Welcome to Hal Leaders Lead where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Okay, picture this. Someone on your team comes to you with a question. Maybe they're not sure how to approach a certain situation. What do you do? Well, if you're like most leaders, your first instinct is to dispense some advice. And hey, that's understandable. You're sitting in that leadership role precisely because you've got all kinds of great wisdom and insights to share. But according to my guest today, that approach can backfire on you. Michael Bungay-Stannier is a best-selling author and the founder of a fantastic company called Box of Crayons that equips leaders to become better coaches. And he's on a mission to help leaders move away from giving advice and instead leverage the power of curiosity to draw out their team. For Michael, curiosity is a leadership superpower that helps you find better ideas, pinpoint the right problems, and get more from your teammates. And this conversation is absolutely jam-packed with practical ways to help you do all that. You know what? I was even able to apply some of Michael's insights right in the middle of our conversation. I'm telling you, this is instant impact stuff. I might have started a new acronym, IIS, and I can't wait for you to hear it. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Michael B ungay-Stannier. You and I have a little bit in common. I used to run marketing for pizza, and I understand that just after all I left, Stuffcrust was launched, and you say that you played a tiny, tiny, tiny part in making that such a big success. And it was a huge success. Tell us about your Pizza Hut roots. I got to hear this. See, I thought you said we had something in common, you're going to say that we were both remarkably good-looking people. But maybe we have that in common as well. But yeah, so when I was in university in Australia, the way I earned money, cash to kind of buy a beer was, I worked in Pizza Hut. So I was hoping marketing was not doing a good job because the more marketing succeeded, the more pizza pans I had to wash up and the more pizzas I had to make. But then when I finally made it out of university, I got to move from Australia to England. I was part of an innovation company that was all about trying to reset and rethink Stuffcrust Pizza in the UK as part of the launch there. So I ran focus groups for people about pizza. I was in test kitchens trying to come up with ideas for pizza. We got the idea, of course, around making the crust interesting rather than the discarded bit. I was very junior here. I can't claim much fame around this. But I do think that I had a tiny, tiny contribution to Stuffcrust Pizza in the UK. What made you leave the innovation or the food industry? Well, I think it's innovation. So this company was all about how do we help big organizations launch new products and new services. And this was in the early 90s. So it was before innovation became quite the buzzword and quite as familiar as it is for many of us now. And I left David because we created great ideas. We created great experiences for our clients. And we launched almost nothing successfully. And I was intrigued why all of our good ideas used to go into organizations and die. So I moved from the world of innovation into the world of organizational change and organizational development because I really wanted to understand what does it take to actually have an organization that thrives, have the people thrive, have the ideas thrive, have the business thrive because I knew that what we were doing with this agency, somehow we were missing a trick. You know, it's interesting, I used to be in the agency, advertising agency business. And I used to get so frustrated because we'd have a lot of good ideas that would never take fruition. And I really love jumping to the client side because then I got to decide, take accountability for it and actually get things done. You know, what are the big things that you've taught people on how to get things done, taken from the drawing board to into the real world? If I had to put boiler down to a single act, a single behavior, it's the power of curiosity because so often in our organizational life, we don't stay curious long enough. And I would say that, you know, for instance, talking about innovation, one of the reasons why so often we would run up against people going, yeah, I'm not sure about that idea. If we ran up with people going, I think I already know the answer. I think I already know what's going on. I think I know what I like and they weren't curious enough to kind of go, how do I imagine something new and something different? And so, you know, in the coaching habit book, that fundamental behavior change that I'm trying to get people to do is to stay curious a little bit longer and rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly because curiosity has impact on strategy . Curiosity has impact on how you lead and influence others as well. Does that one led you to start this company called Box of Crayons? It was, you know, I'd moved to Canada by then. I had a very unsuccessful stint working within a company and they eventually fired me. And at this point, David, I went, I think I'm becoming unemployable. So I started a company and I realized that I could see the power of coaching and the impact it could have. I could see how badly it was done in most organizations. I really wanted to bring helping managers and leaders be more coach-like at coaching to their leadership repertoire. And I thought to myself, I can do this in a way that is different and useful and sellable. So that's the magic triad, right? Do I get excited about it? Does it actually, is it different? And will people actually hire me to actually teach this? And that's the origin of Box of Crayons. Who was your very, very first client? Well, the first client was Nestle here in Canada and they hired me to design a training program around coaching. And I'm so grateful for them for doing that because the first two years of my business, my business model had been, I'll work with anybody with a pulse and a wallet. Because, you know, I'm starting up, I just moved to Canada. I didn't really know anybody. I was a bit of a jack-of-all-trage. I knew about market research. I knew about innovation. I knew about organizational change. I knew about facilitation. So I could do a kind of grab bag of things. But it was Nestle Canada that hired me to design a coaching program that helped me articulate and forced me to kind of figure out my point of view on coaching within organizations. And it all kind of started from that. I want to get back to this curiosity idea because I'm curious about it. How about that for a lead? So many of us are guilty of jumping in and just offering advice just straight away. What's the risk of doing that as a leader? And why should you have that curiosity mindset? Well, there's quite a few things that are at risk. You know, on a purely practical level, quite often if you're too quick with the advice, often you're offering not very good solutions to the wrong problem. Because one of my working theories is the first challenge is never the real challenge. And so it really pays dividends to stay curious longer to figure out what the real challenge is. In fact, if you're looking to be an aspiring leader, if you can become known as the person who figures out what the real problem is, rather than the person who has fast advice, that is a far rarer and a far more valuable resource within an organization. But it's not just around sorting the problem out where the damage is done. There's also a damage done in the relationship between you and that other person. Because if you like, I'm going to jump in and tell you what to do, I'm going to jump in with my idea. You're basically saying, "I'm smarter and better and faster and more experienced and more knowledgeable and wiser than you are." And it's this moment where you disempower the people who, as a leader, your job is actually to help them step into their full potential, to help empower them. So there is this decision that you have to make, which is like, "What serves me best? Me being the person seemed to have the right answer, or me creating the space for that other person to figure this out." Because this is one of the big equations that I think leaders could really get. Having somebody else have an idea, that's their idea that they will own, that they will act on, that's 85% as good as the idea that you have is 100% a win for you. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things I love is how you could capture little phrases, the kind of sum up challenges that we have. You talk about leaders having advice monsters. What can we do to practically fight against that as a leader? How do you get rid of that little critter? Or big critter, it probably in my case. Well, that's exactly right. I mean, you know the advice monster. Somebody starts talking and within about five seconds you've got this urge to tell them what to do. You might be pretending to keep listening to them. You nod your head and you go, "Mm-hmm, yep, sure." But you're just waiting for a gap in the conversation to share your brilliant insight or your opinion or idea. This is what I call the advice monster. So your goal is not to get rid of the advice monster because unfortunately it never really goes away, it's to tame the advice monster. So how do you tame the advice monster? Well, it's useful to know which of the three advice monsters is the kind of most alive in you. They're called tell it, can save it and control it. So tell it is, "I need to have all the answers. I need to be known as the person who always knows what's going on and always has the answers. Save it is, I need to save everybody. I need to make sure that nobody stumbles or struggles or finds it hard or finds it difficult or bumps up against what they don't know. I need to rescue everybody all the time. And control it is, I need to have my hands on the wheels. I can't give control away. I can't let serendipity come in. I can't allow the unknown in. I've got to manage everything perfectly. And all of them are impossible. It's impossible to know everything. It's impossible to save everybody. It's impossible to control everything. But you'll notice that you'll probably have one of those advice monsters is stronger in you than the other. And I think the older you get, you probably have that advice monster of being the wise one, you know, that I got to share all this knowledge that I have. Well, I think that's right. I think actually David, one of the challenges is actually as you become more senior as a leader, it's even trickier to be curious because you know, you think you know a lot and other people think that you know a lot. And in some ways you're like, I became a VP of something or other because of my experience. But again, if you think to yourself, my role as a senior leader is to use my wisdom, not to have the fast answer, but to enable the others around me to figure out the problems, come up with their own solutions, make sure that they're not doing anything stupid. I mean, bring your advice in at the right time. Then you actually unlock something amazing. Actually, David, let me ask you, let me turn to the tables. You know, you ran marketing for Pizza Hut. How did you manage to stay curious when you're in that senior position? You've got years of experience behind you. What did you learn about that? Well, I really wasn't that smart. So the only way I could be successful was to ask a lot of questions and learn for people that knew things that I didn't. So I was a big best practice guy. I love to take my team to different competitors and see what they were doing. You know, sort of really try to go after shared experiences and look for knowledge wherever I could get it. So, you know, that was my way of doing that. And I always asked a lot of questions. I had, you know, my favorite was, what would you do if you were me? You know, or if you're running Pizza Hut, what would you do? Or, you know, I did that throughout my career. And I really like your phrase, which is you say, questions are the kindling of curiosity. You know, that's really good. What would be your go-to questions? Well, you know, the story of the coaching habit book is I was like, there's something to be written here to try and unwear coaching. Because people who are intercoaching are really into it already. But there's a great bunch of people, normal people, managers, leaders, individual contributors who've heard about coaching and are a bit suspicious about it. Because, you know, they've met some life coaches or whatever. And they're like, I don't want to be like that. And various iterations of this book, I'm like, here are my favorite 180 questions. And can I be collecting questions for 30 years? I'm like, there's so many good questions. But in the coaching habit book, I boil it down to seven questions, which I say, if you come close to mastering those seven questions, that gets you a long way down the road. But if I had to pick one, I would say the question is simply and what else? AWE. So it's literally the awesome question because that's the acronym and what else ? Because the insight on that question, David, is their first answer is never their only answer and it's rarely their best answer. So what it does and what else is a multiplier because whatever question you ask , you know, if you say, you know, if you ran Pizza Hut, what would you do? Great question. And they'll have an answer for you. But if they use then go, and what else would you do? And what else would you do? And is there anything else that you do? This is great. And what else could you do if you're running Pizza Hut? Now you're actually tapping into a vein of curiosity and you're not just falling for the first answer that gets spoken because that's where most of us stop. And the higher up you go when you ask people what they do, if they were you, the more reluctant they are to really give you the answer because they're afraid of giving the wrong one. And a lot of times there's silence. So what do you do when there's silence there? You know, silence, if you can get comfortable with silence, it is one of the most powerful leadership tools that I know because as uncomfortable as you are in that moment where you ask a question and there's this beat of silence and you know you, it's like , oh my goodness, it's been one and a half seconds since I asked a question and I haven't said anything and you can feel the tension. But if you can take a breath and hold the space, they will crack before you do. And when they crack, something magical happens. I'll come with the answers. And of course for some people, David, silence is necessary. You know, Susan Kane made popular this whole idea of the quiet ones, the intro verts versus the extroverts. If you're like me, when somebody like you asked me a question, Dave, I'm like, I will start talking and I don't even know what I'm going to say yet. Okay, David, great question. I've got three things I want to tell you about that. And I'm not sure what they are, but I'm about to find out. I'm quite excited. But if you're a wild like Susan Kane or other introverts, they need a heartbeat or three to figure out what they want to say before they start saying it. So when you ask a question and there's silence, the most powerful thing to do is sit in it and wait a moment and not feel the anxiety to feel the silence because it could be a great gift to that other person to say, I'm giving you time to figure this out. I'm giving you time to think. I'm celebrating that I've asked a question that's making you think so that you 're going to come up with an interesting answer. That is so hard to do because the leader, when you have that silencer, you feel like you got a Phillip. How do you coach people on having the security it takes to be quiet and to really let it soak in? Well, probably it's a practice. It's a learn skill to sit with silence. So you do it and you try it out and you find that the first time you ask a question and then you stay silent, the world didn't end. Actually they came up with some good questions and the more you do it, the more you get to do it. But if you want to go a deeper level in my new book, the upcoming book, how to work with almost anyone, that's all about how you build an agreement to build relationships, the best possible relationship, the best version of a relationship. And one of the things that you might talk about when you're having that conversation about how will we work together, it's like when I ask a question, I'm actually going to be quiet and listen to the answer. So I'm not going to fill the silence for you. I haven't had a chance to read the book, how to work with almost anyone. But I was very curious about the title because the almost anyone, explain the almost. What did you mean by that? David, when you're writing books, sometimes you write a good book and then you spend six months trying to come up with a really good title. It's a good title. The title makes all the difference. If you get the title right, people are interested. If you get the title wrong, people just move on. Sometimes you come up with a great title and now you worry about writing a book . And for this one, I was like, oh, I came up with the title, how to work with almost anyone. And I was like, that's a great title. I hope I can write a book that lives up to the quality of that title. I didn't think I could make the promise on, let me teach you how to work with anyone. Because we've all run into those people where it just feels impossible. We know that there are people who have wirings around, you know, some version of, you could call it mental illness, but some version of kind of a type of psychology that just makes it very, very hard to work with that people. But I do think with most of the people in your working lives, even the ones where the relationships aren't that great, you can improve the way you work with them. You can work better with almost anyone. The idea is to build the best possible relationship with that particular person , whether they're hard to work with, whether they're amazing to work with, or whether they're somewhere in the middle. If you could boil it down to one thing, what would that be to get you to get you at least started on that path? I think the secret, David, is to have the courage to have a conversation about how we work together before you get into a conversation about what you're going to be working on. So David, if I just joined your marketing team at Pizza Hut, I'd be super keen to try and prove to you how smart I was at a marketer. You'd be really keen to try and put me onto a campaign and kind of use my talents. And so you might come on and go, "Michael, we've got this new product, stuff across pizza. What are you thinking? What are our angles? What's the problem we're solving? Who are we pitching it to? Who's our target audience? What are our key metrics?" And we'd be swept into the what of the work. But actually, if you'd stopped for a moment and said, "Michael, I'm really excited to work with you, let's have a conversation about how we best work together. Let me tell you about what I'm good at. You tell me about what you're good at. You tell me about what a good working relationship looks like for you. I'll tell you what a good working relationship looks like for me." And we negotiate how to figure out the high points and the low points of us working together. What that does is it creates a relationship that is safe and vital and repair able so that when I'm working on the campaign for stuff across pizza or whatever else and things go wrong, there's hiccups, there's a dent in the working relationship, you and I have the trust that we get to fix that together. Have you ever wondered what David is thinking as he interviews our guests each week? Or have you been interested in hearing David's take on some of the questions that he asks his guests? Well, I do and I know a lot of you do too. My name is Koolah Callahan and together with David, I host the three more questions podcasts that airs every Monday. These episodes are just about 15 minutes and in them, I asked David three questions that dive deeper into the themes of his episode with his guests. David shares incredible insights and stories from his career leading young brands and all of his answers are super practical and inspiring. Like this great insight, David shared in one of our most recent three more questions episodes. You know, one way to stay in touch with the front line is actually do the front line jobs. Make sure you as a leader, no matter how high up you might be, you go do the jobs. You know, when I was a KFC, I bred the chicken. You know, when I was a pizza hut, I put the pepperonis on the pizza and did the pan pizza dough fresh every day. You know, I, and when I was at Taco Bell, I learned how to be a stuffer. You know, so, you know, you learn what the front line goes through and that gives you a tremendous empathy for the challenge of the job and the responsibility you have to make sure you help them do their job by eliminating all the barriers and obstacles that get in the way of them serving customers. Get the three more questions podcasts and your feed each Monday and dive even deeper into the episodes you know and love. Just subscribe to How Leaders Lead wherever you get your podcasts. I want to shift gears for a second here. You know, I know that fairly recently you stepped out of your role as CEO of Box of Crayons and put a new CEO in place to run the day to day business. That's been the biggest challenge for you in that transition. Founder transitions, people who started company and then move on, they're notorious for failing utterly because founders, people like me, are controlling, slightly insane div as. We want our fingers and everything. We don't know really what we're talking about who have our values all threaded through an organization. So it is really hard to step away from something that you've spent 20 years building to hand over to somebody else. And when I did that with Shannon who now runs Box of Crayons, we actually hired a transition coach for two years, a year leading up to it and a year afterwards, to help us figure out how to manage that, how to get through that. And David, the thing that was hardest was to figure out how not to try and be too helpful. But because I was so keen for Shannon to succeed and she is succeeding brilliantly. And part of that is wanting to come in and go, "Look, I'm delighted to have given up a whole bunch of this role, but let me help you out with A, B and C." And what Shannon and I had to do is decide and get really clear on who made what decisions. And we used a model from Susan Scott's book called "Fierce Conversation." And it's a tree model. This is a really helpful tool for any leaders. It says, "Look, you have four types of decisions and using the tree metaphor. They're either twigs, branches, trunk or roots." So twig decisions are decisions that I would never hear about or know about. It will never cross my plate. Branch decisions are ones that I'll find out after the event, maybe an announcement from Shannon or she'll tell me over a drink three months later or a newsletter or something like that. So, I like decisions and this is where it starts getting interesting. Decisions that Shannon and the CEO will come and talk to me about, but they're her decisions to make. So this might be hiring people on the senior leadership team, a big acquisition , redoing the values, a core repositioning of the company. Those are all trunk decisions. And then root decisions are the decisions that I make as the owner of the company. And what we negotiated was that I would only have two decisions to make. One is, do I fire Shannon, the CEO? And two is, do I sell the company? Those are the only decisions I get to make. And setting up that clarity was really helpful in terms of stopping me meddling with stuff that I shouldn't be meddling with. Makes a lot of sense. I'm curious. I have to ask you this one. You write the book, Coaching Habit, and you have to hire a coach. Yeah. Tell me about that. I mean, what goes into that? I mean, you ought to be the ultimate coach. You ought to know all about it. Why did you feel you needed a coach to help you through this process? I do know a lot about coaching. I want to know a lot about Michael. And I know that just because I intellectually get something doesn't mean that I 'm not very human and not very capable of screwing up all sorts of things and getting in my own way. And part of the value of a coach is it just creates an outside person who can see stuff that you can't see, can point to patterns that are playing out. That can encourage you to be braver and bolder. And so for us, hiring Jill, who is our transition coach, she just helped us talk about the stuff that may not have even occurred to me to have talked about. Even though I know a lot about this stuff, and I'm still blind to all sorts of my blind spots. Well, I'm going to follow a little bit of your coaching here. And what else? That's good. Well, I think the value of a coach is that it's a scheduled moment to engage in the hard stuff. So with Jill, Shannon and I would meet, you know, we had different cadences. It was either once every two weeks or once every month, depending on where we were in the cycle. And it was just a space for us to actually get together and surface the stuff that we might not be talking about on the day to day. So one of the questions that Jill asked, and I think I'm a fan of, is what needs to be said that hasn't yet been said. And that is a great uncovering question because Shannon on one side and me on the other side, we both had these moments of, I'm not sure this is big enough to talk about. I'm not sure this is real enough to talk about. I'm not sure if I know how to say or put words exactly to what I'm feeling right now. But what needs to be said that hasn't yet been said creates this kind of space with a formal kind of rhythm to it that allows us to kind of put stuff forward that preemptively helped us deal with stuff that otherwise might have come back later on and kind of cause trouble. That is just a great question. You know, I love that. What are a few big keys that you've learned that it takes to be an effective communicator? This is something that every leader has to do. Well, I can tell you some of the principles that I use, David, and that's not necessarily true that this is going to work for everybody, but they might be helpful. The first is I'm always thinking to myself, what's the least that I can teach that would be most useful? So whether I'm writing a book or designing a keynote or designing a training experience, often what communicators do is they try and cram in more content to prove their value, also to give them a safety net, also to make them feel secure that they're, you know, I'm doing all I can to serve this person. And if you are truly serving your audience, you need your audience to have the space and the time to actually understand and go deeper on a few good ideas rather than overfill their cup. So I'm always like, I don't want to keep pouring water into a full glass. I want to keep trying to say, what's the least I could teach that's most useful ? So, you know, my books are short. I try and write, design them, they can almost read them in a single go. My keynotes have a few really good ideas and lots of space for practice. And this idea of, at least I can teach, and then the second piece, David, is how do I get the audience to engage in this content? How do I hand control to the audience? So if I'm doing a one-hour keynote talk, for instance, typically 25 minutes of that, maybe more will be an audience, the audience interacting with the content. It means that for half my keynote speech, I'm sitting on the stage watching the audience. And I don't know what's happening. I don't know if it's working. And I'm giving up control. And when you give up control, you step into this place of ambiguity. Is this a success? Is it not a success? But I'm doing that because I'm in service to the audience. And then the third key principle that I try and work on is I try and, you know, somebody once said to me, you thingify stuff. So I take abstract ideas and I try and make them real. So an example that we've already talked about is the advice monster. You know, what the advice monster is, tell it, save it and control it, are three ego states that keep us wanting to give advice rather than practice staying curious. And I could write about that in a kind of quite theoretical, slightly dry, psychological way, or I could invent a metaphor of the advice monster and go, you know, when you're talking and you're desperate to give some advice, and the advice monster comes up out of the dark and goes, oh, I'm going to add some value to this conversation with my advice. That's when people go, oh, I, that I understand the ego states who cares, but advice monsters I get. So the least I can teach, that's the most useful, give the audience space to engage in the content as part of teaching less and giving more space over to the audience, control over the audience and making abstract ideas concrete so people can really get a grasp of it. And then doing a nice summary at the end, point four. Just like you did. You did it right there. You describe your work as putting old wine in new bottles. Explain. Well, one of the anxieties of a creator, whether you're writing or speaking or designing training or whatever it might be, is that I need to be original. And I'm like, you know, I'm not sure I can be original. And when I talk about coaching, you know, Socrates, for instance, was talking about good questions quite a long time ago. You know, in how to work with almost anyone, I'm talking about the power of strong relationships. You know, just been people talking about the power of strong relationships for hundreds of years. So what I'm trying to do is understand that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I'm trying to take wisdom that's already there. And I'm trying to put it into a way that makes it feel more practical and more accessible and more unpointed for a specific type of person. You know, David, you've got a marketing background. You know that you need to understand who your audience is. And then you need to understand what problem they have. And then you need to say, if that's your problem, if this is you and this is your problem, this might be helpful. And what I'm trying to do is I'm going, look, if this is you, if you're a busy manager and a leader, and if you struggle to bring out the very best and the people that you manage or you lead, well, then let me help. I've got some ideas on how to help that. And that's my new bottle, even though the wisdom in it is it draws on age-old wisdom. It's been around for a long time, but I talk about it being a unique image to a known quantity or a unique twist to a known quantity. And it works. It really makes a lot of sense. I want to shift gears here again for a second. And I want to take you back. What's the story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today? I'll tell you this story. So I went to law school in Australia. So a little older than a child, but really not that much older than a child. And there were some parts of university I loved. I did a literature degree at the same time I was doing a law degree. I loved my literature degree. Fantastic. Law was never a happy place for me. In fact, I finished my law school being sued by one of my professors for defamation, just to give you a sense of how badly that was all going. But the thing I loved about law school was we did a review every year. A review is a kind of a skit comedy. It's kind of like Monty Python. And I did, in my last year, I did a skit called Synchronized Nude Mail Modeling . So myself and another friend of mine were, stood on the wings of the stage and the music started playing. It was Ravel's Balero. And we took off our robes and we backed onto stage naked. And we went through a series of coordinated moves for somebody making kind of funny commentary over the top of it. And then we backed off. And I still remember the adrenaline going through my body as I was waiting to do this because it felt right on the very edge of what was possible. And I'll just say, you know, I'm deeply grateful that YouTube hadn't been invented by then because otherwise this would be haunting me still. But this sense of me trying to go, what's the edge in terms of how I can challenge and provoke and find a twist on what might be possible? That that's a kind of core theme in the work I try and do. I'm like, it needs to be funny. It needs to be accessible, but it needs to have a twist to it as well. So you see yourself as a rebel? I'm not sure I use the word rebel, but it doesn't not fit me. I'd say that if people are zigging, I'm trying to zag. You know, as a fellow marketer, Seth Godin would talk about. He'd talk about the power of the purple cow. I don't know if you've read his wonderful book there, but you know, it's like, you know, purple cows stand out. And I'm like, I aspire to be a purple cow. That's great. You know, if you could go back and have a conversation with the 25 year old Michael, what advice would you give him knowing all that you know today? I love my life right now. And I'd be reluctant to do one of those time travel experiments where once more change as a 25 year old and then everything changes. I mean, at 25, I was I just mean, I've made a road scholar. I just moved to Oxford. I just fallen in love with the woman who 30, I mean, literally, last Friday was our 28th wedding anniversary. So I just fallen in love. I was having this amazing experience at Oxford. It was like life was pretty, pretty fantastic as a 25 year old. But I think what advice I would give myself then was if you can be the person who takes the lead in investing in relationships, that is a great gift. You know, I think of people I knew in my 20s and how many of those people I don 't really know now, either part of ways or the friendship has kind of softened and not become as strong as it was. And I'm like, I would have liked to have got better as being somebody who is really good at nurturing friendships. And that's a muscle I'm trying to work on right now. She's like, how do I be the person who is a great friend? We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Michael Bungay, Stanyor in just a moment. But talking to Michael is clear that a curious mindset allows you to get the very best from your people by giving them the space they need to develop their own ideas. It reminds me of the conversation I had with the former chairman of NBC Universal, Steve Burke. He's a master at drawing out the wisdom of his team. We have a philosophy that we call symphony. One of the interesting side benefits of the symphony program, it was a message, a cultural message to everybody in the company that no individual business is important, more important than the company as a whole. And teams do better than individual performers. And I think one of the ways that you get really creative people to work with you and for you and bring you great ideas is if they feel like what you're going to be doing is going to be about their idea, not about you. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Steve. Episode 18 here on How Leaders Lead. You know, the coaching habit, you mentioned sold over a billion copies still doing well. As I understand it, it took you a long time to get this off the ground. I mean, you couldn't sell it to any publishers. What was the tippy point and how did you persevere and how did you actually get this book published to be such a best-selling hit? I mean, you're right. I had this idea of a book. I was pretty excited about it because I think I've been teaching this content for five years. It's important content. I think this will unwear coaching, make coaching and the power of coaching accessible to a lot of people. I had a previous book published by a New York publisher and I'm like, this is great. This is going to be my ticket. And so I went and told them about the idea of the book and they're like, okay, we're not that excited, but go away and write it and come back and we'll see. I wrote it and they went, now we don't like that. I was like, oh, disappointed. But we like you to go away and have another crack at it. So I did. And that actually went on four or five times. And finally by version six, I was like, okay, I've gone through the night of the dark night of the soul. I've reinvented this book seven times for you. And I kind of got really clear about what I've won, what the promise was, the essence of this book. Going back to the way I said, all right, this is it. It's either a yes or a no, no more yes, no, but go away and try again. I'm like, it's a yes or a no. And I was sure I was certain that, you know, they'd say yes because I was like, I'd drawn a line in the sand. And to my total surprise, I said, no, like we're not going to, we're not going to bet on it. We're not going to bet on you. I mean, the other book had sold like a hundred thousand copies, which is pretty good. And I was shocked. So I went away and I licked my wounds for quite a while. And then I was like, I'm, I really think that this book is worth betting on. And so I'm going to self publish it, but I'm going to self publish it as a professional, not as an amateur. So I figured out I need to hire an editor. I need to hire a sub editor. I need to find a designer. I really need to build a team around me to get a book out there that is indistinguishable from a book that would be published by a regular printing press. And that turned out to be a pretty fantastic bet in the end. You know, now I work with a company called Page Two, which are kind of a hybrid publisher. They give you, they give me all the control I want as a publisher, but they have all the experience of a big publishing house. And then the second part of your question was, how does this, how has this book done so well? How has it sold over a million copies? Because, you know, 95% of books sell less than 5,000 copies, 15% of books sell less than 10 copies. So a million copies is a ridiculously large number of books to sell. And David, the answer is, I don't really know. I wish I did because then I'd try and make all my other books sell that many as well. But it was, it was something about actually having to rewrite this book five or six times meant that it's a very tight, tort, beautifully constructed book, just because it's gone through so many iterations. Partly, I committed to marketing it for two years. Often when you put out a book, it gets marketed for about six weeks and then everybody collapses from exhaustion. And this book, I was like, I'm going to commit to two years, championing this book to try and get it to the virtuous circle of spinning. And then thirdly, I just had some fairy dust sprinkle over it and it just managed to take off and I'm very grateful for it. That's great and so are so many other leaders because they've benefited from that hard effort of editing and editing and editing and the wisdom that you had. You know, this has been so much fun and I want to have some more with what I call my lightning round of questions. Are you ready? I'm so ready. Yeah. Okay. One word others would use to best describe you. Generous. What would you say is the one word that best describes you? Content. If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be? I think being anyone else for a day would be mind blowing. Just being in somebody else's shoes and experiencing their life, it wouldn't matter who you were put into. It would change the way you think about living forever. Your biggest pet peeve. A lack of generosity. What's something only Australians would know about Australia? That is fantastic. I would say that Vegemite is one of the greatest spreads ever invented. You have to be an Australian to believe that. You have to be an Australian to believe that. What's your favorite part about now living in Canada? It is access to North America and Europe. The number of books you've read in the past 12 months. I'm a big reader and I'm married to a woman who trained as a librarian. So more than 60 less than 100. If I turned on the radio in the car, what would I hear? Well, I don't own a car, so it would be quite surprising. I mean, I went at the car, come from, it works as radio. But if you listen to who plays most often when I listen to music, it's probably Bob Dylan. What's something about you that few people would know? I think actually, people have listened to this already have figured this out. I think people would be surprised to find out that I have a law degree because no way do I look like I'm a person who has a law degree or practice law or anything like that. That's the end of the lightning round. Very, very well done. That's great. You know, you created a book in partnership with Seth Godin that raised $400, 000 for malaria no more. Tell us about how that project came to be. So I've written a book called Do More Great Work and the question at the heart of that book is how do you do more work that has impact and meaning? And I wrote it for people in the self-help world, but also in organizational world, which is like, there's so much going on. How do you find work that lights you up and how do you work that moves the important stuff forward? You know, in business speakers like strategy and culture, strategy is work that has impact. Work that has meaning means that you're lighting up your right people and you 're building that culture. And I talk about and do more great work, the power of having a great work project, something that you name and you put your time and attention and resource and focus to. And when I finished that book, I thought, well, to not be a complete hypocrite, I should have a great work project. Otherwise, I look like I'm one of those people, it's like, take my advice because I'm not using it. And I went to my local coffee shop around the corner, I'm like, what am I good for? And what am I trying to do in this world? And I'm like, I'm trying to have an impact to the global level. I know that sounds audacious, but that's kind of the way I wanted this thing. And I know about writing books and I'm good at collaborating or kind of asking people to collaborate with me. And the idea of a book where by a book, I get a mosquito net to stop malaria, came to mind kind of like palm shoes, you know, by a pair of shoes, give a bear of shoes away for free. Like, I looked at the millennial goals from the United Nations and curing malaria was one of them. And a mosquito net looked like the smallest unit price of a solution. And I thought, book and mosquito net, there's something interesting there. And I pitched it to the publisher who did do more great work. And they were like, we'll try and make this work, but it's really hard to raise money through books because publishing is this obscure, confusing, dark black box of an industry. It's hard to tell where the money goes or comes from. But at that time, 2011, Seth had just struck a partnership with Amazon where he published 10 books through his own imprint. So I pitched the book to Seth and he's like, fantastic, let's make it happen. And it meant that he could make a deal with Amazon that all the money from the book, not just the profit, but all the money. So Amazon donated all of their time and resources. Seth did his. I was the editor and I got 40 or 50 people to write short essays around doing more great work. And then we launched it and the book hit number two on Amazon overall and it raised close to half a million dollars. So it was a wonderful project and working with Seth Godin, of course, is always exciting. Well, that's great. And as you would say in Australia, good on you, that's a good one. You know, you talk about the importance of leaders giving up power. Where does that conviction come from for you? And what do you see on the horizon that we should all be heading towards? It's a very interesting question. What does that conviction come from? Because I'm not entirely sure. It feels a little bit like when you're asking me before and saying I'm a rebel or I zig when I zag when I don't want to zig, it's kind of connected to that in some way . And in some ways, it's somehow connected to the fact that I have a lot of status and power just by nature of who I am. Like I'm a road scholar, I'm over educated, I'm a tall, straight, white man. I've got all of those kinds of cards that have been dealt to me. And yet most of my life, I've been trying to play with this idea of how does power work and how do we disrupt some of the traditional structures of power to enable other people to be the best version of who they are? So if you look at the deepest political message behind the coaching habit, part of why I love coaching is that it is a shift of power. It moves from somebody telling somebody else what to do to asking them a question and giving them the responsibility to figure that out. That's an act of empowerment in the moment. In how to work with almost anyone, it's like here's how you negotiate a mutual relationship that is safe, vital and repairable. That is also a shift in how things are normally done, a shift in how the power works. So what I hope, David, is that we move to organizations that are increasingly human-centered. They need to do the work. They need to deal with the complexity of their business environment. But the more we can do to keep reminding ourselves that it's humans doing the work at the heart of this, the richer a place work can be. The more work becomes a place where people not only do work that matters and contribute to society, but also become a place where they get to grow and become the best versions of who they are. Excellent. Just two more questions wrap this up. What would you describe as your unfinished business? The way I think about the work I try and do is I work project by project. Kevin Kelly taught me this. He said, "Look, figure out your death date." He actually has a thing called the death clock in his website, kk.org. He was like, "Figure out your death clock." And then he got about five years per project. So I'm like, "What's my big project? What's my worthy goal?" And I will stop and I'll take my best guess at what that next project be. It might be a course. It might be a book. It might be a new business. It might be any one of those things. And I do that until it's done or until it doesn't work. And then I take my next best guess. So my other thinking of it as unfinished business. I'm like, "I have a bigger mission. The way I talk about it is to infect a billion people with the possibility virus, this idea of giving people the capacity to make braver choices. And then I just keep working until I die. And I keep doing the best projects that I can think of. That's great. And let me wrap this up with, what's one piece of advice you'd give to someone who wants to be a better leader? I would probably say, if you can stay curious a little bit longer, if you can rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly, it turns out curiosity is a bit of a leadership superpower. It will help you get clear about what the real problems are. It'll help you get more patience around what their ideas and possibilities are. And it will help you bring out the very best of the people with whom you work. You know, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. And infecting all of us with the possibility virus. I mean, I love that thought. And you never know what you're capable of. And you've definitely demonstrated that throughout your career in spite of the fact that you're highly educated and have all this stuff going for you. You've really made a dent in the world and thank you for it. David, thank you. That's such a nice acknowledgement. And thanks for having me on the part. I really enjoyed it. Don't you just love the way Michael fakes and communicates? It's not just the cool accent people. This is a guy who is engaging at a deep level with himself and with the world and most importantly with the people around him. To me, that's all evidence of his own sense of curiosity. And I couldn't agree more with him when he says that being curious is a leadership superpower. The key is to tame what he calls that inner advice monster, which let's face it , we've all got, including me. Our advice is always well intentioned. But man, we sometimes just don't realize how much it can disempower a person or a team in stifle creativity. But the whole dynamic changes when you choose curiosity. That's how you create space for your team to figure out a problem so they feel empowered. So now the question is, how can you start to apply this big idea? This week as you're interacting with your team, I want you to get curious. Try out Michael's follow up question. When someone gives you an answer, say these three magic words. And what else? Be okay with the silence that may follow and allow your team members to really dig for their best answer. It's a simple way you can start making curiosity your superpower starting today . So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders aren't afraid to be curious. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Liz Elting, founder and former CEO of TransPerfect, a language translation solutions company she grew into a billion dollar business. If you don't have a verb, it's just a dream or a wish. And I think dreams are great because that's how you get inspired to do it. But it'll then just end up being a wish. So verbs meaning action. It's all about actions because I think a lot of people love the idea of being entrepreneurs. But it's about the actions you take day in and day out to get there over a sustained period of time. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]