How can asking questions lead to being an effective leader? Let’s find out. Michael Bungay Stanier, author and founder of Box of Crayons, joins us to discuss his latest book, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever. Known for his coaching programs that help time-crunched managers develop their coaching skills in 10 minutes or less, Michael breaks down his coaching methodology, the best ways to jumpstart deep conversation and the smart habits that effective leaders embrace.
Tell us what you think!
Brandon: Welcome to the HR for Small Business podcast, this is your host Brandon Laws. Today I have a guest all the way from Ontario, Canada. He is the author of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever. He’s also the bestselling author of Do More Great Work, the founder and senior partner of Box of Crayons, which is best known for their coaching programs that help time crunched managers coach in 10 minutes or less, Michael Bungay Stanier. Thanks for joining me!Michael: It’s pretty exciting to be here! Thanks for having me, Brandon.
Brandon: So Michael, you just released The Coaching Habit, I did read it cover to cover as I mentioned before we started recording. What inspired you to write this book?
Michael: You know, that’s a great question because honestly I wanted to give up on this book about five times! This is my fifth book and honestly after book four I’m like, I’ve kind of got the hang of how to write a book. It’s not always easy but with some things it’s like, I’ve figured it out, and you just keep going and you work through the hard stuff and you get to it. This book came close to killing me. Honestly, it was hard. I wrote four bad versions of the book before I finally got to what I think now is a good version. And there were times, Brandon, where I was like, I’m done with this! I’m just going to walk away from whatever this is.But there’s a couple of things that kind of pulled me back. The first is just a purely business reason. As you said, with Box of Crayons our focus is entirely on giving busy managers and leaders practical skills so they can coach in 10 minutes or less. So I was like, this book will really help the business. It’ll feed the business, it’ll support the business, it’s just a good business decision. And if you’re a book writer, an author, you come to know pretty quickly that nobody makes any money from books! It’s a miserable, it’s a low pay job to be a book writer. But if you have a way of connecting it to a business then it makes more sense.
But a more important reason for me is that I think that our mission as an organization at Box of Crayons is to help people do less good work and more great work. You know, good work – your job description. Productive, efficient, getting things done, what all of your listeners spend most of their time doing. But great work is the work that has more impact, makes more of a difference, is strategically important. It’s also work that has more meaning. It’s the work that engages you and that you care about and that speaks to your values and that you kind of light up and go, I signed up for this job to do this kind of work! And for me, coaching is just one of the most powerful managerial things you can do to help you and those around you have more impact and work less hard to stay focused on the great work. Because with coaching comes focus, with coaching comes autonomy and self-sufficiency and self-belief.
And I guess I would just say one other thing, Brandon, before I get off my soap box, because you’ve got me on a soap box! I’ll step off in just a minute.
Brandon: You can stay on the soap box, this is great!
Michael: I’m banging away! One of the things that I am trying not to do is to turn people into coaches. Because you know, quite rightly there’s a whole bunch of people who are listening now and going I honestly don’t want to be a coach. I’ve met coaches – yeah I don’t want to be that! But they are thinking, I’d love to be able to be more effective and have more impact in the work that I do. I’d like to be more coach-like, so that the interventions and interactions I have with people are more successful. And that’s what this book is about, trying to make people more coach-like, so that they and those around them have more impact in the work they do.
Brandon: I think that’s a great point, so you want them to be more coach-like, not necessarily just be a coach. Do you think people are even practicing this right now? As managers and leaders, do people have coaching tendencies? I think there’s a reason why you wrote this book. And maybe you believe that most people aren’t doing this.Michael: Yes, that’s what I believe. I believe most people are advice-giving maniacs. They love it – they don’t even know how much they love it. I watch it time and time again in our programs here. People are fifteen seconds into a conversation with somebody they’ve never met before, so they don’t know who that person is. They don’t know what’s going on. But they have some pretty good ideas that they would like to share about how to fix the solution that they’ve heard 20 seconds about so far.
For good reasons, we are wired to give advice. We spend our whole lifetime practicing and being rewarded for and encouraged into giving advice, it’s a deep habit for us. And there is a place for giving advice, and I’m not saying, Brandon, never give anybody any advice or help ever again. I’m just saying your advice-giving muscle overdeveloped. It’s like one of those weird biceps you see on people who have steroid rage. And your coaching muscle being more like coach-like, underdeveloped. We’re trying to just balance things out a little bit.
Brandon: You said there’s a place for advice-giving, but if you’re going to put yourself in a camp, do you like the Socratic method of coaching, where you’re asking questions? That’s really what your book’s about, you give 7 amazing questions, and I’m going to assume that you love asking questions instead of giving advice.
Michael: You know, I do love asking questions rather than giving advice, but not just for the sake of questions for the sake of questions, it’s because it just works a little bit better. You know, there’s a fundamental behavior shift that I would hope for people who read the book. And it doesn’t sound very difficult, it’s harder than it sounds. It is to stay curious just a little bit longer and to rush into advice giving and actions just a little bit slower. We rush to action, we rush to advice, so so much of what this book is about is, let me show you some ways to make being curious something you can be much more often as a daily habit.
Brandon: So the book’s title, The Coaching Habit—what is the coaching habit? Not to give everything away, but just a little sneak peek.
Michael: Oh sure. So fundamentally it’s just what we were saying, which is okay, how do you stay curious, and how do you stay curious just a little bit longer? And to make that easy for people. In the book, and the book’s a fast read, I don’t know if you found that.
Brandon: I did, I finished it in a day. Just a couple hours.
Michael: Yeah, perfect. The goal I set myself was what’s the shortest book I can write that would be the most useful? Because you know, I know you talk to authors all the time, and I don’t know how you find most business books, but between you and me and your vast audience, most of them are terrible! They’re hard to read, they’re dense.
Brandon: Too much science involved.
Michael: Your heart sinks as soon as you open the first page, because it’s tiny type. They’ve fleshed out a slightly dodgy idea with stories of great Southwest Airlines, because that’s the only company they’ve ever heard of, it’s frustrating.
So I was trying to not write that book. I wanted it to be elegant and lean and practical. So in the book we’ve got three elements. The first is the first chapter, which is here’s what a habit is. Here’s how you build a habit. And there’s a ton of terrible advice out there about habit building, the classic being if you do it for 21 days it becomes a habit. Ok, that’s a lie. Somebody just made that up. And what we do in the first chapter is offer the new habit formula, a very simple but powerful formula based on work from Charles Duhigg and BJ Fogg and others. Here’s the structure of a habit, how you build a new habit.
And then the other two parts, one is there are 7 essential questions, which you mentioned, which I think if you have these 7 questions in your back pocket and you use them regularly, you’ll go a long way.
And then the other part’s kind of in-between the major chapters, just little tips on how to ask a question well. Not only do you know the question, but here’s how you actually ask it in a way that will get maximum effect. So everything from getting comfortable with silence to stop asking for fake questions. Fake questions are those ones that sound like have you thought of or did you try or what about , none of which are questions at all, it’s just advice with a question mark attached on the end.
Brandon: If you don’t mind, I’d love to talk about some of the essential questions. I don’t want to go over all of them because I think people should absolutely read the book.
Michael: Just teasing them. 7 essential questions, two of which we may reveal to you now!
Brandon: We may reveal them right now! One of which I wanted to talk about, the kickstart question.
Michael: Good.
Brandon: This one, I loved it. To me, it was profound. It’s so simple. Tell listeners how they can jumpstart a conversation the right way, using that?
Michael: I will, but let me ask you, what is it about it that makes you go “oh I love this question!” What kind of grabbed you about it?
Brandon: It’s because I think, naturally, we are jumping into conversations without asking a question.
Michael: Right.
Brandon: And we do it the wrong way. I think by simply asking, what’s on your mind?
Michael: I like that.
Brandon: It’s incredible.
Michael: So that’s the kickstart question, you heard Brandon just say it, what’s on your mind? And his point is spot on, when we get into conversation, quite often we are coming with an agenda, either explicitly or implicitly about what this conversation’s going to be about. So already you’re in control, already you’re trying to shape the direction it goes, and that’s true whether it’s a formal kind of one-to-one meeting or a team meeting or a kind of informal interaction. You’re like, ok, let’s get into it. And what’s on your mind is a powerful way to start a conversation because the first thing it does is it asks the other person to make the choice. So it gives them autonomy. One of the things that we talked about in the book in more detail was the neuroscience of engagement. How do you keep people engaged? And one of the four key drivers of that is a sense of autonomy. You may have come across autonomy as well if you’ve read the Dan Pink book on drive where he talks about purpose, mastery, and autonomy as well.
So that’s a powerful act. And that’s what all these questions do – you trust the other person to start figuring out the answer. But you’re not saying to them, just tell me anything you want! You’re saying of all the things that are going on, what’s most exciting or most worrying or most consuming or most overwhelming? What’s waking you up at 4 o’clock in the morning? Let’s start talking about something that matters.
Because here’s the foundational belief we have around this thing about coaching for busy folks like the folks listening to this podcast. The first is, we’re not looking to add anything to your current workload, because heaven knows you’re too busy to have anything added to what you’re already doing. What we’re looking to do is transforming the interactions you already have with the people with the people you work with. Your direct reports, your peers, your boss, your customers, your clients, your vendors, all of these people, you can use these skills.
The second piece, which Brandon’s already mentioned, is about coaching in 10 minutes or less. If you can’t do it 10 minutes, you don’t have time. That means you have to know how to get to the real meat of the conversation fast and that’s what I think you like about what’s on your mind, Brandon, because it just accelerates the conversation into the stuff that really matters.
Brandon: I think that’s such a great point, I think that’s why I did like it, because how often do we start conversations – small talk, slowly building it up, and then by the hour-long one-on-one we’ve had, the end of the one-on-one was the best because you finally built up.
Michael: It’s almost like, we’ve got four minutes left, what should we talk about? Well here’s the thing. Oh my god, that’s the thing? Oh no, time’s up, sorry, I’ll see you again in a month. No!
Brandon: You make an amazing analogy later in the chapter about James Bond movies and other action movies in general always start out with action—with someone jumping off a cliff or a car exploding. I’m just thinking of all those amazing action movies and the reason why we get hooked is it starts off immediately with action.
Michael: Exactly, you don’t have any kind of a five-minute setting shot of rolling fields. Suddenly James Bond is beating the hell out of somebody or leaping off a cliff or driving a car or something. And you’re like, whoa! You want that kind of same, almost an adrenaline rush, at the start of your conversations. Okay, good, we’re here, let’s not beat around the bush. Of all the things we could talk about, what’s on your mind? Or a variation – okay, you’ve got a lot on your mind, where should we start? Same sort of thing which is like, I trust you, point me to the thing that’s going to be the most useful for us to talk about right now.
Brandon: Let’s talk about the focus question. And I love this because you sort of have, at least from the notes that I took, you’ve sort of broken down the focus of this question into a couple different ways you could phrase it: what’s the challenge? What’s the real challenge? You just sort of built upon what most people may ask as a question, but talk about that and why that was your focus question.
Michael: Okay, so the pain point, if you want to use that language, and why the focus question matters, is that in most organizations. People are working very hard to solve the wrong problems because they thought that the first things that show up are the real things, the first challenge is the real challenge. Sometimes it is, but not very often. So what’s really powerful about the focus question is it spends a little bit more time trying to get clear on what the real challenge is so that when you do move to action and advice you’re fixing the real thing not the first thing.
And just as Brandon said, the way we phrase the focus question is this: What’s the real challenge here for you? And it is useful to see how this builds up, because you could just ask somebody so what’s the challenge here? And you’re going to get a response, but it’s probably going to be a bit topline and a bit superficial and a bit kind of this is just the first thing that popped into my mind.
You could ask, what’s the real challenge here? And you can feel already that there’s a different quality to that question, right? Now they kind of give you the first thing to think of, they’ve got to think about, they’ve got to make a decision of all the stuff that’s going on, what’s the real challenge? But I think the magic happens when you ask what’s the real challenge here for you? That for you is kind of the magic juice here, because what that does is take the spotlight away from the challenge onto the person who’s dealing with the challenge.
So, you know, I’m talking to Brandon about his podcast and how to make it better. I go, Ok Brandon, what’s the challenge with your podcast? Oh, well, I don’t have as many people listening to it as I was hoping. Okay, Brandon, what’s the real challenge with your podcast? You know, it’s a really competitive marketplace and I’m just one of many people talking to small businesses about HR stuff. Ok. Brandon, what’s the real challenge here for you? You know what, I love doing the interviews, but I’m just less confident about the whole marketing thing and I’m a bit anxious about should I invest in the marketing thing or should I just build it and hopefully they will come.
And can you see immediately how that focus of the conversation has shifted? And by asking what’s the real challenge here for you, now Brandon’s solving the challenge but he’s also growing himself and his own awareness and his own insight about what’s going on and about himself as well.
And Brandon I apologize because I just made all that stuff up about your podcast!
Brandon: You’re spot on! [laughing] Just kidding.
Michael: Right, I can see, Brandon, because the video’s on and he’s crying at the moment! He’s put his thing on mute so you can’t hear the tears trickling onto the microphone.
Brandon: So glad I have a box of tissues right next to me.
Michael: I’m Box of Crayons, you’re box of tissues, it’s perfect.
Brandon: I love it. So there’s five other questions that are within the book, I definitely encourage people to go read it. I wanted to ask you, though, Michael, with these questions, can you ask these when you’re not in person? Because it does seem like these would be better face-to-face, but with the virtual world we have now, can you ask it over email? Skype?
Michael: Oh yeah. Let me tell you a thing I know plagues a bunch of people, it’ll be true for some people listening in for sure. You get that email, it’s that email, you know that long, rambly email you get from somebody? And you’re like, ugh. You can’t just scan it, because it’s too dense or too many paragraphs. So you do scan it once and you can’t quite understand it so you then read it again more thoroughly and you’re starting to see more what it’s about and you read it one more time and you’re like, ok, I think I’ve got this. And then you type at the top, Ok, see my answers below. And then after each paragraph you start inserting your thoughts, your opinions, your advice, your ideas around that. And it takes you 20 minutes to deal with this singular email that’s popped into your inbox and it slows you down, it frustrates you, and kind of sucks you into saving the person, fixing the solution.
Here’s a suggestion about how to do things differently, I’m going to give you two suggestions. You go, Hey Brandon. Thanks for the long email, wow – lots going on here I know. Let me ask you, out of all of this stuff, what’s the real challenge here for you? Send.
Brandon: Boom.
Michael: Exactly! And this is what happens to Brandon when he gets that email back. He goes, Oh man. Have you been on a training course? Have you read a book recently? What is this? What juju magic is this? But the second time you do it or the third time he’s going to get the understanding that he can’t get you to do his work for him, he has to help figure out what the real challenge is.
You know, a variation on this, and this comes from question #4, 5 in the book, the lazy question. And it sounds like this – Hey Brandon! Wow, thanks for the email. Lot’s going on here, before I jump in, just out of curiosity, what exactly do you want from me? Send.
Because what you’re doing otherwise, potentially, is you’re just making up a whole lot of stuff about what you think they need and you’re spending a lot of time giving it to them. And the truth is, you don’t really know. Particularly with those annoying people who send you something and then just go, Thoughts? It’s like – ugh, don’t respond to that! They don’t want your thoughts, they want you to save them in some way. Go, Look, I’ve got some thoughts, but I’m really curious – what exactly do you think the real challenge is, and what exactly do you want from me? Or, how exactly can I help? Send.
And I promise you, it’s going to save you hours if you’re a person who gets emails like that.
Brandon: Well, I don’t know if I can speak for the other listeners, but that is one habit I’m going to change! Thoughts? That is something I definitely do!
Michael: I love that you’re picking that up, because if you’re that person who sends the long email with Thoughts? on the end of it, I think it’s slightly lazy and disrespectful. Not lazy in a good way.
Brandon: It is.
Michael: If you’ve got a request from somebody, ask them for it. What exactly do you want? And that’s actually what we call the foundation question. We’re giving a lot of these questions away now, Brandon. This is the foundation question, number 4 in the book, right at the heart. And it’s foundational because it’s so powerful, which is this: when things get a bit discombobulated, when you kind of get sucked into behavior that’s not that useful, when you’re feeling frustrated or angry or sad or irritated, ask yourself what do I want? That’s going to tell you something immediately. Ask them, what do they want?
So when you get that email from Brandon and he goes, thoughts? You go, Hey Brandon, I do have some thoughts, but I’m just curious – what exactly do you want from me here? Just put the work back to him to make a more specific request.
Brandon: What I love about these questions is it gets people thinking. It helps them figure it out for themselves versus just you giving them the answer. And that’s why when I read the book I was like, wow, this could work! This could really work. So I started integrating some of those into my normal communication and it really gets people thinking for themselves. That’s awesome.
So when people read this book, what’s a common thing that you hear from them?
Michael: Apart from Michael, how are you so impossibly handsome in your author photo? Obviously, that a lot. But the kind of feedback that I really love hearing from people is that they laughed a lot reading the book. They laughed out loud more than once.
Brandon: I did too!
Michael: Because I do have a thing about business books and self-help books being a bit too kind of pompous and serious and look how smart I am and look how humorless I am at the same time. One of the things that I’ve really tried to inject into the book is a sense of lightness and enjoyment. So you’re not only getting something practical, but it’s actually an enjoyable read. You actually have a laugh out of it. One of my favorite authors is a guy called Bill Bryson. He’s written travel books.
Brandon: A Short History of Nearly Everything, right?
Michael: A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of my all-time favorite books!
Brandon: I just finished that about 4 or 5 months ago, great book.
Michael: Oh, it’s mind blowing, isn’t it? He takes science and his point is, you know, science is amazing and most of us know nothing about it. And he just makes it magically accessible and hilarious at the same time. So I’m like, I’d love to be the Bill Bryson of business books. Right? Because he’s sold 8 trillion books! Mainly because he’s a really funny writer at the same time.
Brandon: So I wanted to ask you something that’s not related to the Coaching Habit. I was on your website and you have a page dedicated to your virtual bookshelf, basically. What are a couple of those books you’d recommend to visitors that really tie in with the subject matter and the coaching habit that you think people absolutely if they haven’t read it yet they need to? Because about half those books I have read on that page and I think you’re spot on with a lot of those.
Michael: Let me ask you this, I’ll give you my answer but before I do, what’s one of the books that you saw on that page that you’d go, Oh, if you like Michael’s book on The Coaching Habit, here’s a connected book that you like that you would recommend to the folks listening in.
Brandon: I’m trying to remember exactly which ones were on there.
Michael: While he’s working on that, just as an aside, this is what it means to be a lazy coach. See what I did there? I was like, that’s a great question and I’m going to give you an answer, but before I give you my answer tell me what your first thoughts are?
Brandon: You just spun it back around on me.
Michael: And Brandon’s the host of this podcast! But suddenly the tables have been turned! Now he’s sweating it out trying to remember names of books and I get to look smart whilst he’s doing all the work. And that’s the benefit you’re getting from being more coach-like around that. So a little coaching role modeling there.
Brandon: I like that.
Michael: But I’m really curious, was there a book that you can bring to mind? I know I’ve put you on the spot.
Brandon: Yeah, I’m trying to remember all that were on there, hang on one sec.
Michael: Even if it’s not on the list, just a book that you’re going, this kind of reminds me of this book a little bit.
While you’re thinking, there’s a couple of books that I like. One is by a guy called Roger Martin, he’s a fellow Canadian. And he wrote a book called Playing to Win with A.G. Lafley who’s the CEO of Proctor & Gamble. And for my money it’s one of the best books on strategic thinking that there is. And what I love about it is it’s at its heart five questions. Like, here are the five strategic questions. And when you get them all lined up, then you have a powerful strategy. And what’s also great about those questions is that they’re scalable. They actually work if you’re an individual, if you’re on a team, if you’re running a small business, if you’re at a business unit of a bigger company, if you’re running a big company, they scale up or down to meet you at the scale you’re playing at. Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win, really excellent book on strategy.
Brandon: So I’m looking at your bookshelf now and it’s not necessarily tied to The Coaching Habit, but the way your book’s framed, it’s a different way to look at the world, to look at coaching. I read Reinventing Organizations and it was a totally different way to look at business.
Michael: Nice, yep.
Brandon: And the way they’re structured. Even though it’s not necessarily tied to coaching, it has everything to do with business and the way we’re looking at things and interacting with people differently.
Michael: I’ll tell you the connection I have there, because Reinventing Organizations is by a guy called Frederic Laloux. Most books on change in organizations are just a whole lot of bollocks because it’s just somebody trying to make stuff up. What I love about his stuff is he acknowledges the complexity of most organizational systems, of all organizational systems. He goes, you can’t just do this linear change process and think that’s going to work. Life is complex. You have to understand complexity to actually figure out change. And I would try to make the connection to say that when you ask questions, when you become more coach-like, you’re also honoring the complexity of the person, the complexity of the situation, to help them figure out a path through all of that.
Brandon: Michael, it’s been fun having you on the podcast. I want to wrap up because I know we’re going a bit long, but where can people buy The Coaching Habit?
Michael: Well, you can buy it hopefully in most bookstores, certainly at Amazon and the online stuff. A place to go to is probably thecoachinghabit.com. It’s a little hub for the book, and even if you don’t buy the book, and you don’t have to at all, there’s a ton of free resources on that website, from videos to downloads to the bookshelf, all sorts of different things. So whether or not you’re interested in the book, and I hope some of you are, you can certainly go there.
And I’m just going to ask you a bold-faced request, Brandon, which is this: if you do happen to buy a copy of the book, and of course I’d love it if you did, I have an outrageous goal which is by March 1st, 2017 which is the one year birthday of the book, to have 1,000 reviews on Amazon. Now I have no idea how to make this happen other than to do exactly what I’m doing now which is just to shamelessly ask people. If you pick up the book and you like it enough, remembering to give the book on Amazon would be really appreciated.
Brandon: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with shameless when you’re creating value in the world.
Michael: Thank you.
Brandon: Michael, we appreciate you joining the podcast, it’s been a lot of fun.
Michael: Brandon, it’s been a pleasure! Thanks very much.