“Did you get a free coffee yesterday?”, the owner asked my wife. “No , why?”, she replied. As she brewed a fresh and free coffee, the owner told Donna she had noticed she didn’t drink her breakfast coffee on Sunday. We had left before she could ask why not. She was genuinely curious about why that coffee had been left untouched by one of her regular customers. She listened to Donna’s feedback, asked great questions, and listened some more.

On its own, that’s pretty cool. But it doesn’t make a difference. I’m sure many of us have had experiences of giving feedback, only for nothing to change. At that coffee shop, action is guaranteed - like when the lids on takeaway cups kept coming off and the owner had a new supplier the following day - she makes it safe to speak, she listens and she acts.

Safety in this case is created by 4 things:

1. She has a track record of being open to feedback and genuine enquiry. She always receives feedback without judgement, justification, blame or excuses. She simply listens.

2. The free coffee is a way of saying “I know you were not happy with our product. I know we did something different and less good”. She is creating an invitation to talk about it by acknowledging the problem and making a gesture of good faith.

3. She separates the people from the problem. It’s all about the best possible coffee. It’s not about an argument or lynching baristas.

4. She acts which lets people know the feedback is heard and valued.

By comparison, a coaching client is currently being asked to give feedback about a team member. The process is not transparent. The intent is not transparent. There's a history of issues raised being ignored or not acted on. There’s a history of people being treated differently because they gave feedback. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t feel safe to give feedback.

How do you personally seek and encourage feedback?

How do you make it safe for others to seek it and give it?

What action do you take as a result?

And if you are in Midland, check out New Ritual cafe. The coffee is great.

Observing Elon

I’ve read a couple of great biographies about Elon Musk recently. He is on the record as disliking Psychological Safety. It’s one of the cultural mismatches of the much reported Twitter purchase. 

I disagree with Musk. 

There’s significant evidence that he values Psychological Safety, and like many leaders, misunderstands what it means. 

Amy Edmondson in her book, “The Fearless Organisation” says Psychological Safety is not being nice, or lowering performance standards. In high performing teams there will be a hard-edged drive to sorting issues and clearing a high bar. It’s likely to be rewarding but not necessarily comfortable. 

Musk actively does many things to make it Psychologically Safe to ask questions, challenge the status quo, and achieve incredible results. Like all leaders, he also, either inadvertently or deliberately does many things that degrade Psychological Safety in his companies and teams.

If you want some insight into one of the most controversial and significant “movers and shakers” of our time, I’d highly recommend “Elon Musk”, by Walter Isaccson. It’s current up to 2023. Over the next few weeks, I'll share some more detailed thoughts on Musk and Psychological Safety.

A Standing Ovation

I saw a great post this week of a leader receiving a standing ovation and as he walked down between 2 rows of his team heading for the exit on his last day. The celebration was warm, genuine and emotional. People were cheering, slapping him on the back, hugging him and crying as he walked the guard of honour. I know nothing of the man or his work, but he had clearly made a massive impression and impact on his colleagues and team. I suspect he was a master at some of the core ingredients of building trust and psychological safety in a high performing team.

• Competence - in a professional environment, connection is important, but you also need to be able to get the job done.

• Warmth - we judge people in a heartbeat, way faster than they can demonstrate their competence. Warmth means you care and genuinely connect with people as people, not assets or resources. The easiest and quickest way to do this is make eye contact and smile.

• Integrity - do what you say you will do, when you say you will do it. Competence and warmth won’t be enough to continue building trust and psychological safety if you don’t follow through. (PS, this also means being good at saying “No” - more on that later)

• Connection - beyond your warm smile, is connection. Getting to know team members, what they care about, what they aspire to, what their challenges are, where they shine and where they need support not only show you care, but also help in building high performance.

• Clarity - Great leaders add clarity to everything- roles, boundaries, timeframes, measures of success, standards and more.

I reckon that standing ovation was built on these ingredients. And the beauty is they are all skills which means they can be learnt and improved by anyone. Which of them could use some attention in your world?

Socks and Psychological Safety

One of the most embarrassing moments I’ve had as an adult happened a number of years ago when I bought some new socks (that wasn’t the embarrassing bit). I left them sitting on our kitchen bench for many days. One day, I was short of socks, so I went to the bench to find them. They weren’t there. I assumed my dear wife had cleared them up and put them somewhere. I asked her where they were and she said she had no idea. Then it got embarrassing - I got cranky and started asking her how the hell she could forget where she had put them when she had clearly moved them. It wasn’t my finest hour, and at the time I found it really hard to let it go. Some time later it got even more embarrassing when I found the socks and discovered that it was me who had moved them, and me who had forgotten where. It took a while to repair our relationship after I had acted so poorly.

I was thinking of this incident recently when working with a team who have some fractures in their team culture right now because people aren’t behaving at their best. Like me back then, they have been treating each other in less than ideal ways. It’s pretty human to want to avoid admitting and taking responsibility when we haven’t behaved at our best. It’s also pretty human to want to fire back, rather than extend grace and forgiveness when people treat you poorly (even more so if there’s zero justification for it). It can take a team quickly in a downward spiral where defensiveness, blame, and sniping become the new norm. It gets in the way of both productive effectiveness and team cohesiveness.

One simple principle is “Play the problem, not the person.”

Inviting Response

An Executive leader recently noticed something in one of my workshops. He asked “When someone in the room asks a question or makes a comment, you seem to either agree or say something positive before commenting or answering, even if you don't agree with them. Is that deliberate?”

I love this kind of question from someone who is simultaneously engaging with content, plus observing the detail of what is happening in the room. That’s a useful skill to cultivate. And his observation was spot on. Some of the things I might say are:

• That’s a really interesting story, thanks for sharing it.

• Thanks for your question.

• Tell me more about…

• I can see how (reflect observation) would be potentially challenging in your context.

• Thanks for your insights.

• Thanks for your thoughtful response.

• I see, help me understand more about the impact of that.

Even when I strongly disagree with a perspective, it’s rare that I will immediately take an oppositional perspective without exploring further. For leaders, whatever the context, we have an overweighted share of creating (or damaging) psychological safety. I want people to interact, ask, challenge, respond. If I immediately disagree with them, or take a black and white opposing view, I immediately degrade the likelihood that others will speak or ask anything. Inviting dialogue can be challenging when we directly disagree, but if we shut people down, it doesn’t change their point of view. It shuts the gate on open participation, driving the real conversation underground and out of view.

How do you encourage open dialogue in your context? How do you handle contentious perspectives?

Thanks Paul for the thought provoking observation and question.

Chunking up

The Gap

Some Aussie front line workers colourfully describe the office as ‘Bullshit Castle’. The castle might be HQ in another city, or the supervisors office. When they tell me more, the story is always about directives issued with no operational perspective. In the same organisations, leaders are often looking back the other way with low confidence about how business is being done on the front line. Clarity is low. Frustration (and/or scepticism) is high. Do-overs are frequent. It’s hard to get a complete picture of what's going on, because trust is like unicorn horn!

There’s a continuum at play. At one end, I reckon just about every organisation experiences some mild form of the above. It doesn’t cause major issues, but it slows everything down. At the other end there are highly toxic environments where people rarely bring their best and collaborative work is non-existent.

Where does your organisation sit on the continuum? Whether you have a vast icy wilderness to cross, or already great pathways, enhancing psychological safety will move you in the right direction.

I’d love to hear what’s working for you, and where the frustrations are.

What it Takes

I was invited to observe a team meeting today as part of work building on their already robust psychological safety. Four significant elements of how they work together really stood out.

1. Recognition - All sorts of things were recognised. New hires, project milestones, people’s skill and contribution, a recent big push on a project involving lots of extra time and covering for people who are away. No rose coloured glasses here though. Fatigue, mental health, a significant safety incident, concerns about links between HQ and operations were also openly discussed. There was ample celebration, but also deep dives into real and significant issues that deserved attention.

2. Up for the challenge - Several times people raised challenges to decisions, processes, people. The challengers spoke openly and directly. No one took offence. More often than not their challenge was met with open and curious questions seeking to understand their perspective more fully. Contributions were welcomed and explored.

3. Marking the Boundaries - At every opportunity people shared information, purpose, backstory, decision making parameters, reasoning and more (often as part of the challenge conversations). Everybody contributed to a more complete team view of what was happening, what was expected and what value they could add.

4. People took responsibility - When action was required someone put their hand up to own it. Timelines and detail were given. Follow up was arranged. Lots was getting done. People volunteered for this responsibility without prompting. It seemed expected and normal.

This team is quite a contrast to some others I have worked in and with. The kinds of contributions made by every individual in this meeting are often nowhere to be seen. One way traffic from the ‘chair’ coupled with defensive conversation and lack of accountability are more often the picture.

If you could pick one of the points above to focus on with your team, which would it be?

If you’d like to discuss building psychological safety in your team or organisation, let's have a chat.

Leading Voices

Quality leaders are able to share strongly held opinions, backed by quality information. When they do it well, there’s also an acknowledgement of other perspectives and an invitation to a deeper conversation. Done well, it provides both Psychological Safety to enter the discussion and also a clear direction from the leader. Psychological Safety does not mean watered down leadership, or the lack of robust debate.

Australia is on the verge of an historic vote on the Voice to Parliament. There are a range of strongly held perspectives on this. Unfortunately, a lot of the discussion is polarised and adversarial rather than as described above. This from Braden Hill is a great example of excellent leadership as described above. What do you think? How could you emulate this kind of leadership in your roles?

Smiling: The Simplest Super Power

We were heading into an awkward moment, neither sure what to do next. I was being served by an older Malay woman in a store in Kuala Lumpur. Her limited English was way better than my limited Bahasa, so it was the language we were using. I asked a question, and despite our best efforts together, I couldn’t make it clear, and she couldn’t understand. We were both getting a little frustrated, not with each other, but with our mutual misunderstanding. I smiled. She smiled back. We laughed. It was a moment of human connection. Frustration dissipated. We tried again with more success.

According to some researchers, trust in a workplace has 2 components - Warmth and Competence. Warmth = approachability and safety. Competence = We’ll be able to get the job done. We humans judge warmth in milliseconds. Competence takes longer to establish. But guess what… If we are already seen as warm, we are more likely to be seen as competent too. A genuine smile is one of the fastest ways we have of conveying warmth. Smiling more is a simple super power to build trust and open the door for Psychological Safety.

It’s easy to forget when under pressure, in a hurry or dealing with contentious topics. And it’s also all the more important. Experiment with smiling more, I’d love to hear your results.

Clear as Mud

Image by Hans from Pixabay

One of the greatest barriers to effective work is getting clear about what we want, need or expect for a job well done. Here are some examples of lack of clarity getting in the way of good work. They are all live examples from my own interactions with staff, or from leaders I coach.

• A designer sends me some sample ideas based on an initial brief. It’s not even close to what I was expecting. I’m baffled, because I’m sure I have been really clear about what I consider some of the fundamental ‘must haves’ in the design. When I go back to my brief I find several areas that I thought were crystal clear, but on reflection are very ambiguous. I have not set the designer up for success. I could have done a much clearer job of the brief. The designer could have asked for more clarification.

• A manager gets very frustrated when a high priority piece of work has received no attention for several weeks. They had given an urgent task to the person responsible. The urgent task was interpreted as a ‘drop everything else’ priority. He had shifted all his effort and attention to the new task. It left the manager questioning his capability and him feeling ambushed and unsupported.

• A team gets delegated work from their team leader. They take no action. Why? Because the team leader has a pattern of taking over part way through a delegated task and ‘re-doing’ it because it’s not ‘up to standard’. Neither the leader or the team can articulate what the ‘standard’ is. The team has decided to wait until the team leader initiates the direction, because it feels like a waste of time to do otherwise.

• A director gives a senior leader responsibility for coordinating the scheduling of staff for significant remote area projects that the team is delivering. The leader starts organising a detailed roster to ensure expertise, breaks, and logistics are all taken into account for each trip. She’s told she’s overstepping the mark. The directors wanted to be able to assemble their own project teams. The senior leader was completely confused about what was expected. Turns out they wanted someone tracking workloads and scheduling issues, to advise on team makeup, rather than someone to actually assemble the team. Both had a really different picture of what ‘coordination’ meant.

All these examples burnt time, energy and resources. They created frustration and more work to arrive at good outcomes. All of them involved capable, competent and enthusiastic people. Lack of clarity was a significant factor in all of them.

Do you have similar experiences where you work? What’s the impact?

Lack of role clarity is listed as a potential psychosocial hazard. Lack of clarity adds to workload and can certainly contribute to stress. Clarity also contributes to a sense of certainty and acts as a launch pad for high performance. Next time we’ll talk about what we can do to add clarity.

Fringe Magic and Psychological Safety for Leaders

Last week I took a risk. It worked out beautifully. I teamed up with Stuart Lightbody, a globe-trotting, award-winning magician who was in Perth for Fringe Festival. We ran a leadership workshop together. I learned 3 clear lessons from Stuart that any leader can apply. Each has a direct impact on Psychological Safety.

• Play Host - Well before the show starts, Stuart focusses his energy on the audience. His shows are designed to create wonder. His focus is on what people will experience, rather the technical elements needed to make it happen. As people arrive, he greets them with infectious enthusiasm. Acting as host takes us out of our own head and gets us thinking about what others need for success. We could all do more of that in our work.

• Embody It - “If I want people to be curious or amazed, it helps if I am too”, Stuart said. Don’t try to impose emotion, disposition or thoughts on others. They are their own person and forcing them to show up a particular way almost always leads to showing up less authentically. Invite them into the ideal state for the work you are doing. Model it, but don't force it. I worked with a leader once who was scathing of anyone pointing out potential barriers or challenges to a project. She was forcing an artificial positivity (interestingly her own demeanour at these times was far from positive). People stopped raising challenges and several projects got sideswiped by issues that people could foresee but didn’t feel safe to speak about. The same leader could have framed the challenges through a lens of positive regard for her staff. If she assumed that they were challenging in order to drive success, and invited them into a positively framed exploration of the challenges, the results would have been much closer to what she and her team desired.

• Audience-Centred - No doubt there are many details Stuart needs to take care of for his shows to work, but these are invisible to the audience. When he designs and hosts his shows, he’s immersed in what it will be like from their point of view. He embodied the same positive enthusiasm when we met to design our workshop. It immediately created an open and curious space for us to work in. Especially when we are a subject matter expert, it’s easy to feel like people need to know everything. Usually that is confusing and overwhelming. I remind myself of this regularly as I counter my desire to give people a ‘complete’ workshop rather than a good one. Every time I stray over the line the feedback is that the workshop was confusing, or there wasn’t enough time. Give people enough to achieve what they need but not more. Design for value from their perspective rather than yours.

These 3 - Play Host, Embody It, and Audience Centred if done consistently and well, create a safe and open environment. It will be focussed on the right work, the right people, the right atmosphere and the right result. That makes commercial sense. It might even be magic.

On Trust

I got asked a great question. “Is trust the same as Psychological Safety in a team or organisation?” It’s not but they are closely related. Building one without the other is probably impossible. Both involve some initial faith and investment before they are backed by evidence. Hemingway once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” There’s some risk involved. What if they turn out to be untrustworthy?

There are 2 useful questions to ask yourself/others in the team about trust:

1. How readily do you trust someone? We all sit somewhere on a continuum from ‘I assume everyone is trustworthy’ to ‘I trust no one’. At the extremes are dangerous territory. Too trusting is gullible and easily taken advantage of. Too distrustful and you are unlikely to ever work well with others. You'll always be watching your back.

2. If trust is broken, how readily do you restore it? Again it's a continuum. For some, any perceived breach of trust means they will never trust again. For others, they’ll repair broken trust easily.

Understanding what it takes for each person to give their trust and to fix it is useful.

I reckon a useful mindset is to assume people are inherently trustworthy. It speeds our ability to work well together. And we’ll build psychological safety more quickly too.

Consciously build and defend both.

Resilience Disruption

Resilience is often framed in individual terms. I’m often called in by organisations to assist their staff to build personal resilience. It’s the right conversation but the wrong focus. The focus needs to shift to organisational resilience.

Why?

Disruption is on the rise. Chat GPT is topical right now, but it’s just one more (significant) disruption in a growing stream. Natural disasters (Turkey, NZ), Technological (Chat GPT) Geopolitical (China, Russia) Financial (interest rates) and more. All the uncertainty measures are trending up. Some steeply. Disruption won’t be stopping any time soon.

image by AnToineLanz from Pixabay

Individual resilience helps us deal with the direct impact we personally experience. A group of resilient individuals in an organisation can collectively handle impact. And they are even stronger in a resilient organisation.

One of the best ways to build organisational resilience is to focus on Psychological Safety (...the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Amy Edmondson).

If you don’t have (and actively maintain) Psychological Safety, you are flying blind in the storm. People will see problems, but say nothing. They’ll avoid responsibility. They’ll shy away from change or building new skills. They’ll fear for their security.

Think of almost any organisational challenge. Psychological Safety builds the resilience to effectively deal with it - Because people are more likely to be and bring their best.

If you are a leader, and you would like a clearer understanding of the behaviour that builds Psychological Safety - lets talk.

Goals?

“The biggest casualty of COVID will be goals and plans”. So said Jason Clarke, Mindworker when I interviewed him right back at the beginning of the pandemic.

I reckon he hit the nail on the head. Many of my goals and plans got sidelined, and no doubt yours did too. During that period we all experienced this together, but that kind of disruption happens all the time on a smaller scale.

Factors outside our control make a mockery of our plans. Consider some of these scenarios, any of which could leave your plans in a smoking pile. Some of them might be familiar:

• War breaks out in your region

• Interest rates climb, changing your financial reality

• New technology threatens or removes your job

• You or someone close to you becomes seriously injured or ill

• A competitor out-paces you

• Your entire worldly goods are lost in a natural disaster such as a fire or flood

• A funding program changes its costing model destroying the margins for your not for profit

• Your business is unable to source mission critical supplies

• You cannot find enough staff to run your business

I’m sure you know people who have been impacted by such realities. Maybe you are currently directly experiencing them yourself.

In the face of these kinds of disruption a typically constructed SMART goal may not stand up.

On survival courses we taught 5 priorities for survival. The priorities give clear focus to make a flexible plan that you can adapt to the reality you face.

Some of the sectors I work with find “Areas of Focus” a great way to handle uncertainty.

Regardless of how much duress you are currently under, being clear about your top priorities and key areas of focus is part of creating a psychologically safe environment that withstands disruption.

What are you focussing on in 2023?

If you’d like a conversation about planning for/in uncertainty, I’d love to hear from you.

Right Conditions

I have been visiting a freshwater lake in a secluded patch of bush north of Perth for 20 years. Back then the trees had lush canopies and no there was no fallen timber on the ground. There’s been some harsh, dry years since.The canopy has thinned out and the ground is littered with fallen branches as the trees self prune for survival. Some ancient trees have died.

The last few winters have been wetter and the lake is starting to transform. New trees are popping up from seed. Old trees are regrowing their lush canopies. Some that looked dead are sprouting. The bush has been lying dormant just waiting for the right conditions to flourish again.

People are like that too. I’ve worked with some teams where people are uninspired and doing the bare minimum. They have retreated into a self protective mode where there is no creativity, minimal commitment and little energy. Sometimes, it’s toxic with people working in the shadows to make life worse for each other, either to deflect unwanted scrutiny, or to eke out more resources for their own survival.

Just like the lake, if the right conditions are built, people begin to flourish again. Sometimes the turnaround can be incredible and rapid. But it takes the right conditions. In those harsh years, there’s no way you could get those trees to grow. If the conditions are not right, telling a team to behave better, produce results, be more creative, or less toxic will not change a thing. It may even make it worse. Trust and Psychological Safety are like the rainfall. Growth will follow.

Thank you for sharing 2022 with us.

Thank you for sharing 2022 with us. It’s been another epic year of fast paced change and uncertainty. Many of you have shared appreciation for these messages, and have told us how you are putting them into action. Others have asked questions or challenged some of the assumptions behind my thinking, and I love that too. The combination of appreciation and robust feedback has me always looking for new edges and tools that genuinely help to create capacity when we are under the pump.

Next year, it seems the uncertainty will continue. Geopolitical challenges, shortages of staff, higher interest rates, and high levels of fatigue continue to be themes. Be kind to yourself, the people around you, especially people in service roles. We all need it.

In 2022 we've road tested tools to measure psychological safety and trust in teams. The results have been great, with teams significantly shifting the dial on these measures and developing awareness of specific behaviour that makes it possible to do so. We’d love to get that work out to more organisations in 2023. If it’s of interest to you, or someone you know, click here for a coffee or a call to find out more about it.

Thank you once again. Raising the capacity of leaders like you to handle uncertainty and duress is what lights me up. It’s been a pleasure to share the road with you. As 2022 draws to a close, I wish you and the people close to you a peaceful and joy filled holiday season.

We look forward to sharing 2023 with you.

Cheers

Mike House and Team

Effective Action

We were 5 days into a serious desert survival exercise. We had run short of water because we had assumed that the springs we saw in the first few days would continue. Up until that moment, no one had really spoken candidly. As with any team in the early stages of coming together, we were inclined to defer, accommodate and agree. That all changed when someone suggested a 7km backtrack to the last large body of clean water we had seen. Given our 20km daily target, this would have almost doubled our work rate for the day, and added risk. We were standing beside a small flowing stream, but it was smelly and had algae covering the water.

The effort of the suggested backtrack flipped the group into a candid conversation about the effort, reward, risks and other factors involved in the decision. While the conversation was difficult, our decision to filter and boil the lower quality water and keep moving forward was a good one. We all focused on the problem, rather than the people. Suggestions were made and debated vigorously.

In a workplace this is one of the key benefits of psychological safety. Candid conversations get us to better decisions, less unnecessary effort, less do-overs, less frustration. It’s commercially astute.

On top of creating the environment for frank conversations, there also has to be effective action. The two most common reasons people have for not speaking up:

• Fear - looking stupid, ridicule, losing your job, retaliation, retribution or isolation have people weighing whether it’s worth the risk.

• Nothing Changes - If people do speak up, but nothing changes, it feels pointless and people will stop doing it.

Candour in our survival group required action on both fronts. People’s input was welcome and respected (after all, we would all have to live with the consequences of the final decision). Once discussed, a firm decision was made and the group immediately took action.

Which of these 2 reasons for not speaking up is more prevalent in your workplace? Why? What could you do personally and today to move forward?

Making it Right

I showed the plumber a mishmash of 5 pipe connectors roughly glued together. I asked him what he thought it was. ‘Crappy Reticulation?’ was his best guess. Not even close! It was part of the main water connection to our house and no where near compliant with any standard past or present.  The carpenters accidentally broke the pipe which was buried barely a hand span below ground.

The carpenters could have done a quick repair and hidden the issue, but instead pointed it out potentially saving major problems later. 

The desire to do a high quality job outweighed fear of repercussions from admitting the damage and highlighting the substandard system. That’s an admirable attribute of the business owner. I’d also briefed him that I was expecting to find some hidden problems and wanted to rectify them while work was being done so he was not expecting a negative reaction for raising it. Combined with his preference of service over personal comfort, it's a perfect recipe for a great outcome. 

People don't speak up when they feel there will be blow back. Sayings like ‘No one got fired for silence’ and ‘Better safe than sorry’ give clues about the challenges of creating an open environment in work places.

Have you ever maintained your silence even when you knew you should speak up? If so, what risks were you weighing up? 

If you are a leader, how sure are you that people would be comfortable and willing to raise issues, suggest improvements or ask questions? If there are gaps, what risks do they cause?

Flight Test

“Suddenly the plane dove straight toward the ground. Pulling on the controls made no difference and we were quickly gaining speed. I methodically reversed the last thing I did and reduced the flap. The plane levelled out immediately.” This was one of many hair-raising stories an old mate of mine told about his time test flying aircraft. I’m building a plane in my back shed. Test flying is one of many things I need to get my head around. 

There’s a lengthy process of checking and double checking everything before the plane ever leaves the ground. All of it is designed to make the first flight as safe and effective as possible. Launching without a plan could definitely be a career limiting move! 

Psychological Safety is like that too. It creates a workplace people want to be part of and where great results can be achieved. When we can minimise the surprises in how people act/react, we can work more closely. A couple of good starting points are:

• Treat each other kindly regardless of how difficult the issues you are facing.

• Play the problem, not the person.

Behaving this way creates certainty between people, even when the operating environment is uncertain.

What others would you add?

That’s a great question…

“If you want a better answer, ask a better question”

I ask a lot of questions. I reckon it’s a key leadership skill to ask more than tell.

Often people say “Great Question, do you mind if I use it?”. I’m always delighted to share! A great question has a way of slicing through layers and revealing new insight.

There’s no doubt that using questions well is a worthy skill to develop.

Here’s some tips

• Collect good questions. Any time you hear a great question, record it somewhere. Make some notes about why it resonated.

• Ask yourself Where might you use it and why?

• While the question is important, it’s far more important to be genuinely curious about the answer.

• Ask generously. Questions are often used as traps to convince people or make them look/feel uniformed (politics is a great place to look for examples of this). Ask with the intent to explore.

• Make it safe to answer. We sometimes judge people by their answers. Small sounds of disapproval, eye rolls, telling them they are wrong etc are easy ways to put people off.

I’m always happy to share questions. How can I claim ownership of something that has probably been asked before? Many of the questions I use are collected from somewhere and I can’t always point to the source. I’d rather share them and encourage others to get good at asking too.

What's the best question you have ever been asked? Why did it have such a memorable impact? How could you use that question, or a version of it in your leadership today?