Skillful asking is more than just posing questions; it's a powerful approach to unlock deeper insights and foster genuine connections. Jeff Wetzler, author of Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of the People Around You, joins Mark Cox to explore the art and science of asking the right questions. Jeff shares his five-step "Ask" framework, drawing on his extensive experience in management consulting and education reform. He reveals why people often hold back valuable information and provides practical strategies to create psychological safety and cultivate authentic curiosity. Tune in to discover how skillful asking can transform your leadership, improve communication, and drive breakthrough results.
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Skillful Asking: Unlock Hidden Wisdom From The People Around You With Jeff Wetzler
Team, we've got a great show for you. We're talking about a magnificent new book called Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs in Leadership and Life. This is by Jeff Wetzler. The book talks to us about how a lot of the knowledge that we need, whether it's in business or in life, is in the people around us but they're hesitant to share it. We need definitive strategies and a significant approach to extract that information from them and have those conversations where we get that information.
One amazing stat that was shared in the book is that about 80% of people know something that's wrong with their organization or a key issue but they won't share it with their boss and 75% of those people share it with colleagues and peers. They're all talking about it but they never share it with the boss. There are things that you can do, whether it's your relationships with peers, friends, family members, direct reports, customers, and prospects. In the book, we talk about this five-step Ask approach. 1) Choose curiosity, 2) Make it safe, 3) Pose quality questions, 4) Listen to learn, and 5) Reflect and reconnect. Looking at the topic of this book and the things we're going to discuss here, this is so highly relevant for everybody in professional sales.
Jeff's got a magnificent background and the book is so well-written. It's clear and concise. The frameworks make sense and it's all research-based. It’s a big bibliography, like an MBA class. It's no surprise. Jeff spent ten years with Monitor and then he was the EVP of Strategy and Innovation with Teach for America. He's the Cofounder of Transcend Labs. They're a nonprofit that leads innovation in school design. Think of that as trying to change the way the education environment works.
Jeff's a great guy. This is a terrific conversation and really interesting. I continue to learn from these interviews and I hope you do too. If you enjoy this episode, please like and subscribe to the show. That matters to us. That's how we get fantastic guests like Jeff. If there are ways we can improve this show, don't hesitate to let me, Mark Cox, know. I hope all of you are connected with us on LinkedIn. Here's Jeff Wetzler. We're talking about Ask.
Jeff, welcome to the show. I was super excited to chat with you.
Thanks. It's great to be with you.
A Unique Career Path: From Consulting To Education Reform
We're going to get into the book. Once I read Ask, I realized, “Anybody who's going to quote Daniel Kahneman from Thinking, Fast and Slow and Rick Rubin, the music producer, in the same chapter, that guy's got to be on the show.” We're going to get into this in a second, but first of all, welcome. For the sake of the audience, give us the short story of your professional career.
My career has toggled back and forth between the worlds of business and the world of education. It started at a very special management consulting company called Monitor Group, which is now a part of Deloitte. It's called Monitor Deloitte. I was drawn to Monitor first by their recruitment slogan at the time, which was, “A place for optimists to change the world.” As a bright-eyed college graduate, that spoke to me.
I was also drawn in by someone at Monitor named Chris Argyris who was a Harvard Business School professor and known as one of the pioneers of the field of organizational learning. He studied this question of how it is that sometimes the smartest, most successful people are the worst at learning from one another. He dug into that question. He wasn't one to just admire a problem. He wanted to solve the problem as well. He developed a set of tools and methods to help professionals get far better at learning from the people around them.
I was very fortunate to be able to apprentice to him and some of his disciples. I began to ultimately start teaching these tools and methods to Monitor consultants and our clients around the world. I had the experience that every time I would bring out these tools and we would do days together, people would say, “This is the best professional learning I've ever had.” People would say, “Most of these times were a waste of time, but this changed my life, not just at work but with my wife, friends, or the data I haven't talked to in a while.” I realized I was onto something. I didn't invent it, but I had the great fortune of inheriting it and being able to deliver it.
I spent almost a decade at Monitor. One of my clients, a woman named Wendy Kopp who started an organization called Teach for America, which is a global organization, asked me to come help run part of her organization. She had been my client for five years. I was so impressed by what they were doing. They were more hard-charging, more ambitious, and better-run than most of my corporate clients. I said, “Let me take a leave of absence from Monitor.” Monitor was kind enough to give me two years.
I ended up becoming the Chief Learning Officer of Teach for America. Those 2 years turned into 10 years because I was having so much fun. We were scaling the organization. We were trying to improve quality while we were growing incredibly quickly. It was an incredible journey. I did that for about a decade. Did you want to jump in?
No, you go ahead. Please finish off.
In 2015, I left Teach for America and started an innovation organization called Transcend with a co-CEO named Aylon Samouha. Transcend works with communities all across the United States and more broadly who are looking to reimagine what education can be. We're trying to help them break out of this 100-year-old industrial factory model of schooling that most kids and teachers are still trapped in. We use design thinking, questions, curiosity, and learning science to develop modern 21st-century ways of doing education. We have been building and scaling that organization for the last couple of years.
I stepped down as co-CEO. I'm working on something called Transcend Labs, which is thinking around the corner. It also gave me time to launch this book called Ask, which is a culmination of all of my experiences built off the foundation of what I learned from Chris Argyris but weaving in ideas and tools from other great leaders like Amy Edmondson on psychological safety and many others. I wrote the book to deal with a problem that I both observed but also experienced as a leader and to try to pay forward so much of the incredible mentorship, teaching, and insight I was fortunate to gain in my own career.
Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life
Two things. First of all, my team should record exactly the way you introduced yourself there because I have to improve the way I do it. That was spectacular. Second of all, what a career and a journey. For the regular audience, Monitor Group is a super high-end strategic consulting. It is one of the top players in that field.
We've had Roger Martin who is one of the very early leaders of that organization join the show. We always use his clip because one of the things he said in the interview was, “Looking back now, one of the challenges at Monitor was you'd get somebody to a senior manager level but if they wanted to move up to a director level, they needed sales skills. Back in the day, they didn't think of hiring companies like ours to come in and train them.” He said if he did it, they see value in that professional skillset and capability to get to that next level. It ties into the full title of the book. The full title of the book is Ask: Tap into the Hidden Wisdom of the People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs in Leadership and Life. That's your tie-in with, “This helped me in my personal relationships.”
I am a comic nerd. I have thousands of comics. Unfortunately, my wife and I have figured out what to do with them. At the beginning, you referenced that pollsters asked Americans if they could have any superpower in the world, what would they pick? The answer came back, number one, reading other people's minds. Number two, time travel.
Mine would be, in vulnerability for those reading, I want to be Superman but I don't want to be hurt anymore. I play hockey and I'm tired of being hurt. What an interesting thing that everybody wants to understand what's going on in somebody else's mind. This whole approach and methodology that you come up with the Ask approach is a way of pulling what's in somebody else's mind out.
It's true. We have a natural desire to understand what the people around us are knowing, thinking, and feeling. We know that they're not fully telling us. That's why we wish we could read their minds. We know it's hard as well.
They have an innate need to be heard and understood.
That's exactly right. If we could put those two things together, we would be better off if we could tap into that, and that's really the impetus for the book.
It's so smart. Another stat you threw that's helpful for us to think about was something to the effect that about 85% of people out there have shared that there's an issue or a challenge that they did not share with their boss in organizations. In fact, 75% of those people said they'd talked to other colleagues about it. They’re like, “I'm not going to share with my boss but me and my friends are talking about this because it's this known issue.” This caught you a little bit at Teach for America, which might have been one of the main impetuses of the book. You got caught in a pretty tough situation there. Tell us a little bit about that.
I was relatively new. I spent almost a decade at Monitor in many ways, teaching and leading this very work. It was my first major operating role. We were putting together institutes to train teachers. We had thousands of teachers, so every institute would be training 500 or so teachers. These are new teachers going into some of the toughest contexts or most underserved contexts. The stakes are really high both for the teachers and for the students that they're teaching.
We had teams for every single institute that spent the entire year planning the institute, developing the curriculum, getting the space, and organizing the transportation, food, faculty, and all those different things. We had multiple of these things going at any point in time. I discovered almost at the very last second that 1 out of our 5 institutes right before it was about to launch was about to implode. We had 500 teachers descending on the city when there was not going to be something to support them and they only had the summer to get ready to teach.
All year long, I had been saying to the team of this particular institute, “How's it going? Are there any issues? What can I do?” They were like, “It's going well. We got it. There are a couple of bumps,” and all that kind of thing. I was doing my job. I didn't have all the right questions to ask but I was thinking, “We're good.” All of a sudden, one thing crumbles after the next. We don't have the buses lined up and there's no summer school for them to have a practicum to teach. Half the faculty aren't ready to be teaching and all that kind of thing.
Thankfully, I had a colleague who was credible who swooped in, saved the day, and whatever else, but it got me thinking, “How come they didn't tell me?” It turns out that in hindsight, they were panicking. There were all kinds of issues. If they had told me, I would've rolled up my sleeves. We would've gotten in it, we would've solved it, and it would've been fine but they felt like they had to say to me, “We're on track.” They thought to themselves, “Hopefully, we'll figure this thing out,” but they weren't figuring it out. I thought, “Why is it that people in organizations aren't saying, in this case, to their managers the real thing?” That became an obsession for me to figure out what are the biggest barriers.
Unveiling Hidden Barriers: Why People Hold Back Information At Work
Let's talk about some of them. What's the answer to that? We run a small business here called In the Funnel. We work with lots of medium-sized enterprises. We work with lots of large sales organizations. A lot of the time, we're interviewing the salespeople that will end up training or we're doing some due diligence to do that. I'm amazed at sometimes what they'll share with us but they don't share with their leadership. I don't know what it is about, a casual conversation with me or what have you. What prevents people from sharing?
It's not just that they withhold from their boss. This withholding happens in every direction. Bosses withhold it from the people that they manage. Colleagues withhold it from each other. Customers withhold it from the people who sell to them. Clients withhold it from their providers. Investors withhold it. Board members withhold it. This is a 360-degree withholding that's happening all around us. It's astounding. It’s the same barriers that stop people in whatever direction this is happening.
The number one barrier is fear of the impact of saying what they have to say. Maybe they will get judged. Maybe they'll hurt the other person. Maybe it will poison their relationship. Maybe it will put tension into their relationship. All of those are under the category of fear of the impact. That's not the only barrier. A second barrier is that people don't always have the words to say it. As it occurs to them inside, they know that if they say it that way, it's going to make things worse.
There are whole industries around helping people find better ways to share feedback and all that kind of thing but that doesn't mean people have the words. Sometimes, people have the words but they don't have the time to say it. I discovered this other stat that the human mind can think at 900 words a minute but at best can get out about 150 words a minute.
Our minds can think at 900 words a minute, but we can only speak at about 150 words a minute. Be patient and listen
Oscar Trimboli. I love that.
If you think about that, you're talking to someone. At best, you might be hearing 15% of what's going on in their head at that moment in time, not because they're maliciously withholding from you but because the math doesn't work. The straw is not big enough to get all the words out of their mouth. That's another barrier as well. They don't have the words or the time to say the words.
A third barrier is people are exhausted. Everyone is rushing and grinding fast. People think, “It'll be faster if I don't say it. If I say it, then we're going to have to have a conversation about it. It'll take time. I want to get home.” They're too busy. The biggest barrier and the one that I think is most fascinating is that people don't tell us things because they don't realize we really want to know. They don't think that what they have to say would be truly valued by us. That's the most fascinating one because it's the most actionable one to deal with as well.
You can control it. We've had Oscar on the show too for a couple of times from How to Listen. This will come into the Ask approach. Listen with intent. Actively listen. You shared the 900-125. How many words can you process when somebody else is speaking? The number is 425. If you're speaking to me at 125, it's almost impossible for me not to be slightly distracted because my brain's already connecting patterns and all of these things. I can't wait to jump in and tell you what I've learned.
I love that research.
It's so powerful. We've had a couple of great conversations on that. This last one led into it beautifully. They think we're not truly interested. A[1] ny leader out there tuning into this has been in a situation where they’re having a conversation, maybe with a direct reporter or somebody of that nature. You ask a question but you're not really authentically curious about the answer. You've already got your biases about this person or the situation. We're going to talk about the ladder of understanding in a second here. When we talk about the five-step approach, the Ask approach, the first step is that curiosity is a choice. You have to want to know what the answer is and show it.
The Ask approach is what I'm putting forward as a solution to this problem, the problem that we don't find out what people around us think, feel, and know. It's five steps. They're grounded all in research. They're all tested out and pressure-tested in practice. Step one is choosing curiosity. I'm positing curiosity not as a trait that some people have and other people lack and not as a state of mind like, “I'm not feeling curious today,” or, “I'm feeling curious,” but truly as a choice. That means that it's a decision that's always available to us.
When we choose curiosity, we're putting ourselves in a mindset or bringing an intention of, “What can I learn from this person?” When I center that question, it pushes away other questions like, “Why are they such a jerk?” or, “Why are they so stupid?” or, “How do I get them to say yes right now?” It's truly, “What can I learn from this person?” That opens up lots of other questions that start to flow into our minds like, “What do they know that I don't know? What are they up against? What are they struggling with? What do they see? What's their life experience? How am I impacting them?” There are all kinds of things we can learn.
Often, people say to me, “Do you really want to learn from everyone? Can you learn from everyone?” I'm like, “Just because you learn from them doesn't mean you have to agree with them and it doesn't mean you have to do what they want you to do, but you can still learn from them. Even if you vehemently disagree, at minimum, you can learn, “Why do they feel the way that they feel?” or, “What moves are they going to make there?” I truly believe there's something we can learn from every single person. Choosing curiosity is tapping into that.
Well said. I'll be a little bit honest here. When we started the show years ago, first of all, we went after sales leaders and people who've written sales books. Considering the early days of what went on, I promised that I would read everybody's book before they joined this show. Maybe as a little over-confident, I did some big deals as a salesperson. I led some large organizations.
I'll be honest with you. I was very judgmental in the early days of reading someone's book going, “There's nothing new here. I've heard this before,” and so on and so forth. Getting somebody on live conversation and talking to them, you realize, “They brought 2 or 3 other things to the table that I hadn't thought of. I really like the approach and what they've done here.” It triggers that dopamine where you go, “I'd like to learn more.” We all love dopamine. To some extent, this is still good marketing for us.
The driving factor for a lot of these interviews is we put people or guests on where I've read the book and I go, “I can't wait to talk to this person.” If you are open-minded, everybody's got something to teach you or there's something to learn in everything, but as we'll get to, there are barriers within me where I'm going to make that judgment fairly quickly and say, “They were never really top-level salespeople.” My emotions come into play. In milliseconds, I determine, “Do I like this person or not?” That can put up a wall or a barrier.
We're going to stay on curiosity, but while we're on it, the Ask approach is this five-step approach. Number one, choose curiosity. Number two, make it safe. Number three, pose quality questions. Number four, listen to learn. We talked about Oscar. Number five, reflect and reconnect. The book, I've got to call it out. I read a lot of books and I've written a book. This book is a beautifully written book.
Thank you.
It is well-designed and simple but powerful. I love the fact you've got a powerful bibliography. They’re not opinions. These are fact-based comments. We're referencing great research and great books. The hardest book I've ever read is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I have every one of the 135 biases. It’s so painful to see all of these things. My brain tricks me. Let's stay on curiosity. For those out there who are walking into that next meeting, whether it's with a customer, a prospect, a peer, or a direct report, what are some of the things that we can do in our tool bag to try and generate that authentic curiosity? What might be some tips to make me a little better in that next meeting?
The Ladder Of Understanding: How Our Minds Quickly Jump To Conclusions
Maybe this is a time to talk about the ladder of understanding because this is a tool to help us understand where our curiosity goes to die and how curiosity shuts down. I believe that one of the best ways to choose curiosity is to understand a little bit about how our mind works so that we can become more aware of when our curiosity is shutting down.
This is a tool that is adapted from work by Chris Agryiris. It helps us understand how it is that we walk into a situation, size it up, and tell ourselves a story about what's going on all in milliseconds and all outside of our conscious awareness. It starts by anytime we walk into a situation, we are awash in data points. There is information everywhere.
Even as I stare at you, I'm looking at your background, your facial expressions, what you're wearing, and your microphone. I'm listening to all you've said. If I tried to stop and pay attention to every single one of those hundreds or thousands of pieces of information that surround me or I tried to pay attention to all of them, I would be paralyzed. If you ever walk down the street with a three-year-old, they stop and pay attention to everything. They’re like, “Look at that bird. Look at that worm. Look at that leaf. Look at that crack on the sidewalk.” Everything is interesting to them. It is adorable but they don't get anywhere. It takes you two hours to walk a block.
In order to move forward in life, we can't just pay attention to everything. We have to select the tiniest fraction of that information to zero in on. We ignore everything else. The dangerous part is we forget that we've done that. We assume that whatever that tiny fraction of information that we've zeroed in on is the totality of reality in the whole thing.
Since we're human beings, we're not content to sit with that piece of information. We instantly make meaning of it. We go up the next rung of the ladder, and that is to say what this means. We’re like, “He's nodding that way. That must mean he's placating me,” or, “That must mean he's interested,” or whatever it is. We make an inference of what it means. Quickly, we jump to the top of the ladder, which is ultimately, we draw conclusions. We’re like, “He's that kind of person,” or, “She's trying to do this. This is what's really going on here.” Those conclusions become our story. The story has major consequences because the story shapes what steps we take next.
That is how the ladder works. We're washing this data, quickly zip up to the top of the ladder, construct the story, and we don't even realize that we're doing it. The kicker is that the choices that we make at every step along the way, what information to select, how to interpret, and what story to spin are not random choices. You referenced Kahneman. They're shaped by our prior beliefs, worldviews, assumptions, ways of being, and ways of knowing which I call our stuff. Our stuff shapes our story, but then we have a story that we get to which then reconfirms our stuff. We're like, “There we go again. They're always like that. Here's how the world is.”
We get trapped in this thing that I call the certainty loop. It's the loop between our stuff, which shapes our story, which reconfirms our stuff. The more we get stuck in that loop, the more our curiosity dies. To choose curiosity, we have to interrupt the certainty loop that we all fall into. The way we can do that is by using what I call curiosity questions. These questions are mapped to different points of the ladder of understanding.
At the very bottom is selecting the information. The question is, “What information might I have overlooked? What else might be going on here? What might I be missing?” The next thing is assigning meaning to it. It is, “How else might someone process this information? What's a different way to interpret this?” The next is drawing conclusions. It is, “What's an alternate conclusion that someone might have? What's a different story that one could tell?” The uber curiosity question is, “What can I learn from this person?”
If we can start to inject those questions almost like injecting question marks into our otherwise certain story, we begin to loosen its grip on us. It doesn't mean it's wrong. It doesn't mean we have to throw it away or abandon it. We make room for some other ways of looking at the situation to come in. Sometimes, it's hard to do that because we're so stuck in our own story. It can be helpful to invite a friend, a coach, or a mentor to pose these questions and sit with these questions with you.
I have also found, and I read about this in the book, that AI can be that friend as well. You can put in your whole rant into AI like, “I can't believe this political figure, this business decision,” or whatever. Put a question in like, “What might I be missing?” What comes back is fascinating. It's humbling, curiosity-producing, and in the privacy of your own phone, computer, desk, laptop, or wherever you are. You don't even have to admit that there might be another way of looking at it but you can still get that help.
When you're reading the book, first of all, there are great chapter summaries on everything. There are all of these key points that you go into. There are great examples of these AI prompts. What would you put in? You were using an example there. The example in the book that showcased the curiosity and the ladder of understanding was this reference point in a Caribbean country where tourism was being impacted and the hotel management versus the unions of the labor working in these hotels were trying to figure out, “How do we get to this point where we can stop losing the dollars from our number one industry for the entire place?”
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, it's shocking when you learn about the mental shortcuts we all take and the biases we have. I have them all. You catch yourself. One of the themes you put in the book is we have to be our best selves to do these things. It’s like, “How many times have I been in a client meeting? How many times have I been in a meeting with a direct report where I ran from another meeting? I'm overworked and overtired. I've got to get to the gym tonight somehow. I got five hours of sleep.” Everything's about me.
In order to be authentically curious, pause, and listen to learn or listen to understand, it takes enormous energy. You have to protect some white space for yourself in your day and your energy so that you can do that. We cram so much into a day. Everybody's got so little free time. All of this stuff becomes exponentially more difficult if you're wiped out.
It can take a lot but there are also small things to do. I know you had a guest, Diane Hamilton, on the show. She and I are collaborating on an article together with someone else named Natalie Nixon about how you can put little speed bps in your day so that you can get that pause. Even if you have five hours of sleep or even if you're running, you don't have to become a perfect monk and everything in tune or whatever. You have to put a little speed bump in and say, “Let me think. Here's a question. Let me pause for a second and take a breath.” There are little things that we can do to cue our curiosity.
Another person you may want to think about collaborating with is Juliet Funt. She has a book called A Minute to Think. She was a guest on the show a few months ago. She talks about the same problem. She makes a great reference that it's a little bit like a fire. When she was an inexperienced camper, she'd tried to cram all the wood together to light a fire outside. It doesn't work. To build a fire, you've got to allow some space for oxygen to get through to let the flame breathe.
She talks about the need, importance, and impact of putting some white space in your day and your time. You think instead of doing everything all the time. She'd be somebody who may be great for this discussion too. When we talk about the 5-step Ask approach, the 2nd step of the approach is to make it safe. Learning for me, earlier in my career, is to make it safe. We talk about a safety cycle, creating a connection, opening up, and radiating resilience. Let's talk about those briefly.
Creating Psychological Safety: Making It Safe For Others To Share Their Truth
This is a recognition that even if I'm curious to learn from you and you don't feel safe telling me your truth, especially if it's a hard truth, it doesn't matter how curious I am. I'm not going to learn from you. This was the core problem I faced in the story I told you earlier about my team. I was curious to know how it was going but they didn't feel safe telling me the answer.
You're new. They don't know you. You came from a big-league consulting firm. It's a bit scary, right?
Exactly. There's a power differential. I could hire them or fire them. We were also operating across lines of difference, race, gender, and other things as well like geography. All kinds of barriers were reducing the safety that they felt. If we want to learn from other people, it's on us to create that safety. A little bit about each of the three pieces of the safety cycle you talked about, creating a connection may be obvious.
There are two most important insights I got from researching the book. One is when do you do it? You have to do it before you have an important conversation. You are digging your well before you're thirsty. If you're trying to create a connection at the same time you're trying to create safety, it's much harder. If you can build that connection well in advance, it's much easier. The second thing is the time, place, and space of the connection. For the book, I interviewed CEOs.
They were big-league CEOs too.
They were from big companies like Kraft and Medtronic. They are notorious for not getting the truth from people. People don't tell CEOs the truth. They lie to them because they want to look good in the eyes of the CEOs. I said to these iconic CEOs, people like Bill George or Irene Rosenfeld, “How did you get the truth out of people?” One of the biggest things they said is, “It's when and where I have the conversation. I'll never bring someone into my office, make them sit across the big, intimidating CEO desk from me, and assume that's where they're going to feel safe. I'm going to go to them. We're going to do a ride-along. We're going to have lunch. We're going to take a walk. We're going to sit on the sofa,” or whatever it is.
There was no single answer but the answer simply was wherever they are going to feel most comfortable and at ease is when and where we should have that conversation. It applies in business and in life too. It applies to my sixteen-year-old daughter who never wants to tell me anything when she comes home from school or at the dinner table. If I want to find out what her life is really like, I have to do it when she's comfortable, which is 11:00 PM when she's done talking to her friends, she's done with her homework, and I'm ready to go to sleep. That's when she wants to talk. If I want to know what's going on in my daughter's life, that's when I got to do it. The same thing holds true in work situations. That's creating a connection.
Wherever people are going to feel most comfortable and at ease is when and where we should have that conversation.
We've all had discussions with leaders throughout the course of our career where we felt this and we've had leaders that we reported to based on what we’ve done where we did not feel this.
People can viscerally feel how safe they are.
That's where the stats at the beginning, the 80% of having no problems but won't share them and then 75% share with each other came from. I've lived in that situation where you walk into a meeting saying, “This person does not care at all about me, my life, and my situation. I'm a tool for them to achieve a goal.” You then make this decision to go, “Am I still getting something from this whole thing?” I’ve lived like that for a few years in a role like that because there was still value and learning to me but I would not have thought for a second this person cared about me whatsoever.
They're not going to have your back when you know when you need it.
Asking Quality Questions: A Taxonomy For Deeper Conversations
Continuing along, posing these quality questions. We've got to be curious in terms of the Ask approach. We’ve got to make it safe. On making it safe when we're working with a lot of sales leaders, when this leader takes a look at the team and might have 1 or 2 folks where there's an issue or 2, I often ask this question of them. I say, “Why does Jeff do this?” People think the answer to that question is self-evident but it's not.
Why is Jeff continuing to enjoy his work with Teach for America, if it was a few years ago? The answer to that question came from Jeff specifically. It's not your opinion as to what you think. What did Jeff say when you asked him, “You could work anywhere you want. You came from Monitor. Why do you do this? Tell me more.” One way to make it safe is that people will care about what you know when they know that you care. It has to be authentic.
That's why curiosity comes before making it safe. If you're genuinely curious, it's so much easier to make it safe. If you're not curious, people can tell. There's not much you can do to make it safe if you haven't first chosen curiosity.
Are they in sequential order? When we think about the Ask approach, is this sequential?
It is intended to be sequential. You could pick any step. The more you do it, the better off you'll be, but there is a flow. It starts with curiosity and then it's making it safe. From there, you're ready to ask questions. That takes us to number three, posing quality questions.
Let's talk a little bit about that.
I define a quality question very simply as a question that helps us learn something important from someone else. That may sound simple but many of the questions that we pose or many of the things that come out of our mouths that have a question mark at the end do not truly allow us to learn something important from the other person. I call those crummy questions.
Quality questions are simply questions that help us learn something important from someone else.
We got quality questions and crummy questions. Crummy questions can be things that are clumsy. If you ask four questions in a row, no way someone's going to remember all those questions to answer. Another clumsy question is if someone says, “This is what I think. Wouldn't you agree?,” or, “Isn't that right?” or, “Right?” Those are all things that someone might want to know, but it's very hard to answer when someone says, “Right?” for you to say, “That's not right.” Someone might do it but few people will do that.
There are clumsy questions. There are what I call sneaky questions. That's what a lawyer will do to try to get someone to admit that they're guilty. There are attack questions. All of those are in the category of crummy questions. As it relates to quality questions, one of the things that I'm fascinated by is that so many of us, for a living, have conversations. That means we're asking questions and giving answers. It's the same thing in reverse. Yet, none of us has been taught what is the taxonomy of good-quality questions to ask.
I think about it the same way that a surgeon might have their scalpel and then they've got this tool and all the different tools. Depending on what they're trying to do, they've got something to go with. They've been trained and they know what to use. Yet, we who ask who talk for a living have never been taught what are the different kinds of questions.
In this chapter of the book, I introduce a taxonomy of about a dozen different questions. It's not like there are hundreds. You can learn this. Each one of them helps us get to something different. I'll give you one example. One of the strategies in the taxonomy is called request reactions. Request reactions are simple. I tell you something, explain something to you, make a request, or give you some feedback. In the end, I simply pause and say, “What's your reaction to that?” or, “How does that sit with you?” or, “How does that strike you?” or, “What does that make you think?” or, “What's wrong about what I said?” or, “What might I be missing?”
Any of those things radically increases the chances that I will access your thinking about my thinking. If you disagree with my thinking, I will find out. If there's a hole in my thinking that I might not have seen, I'm much more likely to find that hole if you can see what it is. It's very rare that we'll stop and invite reactions. If we do, sometimes we'll do it in a crummy way, which might be something like, “Does that make sense?” or something like that. It’s hard for someone to honestly answer that question. If we request reactions in any of the different ways I illustrated, we're much more likely to get disconfirming data or information that might surprise us. Especially in a sales situation, you're much more likely to surface barriers if you really understand how what you say lands with someone.
This entire conversation applies directly to sales. I wasn't going to pull everything right back there, but I have a couple of thoughts. First of all, this approach to asking these questions with an intent to learn is much different than asking questions with an intent to manipulate, which is what they used to do in sales many years ago. Human beings resist any form of manipulation whatsoever. They're repulsed by it. Sometimes, when you're talking to an unsophisticated salesperson, this list of questions means, “You've got to move forward. It's time to buy the condo in Florida.”
“How does this strike you?” is a great open-ended question. It's back to Oscar Trimboli. Allow the pregnant pause, which seems like it's way too long. The 900 words in their head need time to get out. It's either Michael Bungay Stanier or Oscar. Once they answer, sit for a while and go, “What else?” They'll fill it. All this comes back to, “Do as I say, not as I do.” I have a tough time also like everybody else. I'm an extrovert, so I want to fill the air. It’s so powerful. Preparation and thinking about these questions.
One of the things that I picked up in the book, and I'm sure it was intentional but I didn't see it written down specifically, is that a lot of the Ask approach is this intent where I do want to know. I’m a believer. There are some stats by Dr. Nick Morgan from Harvard in a book called Can You Hear Me? where people can sense your intent in milliseconds. We're always saying this on the sales front, which is our intent is not to sell them something. Our intent is to figure out if we can help them somehow.
You put your finger on the full ethos of the book, which is the intent to learn something from someone. That's why I started with curiosity because we've got to have that curious intention for the rest of it to even make sense.
The Power Of Reflection And Reconnection: Turning Insights Into Action
Posing quality questions led to listen to learn, and then it led to reflect and reconnect. Given your time, this one is one to touch on before we wrap up. How often do we have this situation where we're having this conversation where somebody shares and whatever they share goes into the ether? Nobody knows whatever happened. They’re like, “I really was exposing myself. I was throwing myself out there saying, “These are the three things the company needs to do.”
I love the fact that at some point in time, you've got to say, “Thank you for the feedback and input.” It doesn't mean I have to agree with it but I do have to acknowledge it and say, “I'm either going to do something about it,” or, “I'm going to decide we're going to do something about it in the future,” or, “We're never going to do something about it.” I heard you and I've considered it and I appreciate the thought.
To me, this is my favorite step of all five of the Ask approach because I am a junkie for learning. Reflection is how we learn. It's how we convert our experience into insight and our insight into action. A lot of people feel like, “I don't have time to reflect. I would have to go on some meditation retreat to reflect,” or whatever but reflection can be very practical and simple.
Reflection is how we learn. It's how we convert our experience into insight and our insight into action.
I talked about a method in the book called Sift It and Turn It. Sifting it is saying, “Of all the things I heard, what are the 2 or 3 most important things?” I then turn it over in my head in a very structured way to say, “How does it shift my story? How can it shift the steps that I take? How does it give me insight into my deeper stuff?”
To your point, reconnect is to say, “This is not extractive for me.” This is about going back to the other person and saying, “This is what I heard and this is what made me think. Here's what I'm going to do about it. Out of curiosity, is that what you were hoping I would learn, or is there something different you were hoping I would learn? Thank you because it probably took some time and it may have taken a risk. I'm grateful for it.”
I did that act not long ago when one of my colleagues at work gave me some feedback. At that moment, I was like, “I'll think about that.” Two hours later, I was like, “She had some really good points.” I sent her a message and said, “Here's what you have me thinking about. Here's what I'll be reflecting on. Thank you.” She told me how much it meant to her that I had closed that loop and let her know that because she knew that she didn't waste her time. She knew that I was valuing her. It will greatly increase the chances that she will give me more feedback in the future as well.
Embedding "Ask" Into Organizational Culture
There's a little bit of trust back and forth. I'm like that too. A lot of times, I might get the feedback, and as much as I like to think I'm highly evolved, that wall of defensiveness for me might pop up every once in a while. I'll go away, let it sink, think about it, and say, “There were some good learning points there.” As you talk about in the book, sometimes our ability to see things that way gets impeded by the amygdala or emotion. I've got lots of emotion floating around.
It’s because you're human. We all do.
More or less. The people you know who tune in to this show are natural learners too. They're growth-oriented. They always want to learn or else they wouldn't tune in. First of all, how would somebody learn more about you?
First, I love to connect with people on LinkedIn. You can find me and connect with me at Jeff Wetzler on LinkedIn. There's a website for the book, which is www.AskApproach.com. On that website, you can find lots of resources and articles. There's an assessment that will help you know which of these five steps you're strong in and which ones you might need to work on. There are videos and all kinds of things. I would recommend going to the website. You can get the book anywhere books are sold.
Thank you. What are you learning? What are you reading? What are you excited about? There are 3 or 4 questions in a row there. We'll take one at a time.
I am reading a novel at the very moment called Kaaterskill Falls, which is a fascinating novel. You mentioned the bibliography, I was so focused on nonfiction and research. I'm giving my brain a break by reading some fiction. I believe that fiction is one of the best ways to gain empathy and curiosity. As much as I can, I'm trying to balance my nonfiction with my fiction.
On the business side or the impact work side, I'm really obsessed with the question, “How can I convert the ideas of Ask into enduring behavior change?” There is training, and that's a really important piece because there's skill building, but there's more to it than that. There are the structures and organizations that we sit within. There's even the technology that we use as well.
I'm really trying to push myself to get creative about what are the various ways that we can weave this into the workflow and into the systems, structures, processes, and cultures of organizations. I'm developing a bunch of different offerings and experimenting with different ones to try to help embed Ask into everything we do.
That’s amazing. First of all, thank you. What a pleasure meeting you. I really enjoyed the book. I was so pleased to get you on as a guest. I'm sure everybody's going to get massive value from this episode. Thank you so much for joining the show.
Thank you for reading the book, for having me, and for your great questions in this conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Thank you very much for joining. We run the show because we're looking to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. In doing so, we believe we're improving the lives of everybody in professional sales. Thank you for tuning in. If you like this episode, please like and subscribe to the show because that's how we get great guests like Jeff to join us.
If there are other ways that we can provide value through the show, we're super growth-oriented. We love constructive criticism. Please send your ideas to me. My personal email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. If there's a guest you think we should have or there's an idea for the podcast where you can get more value from this, let us know. That's my personal email. I respond personally to every idea that's sent in, so thanks for doing that. In the meantime, we'll see everybody next time on the show.
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About jeff wetzler
Dr. Jeff Wetzler is an expert on adult learning and leadership and development. He brings 25 years of experience as a successful entrepreneur, operating executive, and advisor to top corporate and NGO leaders around the world.
Blending a unique set of leadership experiences in the fields of business and education, he's pursued this quest as a management consultant to the world's top corporations, as a learning facilitator for leaders around the world, as Chief Learning Officer at Teach For America, and most recently, as co-CEO of Transcend, a nationally recognized education innovation organization.
Jeff's career is dedicated to unlocking human potential by helping people learn more deeply and transform their mindsets to realize bold new possibilities for themselves, their oorganizations and communities.
Jeff earned a Doctorate in Adult Learning and Leadership from Columbia University and a Bachelor's in Psychology from Brown University. He is a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and is an Edmund Hillary Fellow.