Introduction  00:03

You need to make a decision but don’t want to make a mistake. For decades, Dr. Constance Dierickx has helped leaders make wise decisions. Now, she’s sharing how to see what others don’t and make great decisions when it matters most. So come on in and have a seat. It’s time for your appointment with The Decision Doctor.

Constance Dierickx  00:30

Hi, I’m Constance Dierickx, and welcome to my podcast. I am thrilled to share with you my conversation with Michael Bungay Stanier. MBS, as he’s known, was recently awarded the Thinkers50 Marshall Goldsmith Award for Coaching & Mentoring. MBS is a delightful amalgam of profound intellect, animated curiosity, and a lovely sense of humor. His most recent book is How to Work with (Almost) Anyone. Now, for those of you who may get a little bit squirmy hearing that, you will be very relieved to know that he acknowledges some relationships will never be more than polite. An earlier book, one I also love, is The Advice Trap. His pragmatism, cut-to-the-chase style, and nearly unerring way of knowing the right chase to cut to are on full display in his TEDTalk How to Tame Your Advice Monster. It is poignant, funny, and best of all, wise. Hello, Michael. I am so excited to see you on the screen and to have you join my podcast.

Michael Bungay Stanier  01:50

Nice to be here.

Constance Dierickx  01:50

Thank you.

Michael Bungay Stanier  01:51

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I know we’ve had this in the books for a while. So it’s nice to get here and record and you and me have a great conversation.

Constance Dierickx  01:59

Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. A conversation is always so fun, especially with you because I find your writing to be such a delicious combination of nuance and pragmatism, but you do not sacrifice nuance on the altar of pragmatism.

Michael Bungay Stanier  02:20

That’s a nice compliment. Thank you. I do have a broad philosophy. It comes from a quote, which is like “trying to find simplicity on the other side of complexity.” So taking tricky and slightly obscure and slightly theoretical things like coaching or psychological safety and going, “How do I make this feel doable to a normal person?” So that’s my goal, for sure.

Constance Dierickx  02:46

Yes, yes. Well, you do it so well. And in the simplifying, though, you don’t fall victim to or lead your reader or listener to oversimplify and falsely dichotomize, which is the enemy of synthesis, which is a favorite concept. So I noticed in one of your books, you had some opposites that you recommended that the reader look at. I think it’s in your latest book, which is How to Work with (Almost) Anyone. The “almost” on the title page looks like, oh, I guess I should put almost in there. Not to be too bold. But I love that you encourage the listener to be a little bit more nuanced in that and I suspect —

Michael Bungay Stanier  03:38

We are messy, interesting, complicated, confusing, contradictory people. So I’m a bit allergic to — the gurus are like, “seven steps to the thing.” And like, I don’t know about you, but it’s never seven steps for me. It’s more like 107 and half of them are going backwards and some are going sideways, and there’s a couple of big leaps and the universe is chaotic. We are chaotic. So we have this hunger for simplification, and that can be really powerful. But if you take it too far, you can get something that is a bland, not very useful truism.

Constance Dierickx  04:17

Yeah, yeah, bromides. I suspect that this thinking that you express so well in writing is one of the underlying factors in you receiving a recent award from Thinkers50 Marshall Goldsmith, the Coaching and Mentoring Award. For the listener who may not know about Thinkers50 or may have missed Marshall Goldsmith, who would those people be? This is a very big deal. You have many colleagues in MG100, myself included, who are just delighted for you. I’m interested, what does it feel like to be so honored?

Michael Bungay Stanier  05:00

This is the third time the award has been awarded. I’ve been on the shortlist all three times. I wasn’t expecting to be on the shortlist this time. So I was quite surprised to get put on it. I think they’re just putting me on to make me feel good about myself. I wasn’t really expecting to win. In the 10 minutes leading up to the award, I was like, I would actually quite like to win more than I thought I would. I’m not sure how it feels, Constance. I am much more interested in the impact of my work that I don’t really know about. The language I use to talk about the goals I have for myself, well, the big goal is to infect a billion people with the possibility virus. I came up with that 20 years ago before we had COVID. It was when having an impossibility virus felt as a useful metaphor, rather than some weird pandemic metaphor. But the idea is to encourage people to have the courage and confidence to make the braver choice. That’s, for me, what the possibility virus is about. But the metaphor of a virus works because it, say, decenters me as the guru, the person, and it’s about, how do I get ideas out in the world so they spread. There is a part of me that loves the spotlight and getting an award. I was really chuffed to be recognized. But it doesn’t change a lot in terms of how I think about myself or how I think about the work, which is, this is lovely but some people know Thinkers50, but most people don’t. So this doesn’t change much, really, in the big scheme of things, other than the pleasure of having a number of individuals like you and others congratulating me and saying it’s well-deserved. That feels like a very nice recognition.

Constance Dierickx  06:56

Hopefully, affirmation that this virus of possibility, of courage, another word I associate strongly with you is curiosity, that is taking root. And for people to embed some of your language, your ideas, and your insights into their everyday work, I think is just a wonderful contribution.

Michael Bungay Stanier  07:23

That is amazing. That’s what really amazes me when people are saying, oh, yeah, we use this. I read this email from somebody the other day saying, “Oh, I saw you on a plane. I didn’t want to say hello, because you look busy and I don’t know you. But just to let you know, my manager uses the Coaching Habit stuff all the time, and he’s a much better manager for it.” That’s just a random comment. They show up, not infrequently. That feels like lots of places where I’m making a very small contribution to make things a bit better.

Constance Dierickx  07:58

But maybe it isn’t small. If a manager gets better by 20%, and you think about how many people they’re managing, and more importantly, what sort of management that person is modeling for the next generation, that’s how, you know if you were my client, which you are not, I think it’s important for people to understand the ripple effect of what they’re doing and what they offer and put out there. One other thing that I enjoy a lot about your writing and how you show up as a person, your physicality and your clothing, is you encourage people to be bold. I think there’s a quote that you have on your website. It’s from a movie that I have watched about 20 times. Strictly Ballroom.

Michael Bungay Stanier  08:56

See, I knew I liked you. That’s like one of the all-time great movies as far as I’m concerned.

Constance Dierickx  09:01

I know, and why don’t work people know about this? But, it’s profound. But the quote is, “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.” You encourage people to you know, when the spotlight is on you, be in it fully, show up, and be bold. And I love that. So how do you help people do that? You’re modeling it yourself, at least the few times that I’ve been in the same room with you, but how do you help people show up as their very best selves and be proud of that?

Michael Bungay Stanier  09:39

I’m not sure. So I hear from people that how I show up and kind of role model that, yeah, it’s helpful for people. That’s part of it. If you look at some of the deeper currents to the work I have written about and try and teach, there are probably two core things that show up. One is more fully seeing and hearing another person. I often quote Martin Buber in his I-it and I-thou relationships. Yes, in many ways, the coaching books and also How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, are about how you build working relationships that feel more human so you get to see each other more completely. I think there is a way that when you feel seen more fully, you are encouraged to be that full version of yourself. So perhaps that. And then, a book I wrote a year and a half ago called How To Begin, which is about how you find a worthy goal, a goal that’s thrilling and important and daunting. The key line in that book is we unlock our greatness by working on hard stuff. So, encouraging people to be a bold version of themselves. I’m not sure it works as a direct challenge. Constance, I need you to be a bigger, bolder version of you. You’re like, ah, I don’t know, that’s a heavy burden. If you find something to work on that lights you up and contributes to the world and stretches you, then a commitment to doing that work feels like a commitment to showing up in a bigger version. So it’s a little bit like coming at happiness, you kind of have to come at it sideways to find it, I suspect.

Constance Dierickx  11:31

Yes, it reminds me of whether or not you’re trying to directly impact something, or whether you’re creating an environment in which that thing is more likely to happen. My clients will ask me not infrequently, things like, well, how do I motivate people? You’re right, there’s not a checklist. There’s not like, well, if you do these three things, then magic will happen and everyone will be motivated, and they’ll be working their butts off.

Michael Bungay Stanier  12:03

One of the things is continuing to show up, and in small ways, control, encourage and hold space and create standards. I mean, all of it’s simple and difficult. Part of the difficulty is it often happens through ongoing small things, rather than one large intervention that changes everything.

Constance Dierickx  12:26

Yes. Or through a company-wide training.

Michael Bungay Stanier  12:31

I have a company that does company-wide trainings. But with the clients where that works, there’s more to it than just putting people through a one-day training session. There’s lead-up, there’s support, there’s engagement of the system around it to help people shift their behavior.

Constance Dierickx  12:47

Right. So we’re back to an environment where you can offer people education, and you can give them some practice but if that falls on infertile soil, then yeah, you’re right. 

Michael Bungay Stanier  13:02

There’s a great quote by Winston Churchill, which I’ll get slightly wrong, but it’s something like we shape our buildings, and thereafter, they shape us.

Constance Dierickx  13:10

That’s one of my favorites, how did you know? Yes.

Michael Bungay Stanier  13:14

Well, yes, it speaks profoundly to how much of our behavior is influenced by our environment. The metaphor that often gets talked about in the change world is around the rider and the elephant on the path, this being a metaphor for the levers of change, the rider being the rational case, the elephant being the emotional case, and the path being the environment. We put most of our emphasis on the rider, keep thinking, if we just convince people with the facts, that we’ll change them. But the rider actually doesn’t have a whole lot of influence. What really influences is the path, and also the training the elephant got growing up, that’s what keeps it on the path. But people who will worry a lot less about the path, and they should worry a bit more.

Constance Dierickx  14:04

Yes. And the path is often not obvious to them. I often will have clients talk to me about their company culture, and they describe it to me, and then we study it. And guess what? The results of the actual going out and investigating it don’t match, they overlap. They always overlap. My clients are smart people, so they definitely can describe their company. But then there’s always those differences. And these habits, you’ve written about habits as well, and there’s another quote. You have so many great — I have this long list of things you’ve said or that you’ve quoted other people, but one of them was  how did you learn your work habits?

Michael Bungay Stanier  14:54

Yeah, that’s an exercise from the new book. It comes from Salesforce. It’s one of the questions that they ask and say, where did you learn your work habits from? What’s interesting about that — part of why people find it hard to articulate their culture, so the culture is basically the way we do things around here. Most of the things we do, we do them unconsciously. There’s research that says about 40, 45, 50%, of what you do is done instinctively, habitually. And when you realize that the habit is an unconscious action, and that half of what you do is unconscious, that means that pretty much half of how you understand or half of what a culture is, is an unconscious expression of behavior, that’s why people find it hard to name a culture. I mean, Ed Shine has a model where he says, look, your culture has three levels. You got your artifacts and stuff you can see, your espoused values and stuff you talk about, and then you’ve got your own unconscious assumptions, which are your habits or your behaviors. He says, most of the time, when you ask people about culture, they talk about the first two things because they’re obvious. But actually, the under-the-water iceberg is the behavior. And actually, until you have those three things aligned, you don’t really have a strong culture.

Constance Dierickx  16:22

What I find interesting about culture, also, is when you are looking at artifacts, so you look at how an office is organized physically, the physicality. Like, who sits where and who’s got the corner, and all of that kind of stuff.

Michael Bungay Stanier  16:38

I’m looking at you and I’m like, okay, so Constance, black turtleneck, professional glasses, books behind her. I mean, you’re sending a whole bunch of things to me that say, this is what it looks like. You’re looking at me and you’re like, he’s disheveled, got an interesting background, got an ugly mustache, it must be November. You’re making up a bunch of stuff about me as well. How quickly we make decisions about what all that means, that’s part of the artifacts.

Constance Dierickx  17:09

Yes, yes, absolutely, and the choices that we make. So you were talking about my bookshelves that I had put in here. At one point in time, that was a decision that was conscious, but then it just becomes part of the landscape. And so it makes it so hard. But yes, we do. And we have to, at a certain level, there’s so much coming at us. There’s so much information, people, things in our inbox, the phone ringing, all of that, that we have to categorize and simplify. But what I find gets us in trouble is we make meaning out of those things, those decisions. We reify them. If you try to change them, for me, I will, first of all, I have a physiological response that I’ll then label, as, who’s this guy trying to tell me that my bookcase is all wrong? Or your background actually, I would describe it as very interesting. I mean, it’s got all these different colors and pieces. And it makes me want to ask you how you chose it.

Michael Bungay Stanier  18:25

Exactly. And would you like me to answer that? Or is that a theoretical question?

Constance Dierickx  18:29

Yeah, no, if you’re willing, I’d love to.

Michael Bungay Stanier  18:32

Part of it, I said to myself, look, lots of people have a nicely curated bookshelf behind them in this pandemic Zoom world. A, I am in a small office, my bookshelves are messy rather than laid out. This is new, but some people have performative bookshelves. It’s like, look at these books that tell you just how amazing I am. This looks like a wall. In fact, it’s a photo of a wall. This is a fabric screen that is on a frame that hangs on a tripod that covers up my thing. So I was like, okay, so I want an interesting background. I wanted it to be yellow, because yellow is kind of the main color of my brand. I wanted it to have texture and be interesting as I’m drawn to texture. I just went on to Shutterstock and searched around and found a picture of this wall and went, “Great, I’ll pay 20 bucks for that photo,” and uploaded it and got it printed on fabric.

Constance Dierickx  19:36

That’s great. And the way you described what you wanted is so reflective of the way you write. It’s got texture, it’s got nuance, it’s not typical, but it’s also not so strange that I’ve spent the whole time trying to figure out what it is behind you. It just looks like you bought a structure and you’re renovating or something.

Michael Bungay Stanier  20:04

Yeah. Also, I’m trying to figure out what I don’t want. That, for me, is a key part of this decision-making. Something I’m really kind of exploring a bit at the moment is, so often, decision-making is not, what am I going to say yes to, but what am I going to say no to? So often, if you can just get clear on what you’re saying no to, the rest of it becomes pretty obvious. But we’re wired to spend most of our time worrying about or thinking about what do I need to say yes to? So it’s like, what do I not want? When I figure out what I don’t want, then that makes it clear what I might want.

Constance Dierickx  20:44

And that’s analogous to strategy. I was on a call last week with someone who told me their strategic plan, and by the way, I’m allergic to that phrase, “strategic plan,” what’s your strategy? Tell me what your strategy is, the planning comes after. But he said in that strategic plan, there were — you want to guess how many initiatives?

Michael Bungay Stanier  21:09

My guess is probably more than 3.

Constance Dierickx  21:14

67. And I thought, well, excuse me, I now need to go bang my head on this brick wall over here.

Michael Bungay Stanier  21:23

That’s just silly.

Constance Dierickx  21:25

Right. It’s more of an operating plan or something like that. But that is a strategy that got weighed down by an inability to say no, right? I think Porter talked, was it Porter who talked about how strategy is so much about what we’re not going to do.

Michael Bungay Stanier  21:46

Totally. I think, I mean, the key question in strategy is, what are we saying no to? It’s relatively easy to say no to all the stuff that’s a clear no. But there’s all this stuff, which is like, yeah, it’d be lovely to say yes to this. But I think strategy is really saying no to all the juicy stuff we kind of want to say yes to.

Constance Dierickx  22:12

All the juicy stuff. Yeah.

Michael Bungay Stanier  22:15

I know this because I’m very much a shiny object person. I’m always having ideas. I’m always like, oh, this would be amazing. Luckily, I’ve got people around me who are better in practice, who are able to execute in practice what I talk about in theory, which is all about what we say no to.

Constance Dierickx  22:38

So that leads me to ask about the decisions you made early on when you were starting your company and running your company. First of all, how did you come to be in the business that you’re in? And then how did you shape that business? What decisions did you make?

Michael Bungay Stanier  22:58

Well, I grew up in a family who all worked for the government in Australia. My mum and dad did, my two brothers do, and their spouses do. So I didn’t have any immediate role models to start a business and become an entrepreneur. I left Australia, studied in England, worked in England, moved to the States, and worked in Boston for a while. Then, in 2001, I flew from Boston to Toronto and moved to Toronto. So I’ve been here a couple of years, 22 years. The job I had landed on in Toronto didn’t go well. I was trying to help them with some internal brand culture stuff. And whatever it was I was suggesting wasn’t what they wanted to be doing. So after six months or so there, they fired me. But luckily, they fired me pretty much the day my so-called Maple Leaf card arrived, which is the equivalent of a US green card. So I could work for people other than them. So that was great. It just was becoming increasingly obvious that I was mostly unemployable. I’m just not that good at having bosses. So I incorporated a company and got a job halftime creating models and intellectual property for a market research company because, in my past, I’d done some market research. I knew a bit about brands, I knew a bit about focus groups and the like. In the meantime, started, in a brand new city, so I didn’t know anybody at all, trying to build a business. So for the first year or two, my business model was to find somebody with a wallet and see if they would give me some of their money. I had a range of skills. I knew about innovation, I knew about facilitation, I knew about market research, I knew a little bit about strategy. I had a grab bag of stuff. But in year three or four, I got a job designing a coaching program for a company. This coincided with me doing my own code skills training, starting a coaching practice, and then pretty quickly disbanding it because it turned out I didn’t love coaching people. I mean, I like coaching people, I just don’t like it being the main thing I do all the time with people. So, when I first did this coach design, I designed a two-day training program. Well, that was the start of me going, oh, there’s something interesting here. There’s something that I have a point of view on, because I thought most coach training in organizations was pretty terrible. I thought there was a market need for it because people were beginning to train their people. I thought I could earn some money doing it. So over the next 15 years, that company called Box of Crayons increasingly specialized, and we do code skill training. And even now, it’s talking about curiosity in organizations and coach-like training for their people. That all kind of blew up, in particular, seven or eight years ago now, when I wrote The Coaching Habit book, and that really kind of became a big bestseller. That’s how most people know me. So, Constance, I kind of stumbled into it, mostly. Necessity, being the mother of invention in all of that, but also made some good decisions to kind of focus. You know that Jim Collins metaphor, he says, strategy is firing bullets then firing cannonballs. You fire bullets to figure out which of your hypotheses is the real target but once you find the target, you load up cannonballs, and you fire cannonballs. And Collins says, the problem, mostly, is that people either fire their cannonball too soon, before they know what the real target is, or they never pluck up the nerve to fire the cannonball at all. And I think, they’re like, oh, this is the target but maybe we’ll just keep shooting bullets rather than cannonballs. So I think part of it was, in retrospect, more than deliberately doing it at the time, the process of me going, oh, here’s a bunch of things I can do, firing away, trying to figure out once I landed on that one thing, I’m going, here’s the thing we want to commit to.

Constance Dierickx  27:34

Well, The Coaching Habit, you’re right, it’s so associated with you. And just for the listener, tell us what prompted you to write that book. What I’m curious about is what you noticed that people who needed to coach others needed the most help with.

Michael Bungay Stanier  27:53

Well, The Coaching Habit was my third or fourth book. I had a book called Do More Great Work, which I first self-published as called Find Your Great Work. And then a New York publisher called Workman bought it. It was exciting. And so they published it. It’s like, I got a New York publisher, it’s all very glamorous. And then some years later, I had this idea for The Coaching Habit, based in part because I’d been doing all this training. So I kind of had a point of view. I had some tools that I knew worked. I kept trying to write the book that they wanted me to write, and they just never liked anything that I wrote for them. So eventually, after my sixth or seventh iteration, I figured I’d call their bluff and I went this is it. It’s this idea or nothing. And they went, well, we’re not interested. So I was like, oh, that’s a bummer. So I felt a bit sorry for myself for a while but then decided to self-publish The Coaching Habit, because I thought it solved a real problem, which is to unweird coaching for busy managers and leaders. That’s who I was writing it for. You know, I knew coaching, I knew lots of people were being asked to coach or be more coach-like, I knew lots of people were like, “Yeah, it’s a touchy-feely, airy-fairy, woo woo thing. I’m not a coach. I don’t want to be a coach.”

Constance Dierickx  29:21

Therapy.

Michael Bungay Stanier  29:22

I’m like, great, I don’t want you to be a coach, and I don’t want you to think of this as therapy or anything else. It’s a leadership skill. Let me teach it to you as a practical leadership skill.

Constance Dierickx  29:33

Absolutely. I find that when people in organizations, I work mostly with CEOs and boards, but they will often say to me, I really need to spend some time coaching this person. How do I do that? And what they’re asking me for is,  the tactical 1, 2, 3. I ask them, I say, well, what does that person want to achieve? What is driving them? What do you suspect I get back? I’m sure you know.

Michael Bungay Stanier  30:10

I have no idea.

Constance Dierickx  30:11

Oh, yes, you do. They don’t know.

Michael Bungay Stanier  30:14

Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I meant. When you asked me.

Constance Dierickx  30:17

I’m sorry, I misunderstood.

Michael Bungay Stanier  30:20

All I know is what I want, which is for them to do this. And then we’re gonna call it coaching because it sounds a bit better than me just directing them to do it.

Constance Dierickx  30:28

Exactly, you got in the role really fast. That’s really good. Yeah, they don’t know. That takes me back to your evergreen advice about you show up, you’re curious, you find out about the person, you form a relationship, and we know the power of that. And yet, somehow, it seems to people, tell me if you have this experience, seems to people like it costs too much time. Like there’s too much of an investment.

Michael Bungay Stanier  31:03

The reason I wrote The Coaching Habit, in part, was to try and blow through this idea that coaching is therapy. In other words, it requires half an hour or an hour lying down on the couch, going, oh, I know, isn’t that terrible? And part of the philosophy I would have is, if you can’t coach in 10 minutes or less, you don’t have time to coach. So when you redefine coaching as the act of staying curious a little bit longer, and when you understand that coaching, or being more coach-like, which is kind of the language I use to try and avoid saying, you’re not a coach, you’re just being more coach-like. You’re just staying curious a little bit longer. You can do that in any interaction with somebody, in-person, over video call, on chat, on Slack. When somebody writes you a thing on Slack, you can always just say, I get it, but what’s the real challenge here for you? And send it through to them. And that’s a coaching moment, quickly asking a question. People do worry about the time. But if you can have them experience this way of getting to the heart of an issue really quickly so they go, oh, actually, that was amazing. Now I get it. They start to see a small investment upfront. It means that they don’t come back to you and come back to you and come back to you or you haven’t solved the wrong problem, which happens a lot. You actually spend time to figure out what the real challenge is and solve that.

Constance Dierickx  32:35

You get at what the real problem is, or what the real “stuckedness” is. I just see people stuck a lot in my work, but what will happen is they’ll come back with the same problem but it will be in a slightly different costume. If you’re not paying close attention, you can be distracted by that. And you can think, oh, now I have to help them with this thing.

Michael Bungay Stanier  33:03

It changes your role radically when you decide that your job is just to figure out what the real problem is, not to be the person who needs to have an answer. Giving people permission to say you don’t need the answer, you’re just going to help everybody around you figure out what the real problem is, hey, that’s more valuable and rarer. So you actually become a more valuable person in that team or in that organization. But once you know what the real problem is, it’s, generally, relatively straightforward to find the answers to that. What’s tricky is when you’re trying to solve something that you’re not sure is actually the real thing to solve.

Constance Dierickx  33:41

Or, it’s not the problem, but you’ve convinced yourself that it is and you marshal all these resources, and you get people really angry, and you get angry and irritable and off you go.

Michael Bungay Stanier  33:56

I agree.

Constance Dierickx  33:57

The curiosity, the paying attention, and taking a moment to find out what’s really going on strikes me as being so much a part of your latest book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, and I was so relieved, in the title, to see the word almost.

Michael Bungay-Stanier  34:15

In good conscience, I can’t ever claim to know how to work with anyone. I’ve got more than my share, probably, of screwed-up working relationships. But I do reckon, I think everybody’s got one or two people in their lives that I get that person never — but that leaves everybody else. So if you can think of most of your key working relationships and understand that you can more actively shape them and improve them, that becomes better for you and better for them and better for the two of you and better for the work that needs to be done.

Constance Dierickx  34:52

I wonder how many working relationships are significantly subpar, just not great, just go on and on and on like that because people don’t have the awareness or don’t make the decision to actually put some energy and intelligence into improving that relationship, starting with reading your book and learning about the keystone conversation and all the great advice that’s contained in that book. But before anybody can benefit, they have to really say, oh, yeah, this is something worth trying to improve, I’m going to invest some energy. We’re back to that, “Am I going to make the effort to make this better?”

Michael Bungay Stanier  35:40

I mean, I think it’s a very legitimate choice, sometimes, to say it’s not worth the effort, it’s too hard, there’s too much of a power disparity, there’s too much, there’s too much water under the bridge. My job in this working relationship is just to survive with minimum collateral damage. And that’s perfectly adequate. But yeah, John Gottman, a relationship writer and relationships, says that 70% of all issues in a relationship are perpetual. They don’t actually change. I find this a very optimistic number because it means that AI can stop trying to solve the 70%. B, it means that actually, it might be as much as 30% in a working relationship that we could actually tinker with and co-create and improve. If you think about those hard-working relationships you have right now, and you think to yourself, what if I could make that 30% better? I do think, for many of us, that moves it from unbearable to bearable, from unworkable to workable. So the idea of the book is to have authority to try to build the best possible relationship with somebody. So, a BPR. Every working relationship has some potential to it. So you’re trying to find the best expression of that particular working relationship. And that doesn’t mean it’s going to always be great. You’re just trying to make it as good as possible. The key idea is have a keystone conversation, a conversation about how you work together before you jump into the work itself. People say this feels like a bit of an awkward conversation. I’m like, it is. It is an awkward conversation. You’re right.

Constance Dierickx  37:19

Yes.

Michael Bungay Stanier  37:21

In part, because it’s rare. In part, because both of you are being vulnerable to some extent, when you say to the other person, hey, before we crack on with this work, how do we want to work together? How do we play to our strengths? How do we avoid the hiccups and avoid our weaknesses? What do we need to do? What do we need to know about each other so that we can work well together? An invitation to say, let me tell you about me, you tell me about you, is a bit vulnerable and a bit awkward. So if there’s a call to action, when I teach this, it’s to be the person who reaches out and starts the conversation and is brave enough to suggest it because that in itself is a gift for people. 

Constance Dierickx  38:06

Yeah, it is. And if you get rejected or scoffed at, that’s information.

Michael Bungay Stanier  38:14

That’s information. I mean, I wish I could guarantee that every one of the conversations works, but they don’t. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. I think more often they do work. So, when you’re weighing up risk and reward, prizes and punishments, mostly, the prizes outweigh the punishments when you’re seeking to have a crack at this.

Constance Dierickx  38:36

I think, often, people respond to the invitation, even if they’re initially taken aback, and thinking, “What is this? Are we doing group therapy here? What’s up with that?” I mean, that’s one I get a lot because of my background. But, when you said that about Gottman, I’ve actually been able to see John and his wife, Julie, speak, as I’m sometimes off on these jaunts to get my continuing education credits. I love their work. But the perpetualness of these issues is both comforting and frightening, I think, to a lot of people, but also what I like about it is they’re so predictable. If we all think back to, when I was a resident and I did marriage therapy, and most of my clients, one or both parties were physicians. So they were very smart people. My supervising psychologist taught me to get the couples to talk about how they initially met and what initially attracted them to each other. Right? Because that tells you what the problem is. It’s always the underbelly of the thing that attracts us. One anesthesiology resident said, oh, my wife was the life of the party. She’s so vivacious. Well, what’s the problem?

Michael Bungay Stanier  40:05

Yeah, she’s the life of the party.

Constance Dierickx  40:08

She can’t settle down. She’s not calm. But what drew him to her? And of course, I had the joy of meeting her and she was vivacious, she was energetic, But not unduly so. And what drew her to him? The opposite. 

Michael Bungay Stanier  40:24

Yeah, exactly. This calm, steady, you know, like, he’s so boring. Exactly.

Constance Dierickx  40:31

When we hire people, it’s kind of a similar thing. You say, oh, well, this person, blah, blah, blah, whatever, fill in the blank. And then later, what do you want them to do? You want them to expand beyond that. You want them to do things differently. So your method of inviting people into this conversation, I think, can be done in such a non-judgmental way. Unfortunately, I think managers sometimes just get in the habit of criticism. Just being critical. I was curious to know from you, because you have such great experience and longevity in doing what you do and the human-centered —

Michael Bungay Stanier  41:17

Just saying I’m old. 

Constance Dierickx  41:19

You’re not as old as I am. So there.

Michael Bungay Stanier  41:21

Longevity and experience.  I get the subtext. But carry on, Constance.

Constance Dierickx  41:26

No, no, no. I meant it as a total positive because that breadth of experience shows up so much as you have a lot of anecdotes to share. But more importantly, I think it’s the insights that you’ve accumulated over time. But you’ve probably heard a lot of advice that other people have given your clients. I’m curious, what’s some of the worst advice that people are given when they’re trying to become a better, not a coach, but what did you say, “engage in more coaching behaviors”? 

Michael Bungay Stanier  42:01

Be more coach-like, be more coach-like.

Constance Dierickx  42:03

More coach-like, yeah. What’s some of the worst advice?

Michael Bungay Stanier  42:06

I think, where it gets complicated for some people is going, okay, I need to be a coach but nobody’s told me what that is exactly. People feel like it’s actually doubling down on telling people what to do because one of the role models for coaching is a sports coach, where you’re like, I’m just gonna lay down the law and be really clear about it and now I’m coaching you. 

Constance Dierickx  42:28

Yeah, I’ll get louder.

Michael Bungay Stanier  42:29

Yeah. So I think that’s kind of the deeper thing, which is, just a fundamental misunderstanding about what coaching is. That’s why I defined it as this idea of, can you stay curious a little bit longer? There are small tactical things, which is, I encourage people not to ask or lead with questions that start with the word why because I think it’s quite hard to ask that question in a way that doesn’t come across as a bit judgmental or, I’m just seeking more information so I can give you better advice. This is probably personal preference, Constance, but, the way some people are taught active listening, where somebody will say something, and the person who’s coaching goes, I now have to repeat all of that back to you to prove that I was listening. And you’re kind of doing it to prove that you’re a good listener, rather than being in service of another person. So, if somebody’s saying a lot of stuff to me, I’ll often go, “Wow, it sounds like there’s a lot going on there, and sounds like it’s quite hard.” And that’s the proof I’ve listened to them in that little phrase, rather than going, “Well, you talked about your mother, and it sounds like your car is broken down, and the dog’s unhappy, and the garden isn’t doing well, and the parrot is sick,” and whatever else. I guess I’d say that I think being coach-like, staying curious a little bit longer, it’s simple and difficult. It’s simple to say people get it immediately. I think we underestimate how much we have to unlearn to stay curious because we are so trained and so wired to see the value that we bring as how fast can we come up with an answer or solution or an opinion or a point of view?

Constance Dierickx  44:19

Can I get a gee-wiz reaction from the other person? Which is really being focused on yourself, and how you’re perceived rather than —

Michael Bungay Stanier  44:32

I mean, sometimes, I think, people are just genuinely going, “This is the best way I know how to help. I’m really keen to help you, and all I’m aware of is if you come to me with something, my job is to solve it for you.” So it takes quite a deep unlearning to go, sometimes your job, even if you have the best answer, sometimes your job is not to share the best answer but to help them figure some stuff out themselves. If your job is to have them leave the conversation with a better sense of what’s going on, with some better ideas, with a greater confidence, with greater insight, then you realize that being too quick with your own advice and opinions doesn’t win the game.

Constance Dierickx  44:34

I think there’s something in there about advice being a trap, perhaps. Another of your books, which, I just love, I absolutely love that. And once you have it in your head how often people leap to advice, you just start to see it everywhere.

Michael Bungay Stanier  45:38

It is amazing.

Constance Dierickx  45:39

And see it in yourself, or, for myself, to see it in myself. Someone says, oh, this isn’t going well. Have you thought about this? And you’re like, wow.

Michael Bungay Stanier  45:48

Me too. It’s even more annoying when you’re the person who’s written this book about not giving advice and you find yourself giving bad advice. You’re like, this is not a good look.

Constance Dierickx  45:57

Yeah, my mentor, Alan Weiss, has a saying. He says, “Unsolicited advice is for the benefit of the sender.”

Michael Bungay Stanier  46:05

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.

Constance Dierickx  46:08

I think there is too. I did want to share with you a quote from Virginia Satir, who was a psychotherapist. She says, “The only honest answer to a question that begins with why, is I’m guilty.”

Michael Bungay Stanier  46:24

That’s it. I think it’s very hard to ask a why question, which doesn’t sound like an accusation. Why did you do this? Which might have a really genuine piece around it, which is like, I’m just really curious as to what were the drivers that made this decision feel the best decision. It actually sounds like, well, why the hell did you do that?

Constance Dierickx  46:48

Exactly.

Michael Bungay Stanier  46:49

So at best, you’re gonna get a defensive reaction. Sometimes just like, yeah, I give up. Yeah, arrest me. I did it.

Constance Dierickx  46:59

Get the cuffs out.

Michael Bungay Stanier  47:00

Yeah, exactly.

Constance Dierickx  47:01

I know. So one of the things that you advise people to do resonates so much with me from my training as a clinician. We call it the hand-on-the-door phenomenon. You’ve been sitting with someone for 48 minutes of your hour, you need two minutes to get them out the door, you get all the way to the door, their hand is on the door, and they say, by the way, and then they drop a bomb on you. But the way you are using this advice, it’s different, where you say, is there anything else? Anything else? I think that if the listener of this podcast takes that away and uses it so that you reopen or you crack the door again, it doesn’t feel like you, the manager, have decided that the meeting is over. You’re inviting, I think, it’s just brilliant. How did you come up with that?

Michael Bungay Stanier  48:01

I often use that question in the context of asking, and what else? And I just remember being taught that myself and just realizing the power that had. What it does is it’s often not even really heard by the other person. What you’re doing is you’re just holding the space open longer for curiosity. So, ask the question, what’s the real challenge here for you? What else? And what else? What else? And then is there anything else, says, should I shut the door or should I keep it open? So it’s an opportunity to move the conversation on if the energy is waning but it’s also a challenge to say, do you want to sneak anything else in? And then the related question to this, I think, is perhaps, and it’s coming from the How to Work with (Almost) Anyone book, which is, as I kind of wrap up, is there anything that needs to be said that hasn’t yet been said? And that has a similar thing, which is an invitation for somebody to say, oh, is there anything you’ve been sitting on or just haven’t found the right way in or feels a bit tender or a bit unformed? Is there anything you want to say about that? I find that can be a really powerful question to uncover something that kind of has a real significance to it.

Constance Dierickx  49:19

So it’s very tempting, Michael, to say, “Is there anything else?” to you as we wrap up our time together.

Michael Bungay Stanier  49:30

Our work might be done.

Constance Dierickx  49:31

Our work might be done. Yes. Thank you so much. It’s a joy to see you, and congratulations, again, on your marvelous award and for sharing your deep wisdom with the audience of the Decision Doctor podcast.

Michael Bungay Stanier  49:46

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Constance.

Outro  49:50

The Decision Doctor will be back with more advice soon. Hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app and check out TheDecisionDoctor.com to receive the Meta-Leadership self-assessment and other no-cost resources. We’ll see you next time.