Chapter 9

Avoiding Brain Drain

Language in cultures and groups: The needs required to create not merely individual adeptness in these areas, but entire cultures of intelligent inquiry and profit, sharing language and listening that create dramatic organizational and market advantage.

Decreasing Inquiry Threat and Interrogations

Leadership success isn’t about power or control or dominance. These misguided attributes are elements that can create an atmosphere of coercion and defensiveness. Leadership success is how you relate to others. It’s your ability to create, build, and maintain communications and relationships that influence others to achieve the desired outcomes and results. Your content and your delivery must be conducive to creating this productive environment.

For every hagiography written about Steve Jobs or Donald Trump or Elon Musk or Tony Hsieh, there are tens of thousands of superb leaders using influence through intelligent language to maximize their organizations’ productivity and profit.*

“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” is a common phrase that suggests that the words you use aren’t as important as the packaging or the delivery. When it comes to effective communications and relationships, you need to be cognizant of what you are saying and how you are saying it (They go hand in hand, they are not mutually exclusive.) Your verbiage (the actual words you use) combined with your delivery will determine whether your inquiry is perceived as an invitation to a conversation or as a threat or interrogation. Creating a fight or flight response in others creates an immediate brain drain for the topic at hand and diverts the intent and purpose of the conversation (unless, of course, your intent is to threaten or interrogate!).

Considerations and techniques for decreasing inquiry threat and interrogation are as follows:

• The question “Why?”: We have encouraged and guided you to proactively tell individuals and groups the why of any situation, regardless of whether they ask or not. However, when asking others why, you need to be cautious of how you frame your questions and the tone of voice you use. Asking why can put people on the defense. Your question, “Why did you do that?” can come across with a tone of voice that suggests, “What in the hell were you thinking???” There are a variety of neutral ways to ask “Why?” without ever using the word why, such as “What influenced your decision?” If you are on the receiving end of the why question, you can respond with some version of “Why do you ask?” And: “It would be helpful if I had a better understanding of what you’re looking for.” This positions the other person to frame why they are asking why before you respond, so you have a better understanding of purpose of the question asked of you. Of course, you need to respond in an “inquisitive and appropriate” manner with some relevance, that isn’t defensive or challenging.
• Accompany your inquiry with your reason for asking: Don’t expect others to know the reason(s) you are asking them questions. If they have to second-guess your intent, it creates an emotional distraction. Be forthcoming with the purpose of the inquiry to eliminate the perception of or the anticipation of threat.
• Use rhetorical permission questions accompanied by a value statement: Precede the inquiry by asking (not telling) if you can ask a few questions. And, include the reason or the value of the conversation. Example: “If I could ask you a few questions about the project, our discussion will help me determine how we need to handle XYZ.” Such preparatory questions (May I ask you…?) are, of course, rhetorical, so we call them rhetorical permissions.
• Tone of voice, volume, inflection, rate of speech, facial expression, eye contact, body language: Each of these verbal and nonverbal characteristics contribute to how you say things and how your audience interprets your inquiry. If you’re spouting questions like an erupting Mount Vesuvius, others will believe they are in the midst of an interrogation (with a potential accusation soon to follow). On the other hand, if you’re perceived as being aloof, unapproachable, and remote, it may interfere with others being responsive to you and engaged with you. It can create a tentativeness that is as detrimental as creating a defensive environment. Neither scenario is where you want to be.

To put a new twist on an old phrase, “It’s what you ask (content), and how you ask it (context).”

Many years ago, a sociologist and psychologist by the name of Albert Mehrabian conducted some fascinating studies of people standing in lines and at social functions to see if they would allow someone in front of them or to be interrupted by others. He found that one’s body language (e.g., a smile) raised the likelihood quite dramatically.

Unfortunately, many people have misinterpreted the study (especially professional speakers) to believe that most learning and rapport coming from speech is actually the nonverbal. This isn’t remotely true. Words are the influencers, and nonverbal behavior is simply an augmentation when communicating.

Thus, when you are inquiring or questioning, it’s important to keep your nonverbal behavior positive (e.g., don’t loom over others), but it’s absolutely vital to use the right language to find the information you seek.

Preventing the Response Stall

When you ask a question (or make a statement in a dialog), you expect a direct response. Sometimes you get one and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you get a response stall. A stall can come in many forms, including a complete lack of any type of response at all. Here are a variety of stall techniques, some of which are short-term nuances and others are intentionally meant to stall next steps:

• No response at all (known as the stonewall)
• Repeating the very question you just asked in an inquisitive manner
• Responding with a question to your question
• Responding with a tangential or disparate comment (to which you would love to reply, “Interesting, but irrelevant.”)
• Responding with an excuse, obstacle, or obscure reason as to why the process can’t move forward (This is considered a stall objection or a smoke screen objection as we discussed in Chapter 6.)

In the case of what may appear to be a stall, you have no idea if:

• They didn’t hear you (the words you said).
• They heard you (the words), but they didn’t understand the questions or comment.
• They heard you, they understood you, and they either don’t buy in or are put off by your question or comment and they are responding with a stall technique.

Note: The last situation above is the only actual stall as we’re referencing it here. The other two situations warrant repeating or reframing. However, not getting past the first two situations (hearing and understanding) can create a legitimate impasse, not to mention significant confusion. You must determine which of the above is the case in order to know where to go next.

• If they didn’t hear you, the solution is to restate the message.
• If they don’t understand, you need to reframe the message; state the same meaning in another way.
• If they are objecting or stalling, deal with it.

The above may seem elementary, yet here’s what can happen in the real world. If they don’t understand or don’t agree and instead you think they didn’t hear you, you’ll merely repeat your message louder and slower, which is guaranteed to come across as condescending or sarcastic. On the other hand, if they didn’t hear or understand and you treat it as a stall, they’re still a beat or two behind you and you’re on the wrong track. In the moment, you need to be able to analyze and determine which situation you’re dealing with.

When it comes to an actual response stall, ideally, you want to prevent it, which we addressed with the variety of techniques we’ve discussed in the previous eight chapters. Next best case is to overcome the stall (contingent action).

A stall can happen in any type of dialog, no matter how formal or informal in nature. The following situations are common examples of where, if you don’t prevent it, you may need to coach or prompt someone through a response stall to keep the dialog moving forward.

• Job Interview: This dialog is the epitome of you asking a series of questions (or explaining expectations) while expecting the candidate to be forthcoming with information to determine if there’s a match. If a candidate doesn’t respond to any given question, it’s up to you to pull the information from them. Which means, don’t skip a question and move on just because the candidate is slow or reluctant to respond. Continue to probe. If the candidate says they haven’t previously experienced what you’re asking, try reframing the question in a way that they can relate to it. For example, if you’re exploring leadership skills and success, they may not have been in a paid position with the title of leadership role, but they may have been in a nonpaid position that required particular leadership skills (volunteer role, association, board of directors, affiliates, and so on).
• Tough buyer: A stall is an extremely common objection in a traditional seller–buyer dialog regarding the purchase of products or services. It also applies when you are selling an idea or game plan internally or externally. The stall is a reason why they won’t go forward at this time, but it is seldom the true objection. Stall objections can be variations on a theme of, “I need to talk with my business partner,” “It’s an interesting proposition, but now’s not a good time for us,” “We don’t have the budget/resources/time allocated for this.” If these are merely stall techniques (and not the true objection), attempting to overcome these is fruitless, as you’re still left with the true objection. The technique to address this type of stall is to ultimately ask, “If it weren’t for this situation (whatever they are citing), would you be willing to move forward on this?” Prior to the ultimate question, you may also be able to push through the stall with rhetorical questions or comments. For example, with the stall of “Now is not the right time,” you might respond with, “If not now, when?” or “There’s never a perfect time.”
• Reporter Questioning a Politician: The politicians’ stall is the faux stall. We’ve all seen it and heard it in action. The politician is asked a question and responds immediately without hesitation (and, at least, in their own minds, they respond very eloquently). However, they have not answered what was asked. The politician is either diverting the question they were asked or they are answering the question they want to be asked. They morph the conversation into their agenda, not the reporter’s agenda and not the public’s agenda. A savvy reporter will call them on it and restate the question. Even that doesn’t mean the question will be answered as asked. One does not have to be a politician to mimic the politician’s faux stall. Recognize it when it happens in response to your questions. Redirect to keep the focus on the point at hand.

A stall in aviation can be fatal. When a plane ascends too quickly at too sharp an angle, the appropriate lift beneath the wings diminishes and the nose of the plane drops. Unless the pilot recognizes the condition immediately and pulls the plane out of the stall by taking exactly the right steps at the right time, it’s a guaranteed death spiral. Your role is to ask the right questions (or make the right statements) at the right time and ensure the responses are relevant in context, even if it means restating or reframing, in order to prevent or overcome the stall. Your role is to propel the formal and informal business conversations forward (lift and thrust in aviation) in order to move the business forward. Don’t let unmanaged response stalls result in the inevitable crash and burn of that very progress.

Just as an airplane has a stall speed at which it is no longer able to keep itself in the air, we all have linguistic stall speeds at which point we’re no longer able to keep a conversation alive or intent clear. This happens to the rich and the poor, the introvert and the extrovert, the celebrity and the hoi polloi:

• Remember when Katie Couric famously asked Sarah Palin during the election race what reading she did to acquire news and information? Nothing of any interest ensued, a complete stall. Yet, anyone could have easily named The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times if they wanted to fabricate believable sources. But Ms. Palin, astoundingly, couldn’t even tell that white lie. (And she may well have been reading those newspapers.)
• The finalists in almost any beauty pageant face interview questions. The flubs, silences, and complete mishmash of facts are cannon fodder for hundreds of YouTube videos. Yet these are women accustomed to such questions from prior contests and preliminary qualifying. But they stall on a softball question such as “How should we combat world hunger?”†
• In political debates and press interviews, we observe politicians quite accustomed to this scrutiny fall apart. Bill Clinton actually managed to blurt out, “It depends what ‘is’ is.” Various others have stared blankly when asked about foreign policy, the Federal Reserve, or the Constitution.
• In your business, you’ve seen people at meetings, even prepared for a presentation, who look as though they want to dive under the table when asked a simple question such as “What are the risks involved?” or “Who else is doing this?”

You can prevent defaulting to a stall in your own responses by knowing your topic or discussion points very well. You should have examples and metaphors to back them up and give them relevancy.

You can prevent your own stall by knowing who else is present and what they are likely to ask or be most concerned about. President Obama, for a long time, was going to be asked about health care, no matter what. Are you going to be asked about sales, or product commercialization, or cash available, or absenteeism?

You can prevent the stall by controlling your nerves. Choking is not being able to do what you know needs to be done. Panic is forgetting what needs to be done. Stalls are caused by choking, when nervousness and stress confuse your rational responses (as in Sarah Palin’s case). Be rested, be early, be prepared.

To mitigate the effects of a stall, learn this kind of profitable language:

• “I’ve just drawn the kind of blank where I forget my own name. Could you repeat that question?”
• “I don’t want to risk a glib but incorrect response, can you give me some time to consider your point?”
• “Apologies, I was distracted, my fault. Can you say that again?”
• “Can we get back to that, there’s something I need to ask you first?”

One of the causes of stalling—which can kill a sales call, job interview, or attempt at persuasion—is to fall prey to self-limiting beliefs.

Exterminating Self-Limiting Beliefs

Self-limiting beliefs become the bane of individuals and, collectively, their organizations. Their individual and cumulative nature makes an organization weak and vulnerable. They become the internal enemy of innovation and progress. They promote a synthetically heightened aversion to risk. Ultimately, self-limiting beliefs create a prevailing culture of self-fulfilling prophecies of what can’t be accomplished or achieved, instead of what can be.

What are self-limiting beliefs? How do you recognize these undermining beliefs in yourself, in others, and within your culture? How do you exterminate them? And, how do you prevent new self-limiting beliefs from taking hold? Let’s explore each of these.

What are self-limiting beliefs: Remember the phrase, “perception is reality?” What you perceive in your own observations becomes your own reality. Here’s another facet of that concept, “Your beliefs are your reality.” What you believe, especially about yourself, becomes your reality. Whether your beliefs are self-promoting or self-limiting, they are your truth. Your beliefs consciously and unconsciously inform and drive your behavior. For better or for worse, your beliefs about yourself are your truth and they become the motherboard of your personal operating system.

Self-limiting beliefs are self-imposed. They’re not what others think about you (although, that may influence how you see yourself, if you allow it). Your self-limiting beliefs define who and what you are (or are not), in your own eyes. The negative aspects of self-limiting beliefs are focused on experiences from the past (recent or ancient history) and are carried into current times:

• Defining oneself by what one cannot do or be
• Comparisons and negative self-ratings of attributes and abilities
• Placing blame for circumstances that are imposed
• Being a victim of the environment
• Minimized self-worth and self esteem

How do you recognize self-limiting beliefs? There are patterns of thinking, communicating, and behavior that demonstrate the existence and manifestation of self-limiting beliefs.

Think about the times you’ve walked into a business meeting convinced that your proposal won’t be accepted. Or getting into an athletic contest where you’re sure you’re outmatched by your counterparts. Or think of the times you were shocked that you prevailed, won, or succeeded.

You can recognize self-limiting beliefs by their manifestation of certainty of lack of success or surprise at actual success. You have mentally prepared for the negative, and if it’s not fulfilled, then the positive astounds you.

How do you exterminate self-limiting beliefs? If beliefs are reality, and those very beliefs are self-limiting, then it’s your role to distort that reality, just as Steve Jobs did (as discussed in Chapter 7). Your mission is to create new, nonlimiting beliefs, which ultimately create a new reality. The limiting beliefs don’t just magically go away. They need to be replaced with a new way of thinking or believing.

• Whether focusing on yourself or others, it’s imperative that you recognize and capitalize on strengths. Too much time, effort, and angst is spent on weaknesses that are irrelevant to the circumstances. (The extreme of this is people who wear their weaknesses as a badge of honor as to why things can’t happen.) The key is to maximize strengths and minimize weaknesses.
• Self-limiting beliefs can be a symptom of a fear of failure or of success. Counteracting the fear counteracts the self-limiting belief and vice versa.

Find the cause of the fear, and then deal with it rationally:

I fear public speaking.

Cause: I’m afraid someone in the audience will make fun of me.

Is that likely? Of course not, people want to see a success in terms on investing their time, and they’ll want me to be successful and support me.

• Throw the baggage off the train. For years, counselors and therapists have advised clients that they need to drop the baggage they’ve been carrying to free themselves of the negative, nonproductive load they’ve been hauling around. If you’re on the train, dropping the baggage merely releases the baggage from your grip. Interestingly enough, the baggage still shows up at your destination right beside you! So, the appropriate action is to throw the baggage off the train in order to truly leave it behind as you move forward.

How do you prevent new self-limiting beliefs from taking hold? Be conscious of how feedback influences your own self-talk, self-image, and confidence. Be selective in accepting and believing the feedback offered to you. Feedback is either solicited or unsolicited. Solicited feedback is sought and invited. It can be situational, meaning you request it for a specific event, occurrence, or behavior. Or you can give someone blanket permission to proactively provide feedback at any time. With solicited feedback, it’s essential to engage people you trust to give you feedback.

Solicited feedback from those you trust is always in your own best interest. On the other hand, unsolicited feedback is imposed on you and is often someone else’s agenda that is focused on you. Unsolicited feedback can be the sustenance and stimulant for self-limiting beliefs. Don’t let that happen.

Building a Culture of Intelligent Inquiry

The Question is the AnswerSM. This is the foundation for building a culture of intelligent inquiry. Building this culture begins with you. It’s your role to create, participate in, and model intelligent inquiry (versus creating a culture of inquiry that can span the spectrum from feeble questioning to an inquisition to an autocratic parental-type dominance). It’s your role to be consistent in this approach in order to create a productive culture. (Remember, beliefs influence attitudes, which are manifest in behaviors. Instilling beliefs is what creates the culture.)

By definition, intelligent inquiry is an ongoing process that continually seeks an expansion of knowledge with an emphasis upon keeping an open mind concerning alternative theory. Sounds complicated? It’s not. It’s a matter of asking the right questions at the right time.

What beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors do you need to model and instill in order to create a culture of intelligent inquiry? The following are integral components:

• Inquiry is appropriate (and expected) at all levels of an organization. It’s not merely a leader’s or executive’s right. It must be an equal opportunity regardless of position or title, without it being viewed as an inappropriate challenge of others.
• Avoid the intentional or unintentional belief that you expect a sycophantic culture. Lauding obsequious answers is counterproductive to a culture of inquiry.
• Encourage everyone in the organization to ask “Why?” so the value of processes or decisions never goes unspoken, or is not understood, or, worse yet, misunderstood.
• Think in reverse. When you want to tell, think in terms of what is the unasked question (yours or theirs) that prompts or generates the very response you are about to state. “Why is she asking that?” is an excellent internal question.
• In problem solving, encourage people to believe that it’s effective and expected to ask questions to determine cause in order to prevent anyone from prematurely jumping to solutions. Managers are famous for the mantra, “If you’re bringing me a problem, bring me a solution.” The mantra needs to be, “If you’re bringing me a problem, come to me with the possible and probable cause(s).” Instead of prematurely asking, “What do you think is the solution?” first ask “What do you think is the cause?” (Reminder, see Chapter 4, Critical Questioning Skills and Solving Problem, for the problem-solving process and related questions.)
• Be strategic in what you are asking and how to ask (versus asking haphazardly just for the sake of asking). Realize that questions can be focused on the past, present, or future. They can be focused on fact, opinion, or speculation.
• The Socratic method in its purest form is asking exploratory questions in which there may not be one right answer. It’s meant to stimulate discussion and debate. That very method has morphed into a teaching method where the instructor asks questions in order for the audience to experience and learn. It’s meant to promote logic and critical thinking. If you only ask questions in which there is a right answer, you may be creating an effective learning environment. However, be aware, you cannot create a culture of intelligent inquiry solely via this method. You run the risk of being perceived as merely testing people to determine if they know the right answer. The Socratic inquiry is merely one tool in creating a culture of intelligent inquiry, not the only tool.
• Asking the right question at the right time creates an environment of engagement. Questions create active participation. Consistently telling or directing, with the absence of questions, is a passive environment.

How do you know when this very culture you are creating and instilling is actually taking hold?

Here are some hallmarks of a culture of intelligent inquiry:

• People don’t jump to cause. They don’t say, “This is another instance of …” but rather immediately seek to find answers, not blame.
• Validation and verification are naturally sought. “Here’s the issue, here are optional effective responses, and here’s how I know this.”
• Due diligence is performed on new initiatives and projects, as if the organization were buying or acquiring or merging. Due diligence becomes a process, not an erratic undertaking.
• Feedback, alternative views, and healthy debate are encouraged. No one believes that self-editing is required before voicing an opinion.
• The organization’s self-interest is represented in the opinions and ideas expressed. Fiefdoms and silos are disassembled and there is no more fertile ground for them. All top executives see themselves as functional heads (e.g., sales or R&D) but also as corporate officers.

Inquiry, in and of itself, can be unproductively undermining or it can be productively healthy. Intelligent inquiry is with the intent of being productive and positive for all involved. Even when it seems to be challenging or uncomfortable (for you and for the audience), it should always be productively healthy. The following are additional tips in creating a healthy culture of intelligent inquiry:

• Don’t always take responses at face value as to what you think the other person may say or what they may mean. It’s effective to continue to probe (drill down) by asking additional clarifying questions such as:

  Tell me more …

  What brings you to that conclusion?

  If that weren’t a factor, what would happen?

  What would cause this to fail?

  What are the exceptions to this situation?

  What if …?

  How will we know if … ?

  How could we … ?

Inquiry is one aspect of success. At some point, inquiry must lead to a conclusion, a decision, an action. But you’ll find that it does so more efficaciously than not utilizing it and produces greater harmony and consensus, which are important by-products.

Building a culture of intelligent inquiry is one element of exercising and promoting productivity in an organization. It’s not productivity in terms of the cliché harder, faster, more. It’s a type of productivity that’s not easily quantifiable on its own, and yet it propels individuals and organizations to success in a variety of ways. A culture of intelligent inquiry is the antithesis of individual and collective brain drain.