates an opening for change. If you’ve spent the past thirty minutes talking about a problem but ask a question about a different problem, you’re likely not asking a powerful question, because it’s completely unrelated, out of the blue, and not within the context of the conversation at hand.
Say you’re having one of those difficult conversations with a direct report. They’ve been struggling in their position, and you want to discuss their team’s issue of consistently missing deadlines. You begin the discussion by asking: “What does your team need to meet their deadlines?”