Struggling to capture attention in a world overflowing with information? This episode dives deep into the transformative power of curiosity in sales and beyond. Our guest, Dr. Diane Hamilton, the author of the acclaimed book "Cracking the Curiosity Code," joins us to shed light on why curiosity is a superpower for salespeople and individuals alike. Dr. Hamilton dives deep into her insightful FATE model, which identifies the four key factors that can stifle curiosity: Fear, Assumptions, Technology, and Environment. We'll learn how these elements can hold us back from asking insightful questions, and how to overcome them to unlock our full potential. Dr. Hamilton goes beyond identifying the roadblocks, offering practical strategies to cultivate curiosity. You'll discover how curiosity acts as the spark that ignites innovation, propels motivation, and enhances emotional intelligence – all essential qualities for success in sales and personal growth. So, get ready to ditch the script and embrace the power of curiosity!
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The Curiosity Code: Unlock Your Sales Superpower With Dr. Diane Hamilton
Is curiosity important in professional sales? Is it important in life? Of course, it is. You’ve read a hundred times on this show that curiosity is the key component during discovery, where the client or prospect will feel literally that we care about them achieving a better outcome for their business. It turns out curiosity makes us feel good. It releases the enzyme dopamine, which is the pleasure enzyme. It makes us feel great when we eat a wonderful meal or even enjoy sex. Curiosity is good for us.
Curiosity is a critical success factor in business. In fact, a quote from a book that we’re going to review, “Next to integrity and trust is my curiosity and willingness to encourage my colleagues to challenge the status quo was one of the most critical characteristics that held us to whatever success we were fortunate enough to experience.” That quote came from Keith Krach, who wrote the forward to this book.
Keith is the Founder of DocuSign and Ariba. Ariba ended up with a $40 billion market cap. Whatever success, we were fortunate enough to enjoy. Keith enjoyed a lot of success. Keith was writing about Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlo by Dr. Diane Hamilton and Diane’s our guest for this episode. An amazing conversation about curiosity.
We learned that as infants or children, curiosity is everything. We have an abundance of it. That’s how we learn and grow and develop. Over time, things get away and there are barriers preventing our curiosity. It’s so important for personal and professional success. Diane shares with us the four factors that get in the way, fear, assumptions, technology, either overuse of technology or underuse and even the environment, the messages we hear and the stories we’re told.
Diane is an expert on this. In fact, she’s a sought-after expert in curiosity, perception, emotional intelligence, and behavioral science. She’s got four decades of real-world experience and she’s written five books and we’re talking about one of those books. She’s amazingly recognized in this field. She was named to the Global Leader Today’s list of top leaders.
Other people on that list is Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Cheryl Sandberg. What company? She was also listed as one of the 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership and in the top 10 Most Powerful Women Leaders in HR. I enjoyed my conversation with Diane. I’m sure you will, too. By the way, Cracking the Curiosity Code should be required when reading in professional sales and maybe in business. If you like this episode as much as I do, please like and subscribe to the Selling Well Show because it matters to us. That’s how we get great guests like Dr. Diane Hamilton and here she is.
Diane, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.
I’m super excited to be here, Mark. Thanks for having me.
I’m super excited to chat with you. We’re going to be talking about Cracking the C. Diane, the folks who read our episodes knows me go on and add in fun item about the importance of curiosity and authentic curiosity in professional sales. It’s not about us. It’s always about the person we’re speaking to and having that authentic curiosity. You’ve got an amazing background. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind sharing the short story of your journey, your professional journey that led you to writing this book.
Diane’s Professional Journey
I come from a sales background for sure. Decades of sales. I’ve sold everything from computers, software to mortgage loans. You name it. I was in pharmaceutical sales for a long time. There’s so much that you do that is impacted by your sales background, which is wonderful. When I worked in pharmaceuticals, I worked for AstraZeneca. I worked in their AgChem division for almost 4 or 5 years, then they’re another 15 years in their pharmaceutical sales.
I learned a lot from that experience. One of the things I got out of it was they paid for my Master’s, which was wonderful. I never wanted a Master’s. I never thought about it. I never occurred to me to even go back, but I’m thinking, “If they’re going to pay for it, I’ll certainly get one.” I loved education and learning new things. I went back to see how hard it would be to get a PhD. That was my whole goal, just to see how the challenge behind.
I fell in love with online education in the process because I did my entire Bachelor’s at night. You work for 8:00 to 4:00 or 5:00, then you go to a school from 7:00 to 10:00 at night. You want to shoot yourself. I loved online education. I wanted to teach in that realm because I thought I want to help other people not have to do what I do to do. That got me into online education. I’ve been in that coming on many years. I don’t even know. I’ve taught thousands of online courses because I love it so much.
I ended up as the MBA Program Chair at the Forbes School of Business, which is out in the University of Arizona. It was a great experience but when I left, I thought I wanted to try to do some. I still work for them part-time. I teach for a bunch of different universities that have online departments. I’ve taught thousands of courses and I love it.
I wanted to develop my consulting and speaking business. When I went out of my own, I did so many different boards. I work on a lot of different boards from DocuSign. I was on their board advisors and different companies like RadiusAI and technology companies. Many wonderful things. What I do is I learn things and I share what I learn. That’s what I do for a living.
My main thing is, I have my consulting and media business and like you, I had a show like this that’s on hiatus because I’m doing shows for some other people. Mostly, I work with organizations to help them build curiosity. I created the Curiosity Code Index and wrote the book that you held up that goes along with that. It’s the first assessment that determines the factors that inhibit curiosity, which is pretty exciting because you have to know what stops you to get better.
It’s the first assessment that determines the factors that inhibit curiosity, which is pretty exciting because you have to know what stops you to get better.
How interesting in terms of the journey. The journeys on this show are fantastic and I’m sure you experienced the same thing. The list of the guests you had on your show is flabbergasting, as is the list of the testimonials for the book. Everybody’s provided an amazing testimonial, but you mentioned being on the board of DocuSign with Keith Krach who did the forward to the book. He’s such a fan of yours as well.
I’m a friend of his.
The interesting thing about that journey that I liked, Diane, and a little bit of alignment. I as well did an executive MBA. I’d been in my career for a while. I’d had a little bit of some modest success. I thought in my own mind I wanted to become a CEO. I thought I had a bit of a gap in terms of financial acumen. I ended up doing an executive MBA, which is evenings and weekends. You go and spend some time into a wall while working.
Reading your book, the one thing that jumps out at me is it was that experience for me that I’d say, reinvigorated my curiosity. Up to that point in time, up into my low 30s had some success. I thought I was having success because of my inherent capabilities almost Carol Dweck, a fixed mindset, saying, “I’m pretty good at this,” but it’s because of my inherent capabilities.
Cracking The Curiosity Code
I went to the MBA school to try and come back. Maybe become a CEO then I realized all I want to do is sales. It’s the only thing that’s important in a business. It’s the most important thing but it triggered this lifelong learning and this desire to keep growing. The fact, I love doing this show. It’s speaking to people like you to continually learn. Let’s zip around to the book, Cracking the Curiosity Code.
Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential
A couple of things that are interesting. At the beginning of the book, you’re trying to pursue this topic to understand, where do people fit on this spectrum of curiosity? Can being more curious make you a better leader or more successful, or help you address your fears? All these things that we should unpack as part of this discussion, but maybe the starting point is, how do we define curiosity? What is curiosity?
It’s funny, because I gave a big talk for Coaching.com. The very first thing I made everybody do was define a couple of words. What how do you feel? What was the definition for curiosity for you at work, especially? It’s fun to see everybody’s answers. A lot of it is exploring new things, asking questions, and doing things you haven’t done in the past. Those have come up a lot.
When I wrote the book, I always saw myself as a very curious person. I wanted to know why other people weren’t curious. I wanted to just delve into that a little bit more because I had all these people like Steve Orbs and billionaires on my show. Everybody’s super curious, wonderful, and interesting. I would teach some of my classes and some of my students maybe not as interested in looking. You’d want them to give them the fish instead of teach them to fish.
I wanted them to want that. I looked at curiosity like everybody else. It’s the desire to learn new things and all that. As I started to work with organizations and give them my Curiosity Code Index and find out what was slowing them down and talk to them about all these things. I see it so much as getting out of status quo thinking in organizations because blockbusters and the codex and the companies, Blackberry, that was a great movie. I watched how they all failed because they stuck with the status quo way of doing things.
If it worked great in the past, we don’t need to explore and look into new ways because we like those blackberry thumb buttons that we but then Steve Jobs ate their lunch. We have to realize that just because something worked in the past, it’s not going to necessarily work in the future. Having a strong sales background, I saw the importance of asking questions and all those aspects of curiosity. It encompasses all those words that everybody typed into the box.
We have to realize that just because something worked in the past, it’s not going to necessarily work in the future.
What an amazingly consistent theme out there, which is what worked in the past won’t always work in the future. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to take in some of the positives of the past or we’re changing everything. I do believe that in professional sales, particularly over the last 15 or 20 years, there have been significant meaningful changes that we have to respond and react to.
That’s a real challenge in professional sales because you’ve got well established mature folks who have a bit of that Kodak thinking. I was at Kodak at that time. It was interesting time I got hired into Kodak as my first job selling photocopiers back in the early ‘90s. It was quite interesting because they had this photocopy division that had a professional sales school and competed with Xerox. They had some technologies that did compete quite successfully with Xerox.
You could see that mentality if they didn’t want to disrupt their cash cow. It was always this discussion about the film business. As you aptly point out, they had the patent on digital photography and they would literally joke about companies like Sony and Agfa and some of these other competitors because they were so minor league in traditional film compared to Kodak then they ate their lunch.
I know. It’s crazy. I’ve had Jeff Hayzlett on the show. I’ve talked to him. He was the CMO of Kodak. It’s a common thing that a lot of companies have had. They’ve had such great success. You couldn’t walk into a Kodak store without getting a bunch of Kodak film landing on your head because it was so packed everywhere. It’s the thing that it’s hard to foresee the future of what’s going to change. What I found was interesting in sales that has changed so much is the teams are much more popular. When I was at the pharmaceutical rep, I started to see a little bit of that when I was leaving. This is more than twenty years ago than when I was doing that.
I loved having my own territory. I had nobody to bother me. I could do my own thing, then they go, “If one person calling on this doctor is getting such great results, let’s have two do it.” They would have me do it instead of every four weeks calling on somebody. My counterpart would go every two weeks and we would split it up. “That works so well. Let’s have four people.” By the time I left, there was eight of us calling on this guy or gal. It was a lot.
They got overwhelmed by it. It was interesting to see. My daughter is a big director of marketing sales for a company called Split and she’s been in sales forever. I get to see what they do and some of these teams. When I was selling loans, they threw you the phone books, “Here, dial for dollars.” Now, they’ve got this person gets the lead, that person closes the deal, and this person does this. That’s what I think is the biggest change in sales since I did it.
You’re right, that’s a huge change in sales. That came about with Salesforce. There was a guy named Aaron Ross, who helped grow Salesforce in the early days. He came to the conclusion that established sales reps wouldn’t do what’s called demand generation or what they used to call cold calling many years ago.
He came up with something, the specialist model where we have people who do demand generation. They passed the opportunity over to the more mature account executive because that person’s never going to do demand generation. I don’t agree with that, but they’re never going to do demand generation. A very famous book called Predictable Reve.
That triggered this specialist model. Part of this is damaged the sales community. That’s a different episode for a different time but that idea is interesting. That idea of this isolation as a salesperson as well. Curiosity comes into play there a little bit too and to a certain extent. extent. One of the things that we’re always surprised by in our training is that people get benefit from being a part of the community, even people who sell for companies in different divisions, different industries, and selling different products. There’s an amazing amount of consistency in terms of challenges or opportunities or the importance of the mindset.
They get real value understanding what different people do. You talked about, “I enjoyed being alone and being on my own,” then suddenly there’s eight people calling on that poor physician. Diane, in the book, you make these great connections. The book is such a great read. It’s so incredibly interesting because you make these great connections between curiosity and motivation, curiosity and leadership, engagement and emotional intelligence. All these things we want it success and we want to know about.
One of the most fascinating points you bring up that’s validated by the research is that and correct me if I’ve got this wrong, that children or babies are all about curiosity. By the time they’re three, they’re asking about 100 questions a day. Survival is based on curiosity and they’ve got this going for them. By the time they’re 12 or 13, that’s cut by 75% and they’re asking very few questions. It’s almost like the environments are bleeding the curiosity out of these kids as they grow up.
Emotional Intelligence
You bring up something that comes up in the Curiosity Code Index. The environment was one of the factors that inhibits curiosity. What was interesting to me was you mentioned emotional intelligence and some of these other things that we’re trying to develop at work. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the impact of emotional intelligence on sales performance. That’s what got me into the interest of emotional intelligence, which I fell into randomly. I hadn’t even heard of emotional intelligence at that time. It was a long time ago.
I thought, “This is a cool and interesting topic.” I had no idea how big this thing flowed. As I was writing this, I’m thinking, “I like all this assessment stuff,” because I thought it was fascinating. I got certified in emotional intelligence tests and Myers-Briggs. Whatever was popular at the time. What I learned was emotional intelligence and motivation and all those things you mentioned are all the things people hire me to speak.
They’d say, “Can you speak about soft skills or whatever they call the different things?” As I started to look at some of these things, I realized that to fix any of those things, you’d have to fix curiosity first. Curiosity is the spark. I liken it to baking a cake. You want cake as your outcome. If you’re baking a cake, that’s your goal. You’ve got ingredients like flour, oil and eggs. You’re mixing them together and you put it in a pan. You put it in the oven and you want cake.
In the business environment, our cake is money and productivity. We want that. These are the ingredients, emotional intelligence, motivation, communication, engagement, and innovation. Everybody’s working on these things but nobody’s realized that they’ve put it in the oven. The oven’s not on. You got to have it on the oven with a spark of curiosity to get cake. That’s how it all ties together. That’s why I broke those things out into different chapters for that reason.
FATE
Let’s talk about the spark. We’ve got folks out there reading that might say and almost like Carol Dweck with growth mindset, “In one area of my life, I’ve got a real growth mindset. I’m a musician. I love learning, and watching online videos for drumming. I love getting better. I love improving. When I’m not playing well, I don’t see it as a scarlet letter. I go, this is part of my journey to getting better. I’m going to get better. Yet in business, I might have this fixed mindset and I’m not open to coaching. I don’t want to learn and develop.”
In Carol’s book at one point in time, she says, “One of the main ways of changing or triggering that growth mindset is understanding the difference between a fixed and growth mindset then looking at some part of your life where you have that growth mindset.” If people are reading and they say, “Maybe I have plateaued a little bit or regarding my curiosity, maybe it has diminished.” How do we re-trigger curiosity?
I use Carol Dweck’s work, George Lanky and Sir Ken Robinson. The last two have some great TED talks if you haven’t seen them. If you look at some of this stuff, in George Lanz’ work with NASA, he looked at creativity, which mimics exactly what we see with curiosity. It goes up about age five then tanks. In our 30s, we have very little left.
What he said is, “We come up with these great ideas, but at the same time, we over-criticize them.” It’s like putting on the gas and the brakes at the same time. You don’t go very far. How do we know if I’m a musician and I love that but I told myself in my head what you were saying, “In business setting, I’m not this.” That’s our assumptions that we have. That’s our voice in our head.
When I studied for the Curiosity Code Index, that’s my main thing that I work with organizations with. I give this assessment. The reason this assessment got so much attention is because there was nothing that determined these things that hold us back. We already talked a little bit about environment, but there’s four factors that you can figure out what’s holding you back from curiosity.
If you know these things, that’s how, as you said, awareness for from Carol Dweck. If you recognize these things, then you can move forward. I spent years studying thousands of people and this is all peer reviewed scholarly research that I had published because I wanted to not come up with an assessment that’s cute for my website. I wanted something that’s going to fix this. The four factors that inhibit curiosity are the acronym is FATE.
You have to recognize how fear, the F. A is the assumptions, which is that voice in your head. T is technology, which is over and under-utilization of it and environment is E, which is everybody with whom you’ve had contact who’s told you, “You shouldn’t like this or family all does that or I don’t have time to answer this.” All these can overlap a little bit. You talk about environment.
If maybe somebody has said or maybe your sibling said, “That’s a stupid thing to do.” You get all these people in your life. Your boss, “Don’t come to me with problems unless you have solutions,” or somebody said, “That’s a great question. I’ll make you the head of that committee and I’m not going to pay you to do it but here’s more work.” All these things have this voice in our head going, “I don’t like that or I’m not going to do that again.” That leads to fear.
We’re in the meetings and going, “I’m not going to suggest anything. The last time, they made me the head of that, or I don’t want to look stupid.” There’s all these things. It was so interesting to me to get it in writing like, “This is what holds you back under fear. Here’s what holds you back under assumptions, technology, and environment.” As you said, you know where you stand but as in an emotional intelligence test or an engagement test. You then can create a personal swat, look at your weaknesses and threats, then create smart goals to overcome them. That’s basically the process I go through within organizations with people.
That’s the process you go through. By the way, if we go online and we do the Curiosity Code Index, is there a tool online that we can self-assess and do these things?
Yes, it’s CuriosityCode.com.
Those links will be in the episode. Everybody should take a look and take that on. The acronym was FATE, fear, assumptions, technology, and environment. You start to think and all of these are cognitive biases. Many of these, anyway, at least environment cognitive biases. A lot of them apply, by the way, to sales. I think that environment and these voices you hear in your head, certainly when I started I’m not sure about you. I wasn’t very proud to be in a professional sales role when I started.
All my friends, looking back, had the worst jobs in the universe. They were MBAs who were the lowest level in terms of the financial community and investment banking, where they get abused for years. We had lawyers who were articling and miserable existence. I’m selling photocopiers into businesses all the time, dealing with people and learning about business, but it had a real self-esteem issue likely because of this perception in the universe of what sales is. The stereotype from many years ago like Gil from the Simpsons. It wasn’t very good. By the way, there’s still a little bit of that out there.
A long time ago. It was Willie Lohman and death of a salesman.
There you go.
I watch Glenn Gary and Glenn Ross. You watch these things and you go, “It sounds awful.” I believe that every should have a sales background to some extent. It’s the most helpful thing. I had Barry Ryan on my show. He teaches curiosity and sales at Stanford. Some of this stuff is fascinating to see how much sales helps you.
For me, the biggest thing that helped me in sales was questioning to develop my empathy, which is a big part of emotional intelligence. What was interesting, when I worked for AstraZeneca. They rated us on our concern for impact. This was like 1980 when I took the first assessment with them. They were way ahead of their time. How I came across to other people was huge for them.
I thought, “That’s such an important part.” Emotional intelligence is your ability to understand yourself and others and those emotions and react appropriately. In sales, if you don’t know how you’re coming across to other people, that’s a problem. It’s also in sales, you need to develop this empathy to be able to know what your customers even need. It’s so complicated. Even though sales has got that Willy Loman thing to some people.
In sales, you need to develop empathy to be able to know what your customers need.
To me, you’re bringing in all the money for the company. You’re the heart of everything. People are starting to see that this is so important that we need to have people trained and have them understand. I have a sales story. I share this more than one as a pharmaceutical rep. I’m young doing this. I was just out of college. I had never sold anything.
I went through their intense training program. I’ve never had better training in anything in my life. They’re like, “You’re going to say this. You’re going to do that. It’s going to be this order. You’re going to talk about this product.” I went through all that training. It was years of training in some respects, but my first call or so, I’m in a building. It’s like a three-story building. I get up there and I’m in the waiting room. You’ve got to wait for these, it was a guy at that time that I had to call on.
You had to wait for him a long time and you’re all nervous going, “I’m going to say this. I got to talk about this product and that product.” I got in front of him finally and they told me, “You don’t know how much they say. This guy’s got five seconds. He’s not going to want to talk to you. You’re going to have to do what your best. Chase him down the hallway. Whatever you have to do.” For some reason, I was able to sit in an office with him, which was unusual. I got through three of the products. All three, that was the goal. No one gets through three. I got through this one and that one. I walked out of that office. I was so proud of myself like I had just done the most amazing presentation.
You just pitched.
It was wonderful. I closed him. I did everything you’re supposed to do, but I had to go get my samples. I go down and get in the elevator to go down to my car. As the door’s closing, a guy gets on the elevator with me. I’m such an extrovert, I can’t go three floors without talking. I look at him and I go, “Sir, do you work in the building?” He looks at me, so mortified. He goes, “You just sold me your products.” That’s the same guy.
You never looked up.
I look at him.
Fantastic.
The worst thing. I died. Wouldn’t you? It was the worst sales call you could ever have. I didn’t ask him any questions. I often think about if you hadn’t gotten the elevator, you don’t know how bad you are sometimes.
First of all, what a tough lesson to learn and how spectacular to learn it on your first call for the rest of your existence.
It helped me.
Change In Professional Sales
By the way, Daine, what you described is the biggest change in professional sales in the last 30 years. There was a time where that person on the other side of the table needed you to explain what products were out there. The difference now is everybody knows everything. They don’t need you to explain what products and services. This is a problem. Most people still want to pitch but the reality of it is, this is where curiosity comes in. What they want to know is, how can you help me run a better business?
Whatever it is you do, can you help us run a better business somehow or help me achieve the goals and objectives of my division? If I’m a doctor, help me run a better practice. That’s where the shift where you interviewed at the end of our show. Sales is management and consulting now. He said, “Used to be pitching and all that but all that’s going to get taken care of online by AI.” By the way, thanks for sharing that story. We’ve all got them.
You get a real groan from the audience when you share that one in a sales group because it’s just awful.
We’ve all got them and you’ve got those things where you were so nervous. You did what you’d been taught, “Better know my product. Better pitch. Get better. Keep going.” This is why it’s lifelong learning doing this. This is a hard thing to do.
It’s a funny aspect to look at how things have changed, as you said that because a lot of people don’t ask the questions that they need to ask. Back then, you would ask different questions. Again, we’re getting on a status quo. You have to know the kinds of things to find out how to help them with their practice. I can remember a doctor I called on.
I got better and started asking him questions. I start painting the picture they used to teach us to paint the picture. I’d say, “If you use my migraine drug when your patients come in and they have this horrible headache. They call you in the middle of the night and wake you up because you have to send them to the ER. It’s all this money it’s going to cost them. They’re going to have all this.” I painted this big picture. The guy says to me, “I don’t care. That comes out of somebody else’s budget.” I’m like, “First of all, it might be not to go to you.”
You don’t care about your patients.
Sometimes painting the picture helps bring out the questions. That’s another way to explore what their pain points are.
Sometimes, painting the picture helps bring out the questions. That’s another way to explore what their pain points are.
I had this experience where we have a networking touch point with somebody. They’re extraordinarily successful individual. We had a great conversation, but somebody thought we should chat. At the end, they went, “I’m thinking about this. Why don’t you let us know what you do there?” I thought to myself, “I’m not going to give too much data here. I don’t know anything about your company. I’m not going to go too deep.” I sent this note over and I literally got this email with probably 35 points attacking what I’d sent over. I sent a quick email back going, “Fantastic thoughts. Let’s chat live about it.” As soon as you start pitching anything. It’s very easy for somebody to come back and go, “I don’t like this.”
You don’t know what they even want.
We have no idea what they want. My email back was going to go, “I agree with all your points. What problem you think you’re trying to solve?” You asked for this but if you don’t know what problem we’re trying to solve, then I can’t help. Your book would be so important for everybody reading. There’s a difference between a line of questioning that is meant to trigger an answer that leads to the problem I solve and me pitching again.
By the way, through Dr. Morgan’s work, the book’s called Can You Hear Me? People are always sensing the intent of someone else. Consciously and subconsciously, we can tell their intent. The second these they start to think that we’ve got commission breath, a wall goes up. You’ve come across those people that have that authentic interest in you and your business or what’s going on. That’s the skill to try and cultivate, which is have a unique interest. Try and understand what’s going on.
Do your research to earn the right to understand. understand. The outcome down the road might be an opportunity for you. If you’re constantly focusing on trying to figure out how to add value to somebody else or some other business or a buyer, things will work out for you down the road. Even if it’s not an immediate sale for you. That’s one of these key lessons that is also new in sales. I don’t think people get that.
We learned a lot from the focus on culture and perception and some of the things I wrote about after my Curiosity book. I wrote a book on perception because I thought it was so important what you’re talking about to recognize this. The power perception and the perception power index is all based on recognizing that perception is a combination of IQ, EQ, emotional quotient, CQ for curiosity quotient and for cultural quotient.
As you look at all these aspects, sometimes you can put yourself in somebody else’s shoes a lot more easily when you recognize perception is a process. My acronym for that is EPIC. It’s evaluate, predict, interpret, and correlate to come up with conclusions. There’s so much of our backgrounds and culture. It doesn’t matter if it’s religious or female or male. All these different factors of how we were raised can impact so much of what we think the other person’s thinking.
Again, it comes back to the assumptions and the curiosity thing. We assume that this is their problem. We assume all these things without asking. It all comes back to asking questions and building that empathy and our perspective. We all sit on this world in a different spot. I see you’re selling the Selling Well show from this angle but somebody sitting here might see it from here. When we think about that, it’s so easy for us to assume everybody else is thinking the same thing we’re thinking and they could be on completely different plane.
It’s such a great point. By the way, because of the forgetting curve with Herman Ebbinghaus, we constantly have to reinforce this or reengage this or recommunicate it, frankly. Whatever conversation we’re having because we’re also busy. What might resonate and stick to one person at one point in time. Particularly, he says, “You come and see them three weeks later.” You think they understand your value proposition to the market in your company and your product. They don’t even remember your name.
Curiosity And Leadership
You think, “We’ve already been through this.” I’m going to tell a very short story because it leads to curiosity and leadership. On chapter four in the book, curiosity and leadership but everybody in this podcast has heard very quickly. I was the worst sales manager ever in the year 2000. Pretty sure in the history of time, there was nobody worse because I’d been this very strong superstar salesperson, who gets promoted into being a sales manager.
I thought it would be Shangri-La. Now I’m responsible for eight people. All I want to do is tell them exactly what to do all the time. I want them to do it as I used to do it. They can’t do that, so I’m miserable. They don’t want to do that, so they’re miserable. In big companies, when you perform badly, you keep getting promoted. Within about a year, I got promoted to run a division that I knew about whatsoever.
I’m managing a team and every time I’m working with them, they say, “Here’s my situation, what should I do?” All I can do is go, “I don’t know. What do you think you should do?” Suddenly, management became easy. They were happy and engaged. They felt empowered and I started to slowly learn the business. Tell me a little bit about the chapter curiosity and leadership, some of the connections of these great leaders. What did you found there?
Leadership was such an interesting thing. When I had Francesca Gino on my show, who’s a big Harvard professor, who did the case study for curiosity in HBR article, which I love. Everybody should read that. We talked about how leaders think that they encourage curiosity if you research them, a lot of them. when you interview the people who work for them, they think, “Not so much.”
There’s a disconnect in leadership. What leaders want to know about curiosity when I work with them is how does it impact the bottom line? They want to know a lot of that data when I’m talking from their perspective. What is interesting now that ChatGPT is such a hot topic. If you type into chat and ask you know how does this help leaders? How does this promote the bottom line to have curiosity? It almost tells you like, “It’s intuitive, dummy.” When it comes back what it says to you it’s funny.
It helps with communication and emotional intelligence and emotional stuff. There’s not a lot of data out there, which I love that Francesca had some for leaders that we’re seeing some of this. I work with big companies like Novartis, Verizon, and LinkedIn. I speak and go around the world and talk to these companies and give this assessment. I get to talk to a lot of leaders and they all have a different way of promoting curiosity within the workplace.
At Verizon, they sent me back and I created these videos. These small little teaser videos that they play in their onboarding sessions. They can share the value of curiosity in a couple of minutes from me talking. They’d have an employee who was super successful and they give their story of how they became successful based on their curiosity. They create these little videos. They play them all throughout all the stores and all their onboarding sessions.
They’re sharing the culture of curiosity. That’s Verizon’s way of doing it. Novartis pays 100 hours of education a year to their employees. They all have different things that they do. It’s emulating what you want to see if you’re a leader. You have to ask the stupid questions. You mentioned Keith Krach and I’m on a lot of boards with him. I’m at the Krach Institute at Purdue. It’s a technology awareness company that he’s created and Global Mentor Network. He grade him on that one.
What I loved about Keith is his leadership style. That’s why I asked him to write the forward of the book. Whether he was the CEO at DocuSign or undersecretary in Washington, he’s stayed very humble. He doesn’t say he knows everything. He gets these giant boards. When I was at the board at DocuSign, there was like 250 of us. I’m with sharks and McDonald’s. I’m like, “What am I doing here?” In a way.
He gets media people, scientists, and technology. He gets all these people together and he doesn’t say he knows everything that everybody knows. He knows a lot more than he pretends because this guy’s the smartest guy I’ve ever met. He’ll be very humble about it and say, “I hire these people around me that know all this, who all are all knowledgeable in these areas.” Leaders need to recognize you can’t know everything and you don’t know what you don’t know and that comes up a lot. If you surround yourself with great mentorship, you can build your curiosity and utilize everybody else’s curiosity, your advantage.
What resonated with me about the chapter, Diane, was all of the amazing leaders Keith and others that you’ve interviewed. When they talk about some of the most important traits on leaders, curiosity ends up being one of the biggest ones. They’re not in meetings telling everybody what to do. As you know and I know now, but it’s a hard learning curve. Nobody capable wants to be told what to do. Generally, capable people want autonomy to grow themselves, to achieve, be creative, and have flexibility.
No one wants to be told what to do even in your earliest days selling for AstraZeneca. You wanted to be left alone. That’s how you phrased it. One of the important things, the best leaders are, they ask the right questions to challenge the team and elevate the team. They do have that core capability, experience and intelligence to assess to a certain degree what’s coming back because at some point in time, we want to be curious. We want to get facts, but eventually we have to make a decision and you raise that in the book as well. We can’t get paralyzed by curiosity where it’s analysis paralysis.
When I was speaking to that group, you reminded me. I had shared a story of Doug Connect and how he turned around Campbell Soup by asking. I teach so many courses where they have that case study in there. It’s because he took engagement and drastically improved it. Everybody was walking dead going to work. What he did was ask people about themselves and learn about them. He wrote them handwritten notes. He wrote 30,000 of them in his time there.
You should see his face when he talks about it. It was more than he expected but it completely turned around the culture. You can’t assume you know the answers to what motivates people. I’ve had more people offer me tickets to basketball games or dinners at night as a reward for my sales output. I want to go bed at 8:00. That’s not rewarding to me. When you’re talking to motivate people, you got to find out what they care about.
By the way, we’re cut from the same cloth. The early the bed, early raises the thing. It’s interesting you talk about something like that note what motivates people, even that note. We’ve done maybe 100 of these episode and wonderful people. Every conversation is great like this one. I had Stephen Covey booked for six weeks out or eight weeks out or something. First of all, I get his book in the mail. He sends me his book in advance. There’s a nice little inscription on the front and I thought, “That’s nice.”
Amazon doesn’t have to come to the house this week. The next thing, a week later, a letter comes in the mail. He said, “I’ve been watching what you’ve been doing. You’re knocking the ball out of the park. I can’t wait to have a great conversation.” I still have that. I kept that letter somewhere but it’s just this meaningful impact. It’s funny in this world, you bring it up quite a bit that gratitude matters so much to Millennials and so on and so forth. I’m not getting rid of that letter in the short term. That was such a nice thing. You can be darn sure I was as prepared as you can ever be for that episode.
I understand what you’re saying. I’ve had like Tom Hopkins and different people. When I was a kid here in Arizona, Tom Hopkins was like. I wasn’t even a kid. I was in college and whatever but he was so big. It’s so fun to see the Zig Ziglar type people and what their little things that they do. We can learn from so many of these sales gurus out there.
I attend a lot. I think a lot of salespeople don’t attend enough training. I’ve gone to Tony Robin’s things or whatever things. You go to a different things and you get bits and pieces because you can find, “This piece works for me. Maybe that works for this person.” That’s one thing I liked at pharmaceutical sales. Before they hired you, they made you ride in the car with 3 or 4 different salespeople. You spent three different days to decide if this is the job for you.
I remember the first person. She was like, “This is the worst job watching her.” I thought, “I’m never taking this job.” The second person, I’m like, “This is the best job ever,” because I hated the way she did things. It was like, “This is not how I could do this.” She was inefficient. It was awful watching her but I could take a couple things that she did. I could take a couple things that this guy did. You take them and you go, “This makes it right for me so that I’m most effective.”
All those folks you talked about, by the way, I love the testimonial from Tom Hopkins. Tom Hopkin is a total legend in professional sales with those same people from 30 to 40 years ago, but amazing things. One consistent theme from all of them become a lifelong learner. No one’s a know-it-all. You’ve got to be a learn-it-all. This is why the book is so important. Everybody’s heard me chat about books, but when we’re on the show and the joy the show is I have to read these books to prepare for the episode.
Sometimes I’m delighted. I got to call it out with Cracking the Curiosity Code. This is a fantastic book, folks. We didn’t have time to get into everything but Diane makes this very detailed fact-based and research-based connections between curiosity, motivation, leadership, engagement, intelligence, creativity, innovation, age, or maintaining health. What’s that connection? What holds you back from being curious? We start as infants where we’re nothing but curious.
Suddenly over time, it diminishes, how do we retrigger it, curiosity, and technology. In chapter seventeen, that’s where we talk about the Curiosity Code Index. An interesting thing to go through. We’ll have the links in this episode so you can go find it. This is a great book, folks. Diane, thank you the show. What a pleasure speaking with you.
Thank you, Mark. This has been so much fun. I love talking to salespeople. This is so important for everybody. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience here.
Thank you so much. How do people learn more about you? What’s the easiest way to connect with you?
The easiest way you can find me on social media is at Dr. Diane Hamilton. My website is DrDianeHamilton.com. For curiosity, you can go to CuriositCode.com, which is part of my main website. If you go to DrDianeHamilton.com, you can get there that way as well. The most important thing on the site is to start with the Curiosity Code Index because it goes along with the book. That’s the most important aspect of how you can develop your curiosity is the Curiosity Code Index. I hope they check that out.
Thank you, Diane.
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As always, the intention of the show is to increase the performance in the professionalism of B2B sales and improve the lives of professional salespeople in doing so. I know the conversation with Diane would have helped you in that regard. I also know I can get better at running this show and you’re the folks who can tell me how to do it.
If you like this show, please like and subscribe to it. That matters to us but if there’s things that we can be doing to make this show even more effective for you, please let me know. My email is MarkCox@inthefunnel.com. That’s my personal email that I checked. We love constructive criticism. Send us a note and give us some ideas on how to improve the show. Everyone who sends some ideas to us, get a response from me directly and thank you for doing that. In the meantime, I hope everybody continues to have a great time and good luck selling.
Important links
Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential
Facebook – Dr. Diane Hamilton
Twitter – Dr. Diane Hamilton
YouTube – Dr. Diane Hamilton
LinkedIn – Dr. Diane Hamilton
About Diane Hamilton
Dr. Diane Hamilton is the Founder and CEO of Tonerra, which is a consulting and media-based business. She is a nationally syndicated radio host, keynote speaker, and the former MBA Program Chair at the Forbes School of Business. She has authored multiple books including Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential, and The Power of Perception: Eliminating Boundaries to Create Successful Global Leaders. She is the creator of the Curiosity Code Index® assessment, which is the first and only assessment that determines the factors that inhibit curiosity and the Perception Power Index, which determines the factors that impact the perception process.
Her groundbreaking work helps organizations improve innovation, engagement, and productivity. Thinkers50 Radar, considered the Academy Awards for Leadership, chose her as one of the top minds in management and leadership. She was named to Global Leaders Today's list of top leaders along with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Sheryl Sandberg, LeadersHum included her on their list of 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership and in the Top 10 Most Powerful Women Leaders in HR.