Brian Glibkowski 00:01
There's two sides of the equation. There's a question side and the answer side, you need to understand both to be an effective communicator. Leadership is like two ropes and the ropes are separate, they're strong. When the ropes are braided together, they're stronger. That's how I'm going to leave each meeting. I'm going to try to inspire and hold you accountable. There are blind spots. We don't realize we're not providing certainty at certain times.
James Laughlin 00:31
Welcome to lead on purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven-time world champion, musician, and now an executive coach to global leaders and high performers. In every episode, I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today on investing yourself. Enjoy the show.
James Laughlin
Thank you for taking the time to tune in to Lead on Purpose. We recently made the decision to remove all odds on the show for the foreseeable future. Your listening experience is my number one priority. If you gain insights or value from the show, and you would like to show your support, please consider making a small recurring donation to cover the significant back-end, admin, and production costs. Even a few dollars per month will make a huge difference. So, thank you. The link is in the show description. Now, let's get straight back to this week's incredible guest.
James Laughlin
AQ Yeah, you heard me right, AQ, not IQ. Today, I'm so excited to welcome Brian Glibkowski. Dr. Brian is an author, researcher, and futurist passionate about the role of questions and answers in business and society. During his research on questions, one simple observation stopped him in his tracks. We know a lot about questions. But we know very little about answers. In grade school. we teach kids about questions, not answers. Our children learn about the six WH questions why, what, when, where, who, and how. And they learn about open and closed questions. There is no topology of answers that we teach our children, journalists, physician, sales reps, and executive coaches, and almost all professionals have been trained in questions, not answers. In Brian's new book Answer Intelligence: Raise Your AQ, he goes deep into his research and the six different answer types. So, you're going to find out what those six answer types are. So, sit back and enjoy the show.
James Laughlin 03:03
Brian, a huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose Podcast.
Brian Glibkowski 03:08
James, thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
James Laughlin 03:12
I'm so excited about this. So, for a long time, and I'm sure the listener is going to probably side with me here. We've thought about questions, you know, the question is just so important. It's all about the questions. When we look at books, you know, a large proportion of books, the title of them are questions. But actually, you have rethought things, you've flipped reverse that, you've researched that, you've done the study. And actually, we're going to talk about the answer to intelligence AQ today. So, Brian, just to get started, what is the answer to intelligence?
Brian Glibkowski 03:43
So, a defined answer intelligence AQ is the ability to provide elevated answers to important questions. So, it's a framework that incorporates questions, but I call it answer intelligence because the new component is really focused on answers. And that's where the majority of my intellectual contributions are focused.
James Laughlin 04:06
Brilliant. And let's take enough so the lesson that's listening right now going okay, I focus a lot on questions, but now I'm going to be open to shifting over this answer intelligence, where might they start to apply it in their life?
Brian Glibkowski 04:19
Well, I think answer intelligence is applied to any important conversation. That's a good starting point. So, if you're in sales, you know, you're going to feel the important questions, you know, on a daily basis, you know, why should I buy from you? What is your product? How do we work with you? And is your ability to provide answers to those questions, whether you close the deal or not? In leadership, you can ask yourself basic questions a leadership you know, why am I a leader? What is leadership? How do I lead? And you provide these answers which you know, we're going to talk about, but it's an area where you want to influence others and you want more effective answers is a good area to stir.
James Laughlin 04:56
I love it. And I said this thing because a lot of leaders talk about not How to Win Friends and Influence People. And that as a framework, but what I see what you've done is so much more in-depth in terms of the research, and you've been rolling this out, you've been rolling this out around the world. In fact, we just spoke. Before we hit record, you've got a partner here in New Zealand, which is incredibly exciting. So, I know that the listeners want to dive in and get their get the meaty stuff here. But who, what, when, why, and how. That's kind of what I did when I grew up in the British school system in Northern Ireland, that's kind of what we focused on, right? Like, ask those questions. But tell me why we should be thinking a little bit deeper and longer than that.
Brian Glibkowski 05:39
Yeah. So, think of it this way. Like, if you're exercising and you go to the gym, you know, you want to exercise your upper body, you want to exercise your lower body also, yes, it's sort of like this idea that balance is important. So, for focusing on questions, it's great to understand the six WH questions and formulating great questions, we should try to understand the type of answers that are appropriate for each question. So, for example, let's say we have leaders listening. And it's important to think about leadership and define it for yourself. So, the question what is leadership? Can be answered with a concept and or a metaphor. So briefly, as a concept, I'll just keep it really brief. The concept of leadership, to me, it's inspiring others and holding them accountable. And leadership is like two ropes. And the ropes are separate, they're strong, when the ropes are braided together, they're stronger. That's how I'm going to lead each meeting, I'm going to try to inspire and hold you accountable. So I've demonstrated there is yes, we need to know the questions to ask in this case, what is leadership to reflect upon as a leader, but it's our ability to understand the particular answers that map to that question, help us gain knowledge and understanding and self-awareness. And then, you know, when we understand those answers for ourselves, we can use those and share those with others. But it's simply saying, there are two sides of the equation. There's the question side, and the answer side, you need to understand both to be an effective communicator.
James Laughlin 07:05
It's funny, because as soon as you mentioned, the two strands of the rope, and then instantly, it just clicked for me as it Yeah, I can see I can feel it just makes sense. So, what actually led you down this track? Or what was the moment in your life? Like, I want to study that I want to go deep on that.
Brian Glibkowski 07:23
Yeah, I think it was sort of an unfolding process over time. And I didn't realize I wanted to study it at first. But, you know, someone said once that in research, you tend to research things you're not good at. And I always felt like, I wasn't as effective a communicator as I wanted to be. I think a lot of us experienced this, we have something to say, we feel like, you know, we can share information, but we're not quite influencing the way we want to. And that's how I felt, for example, as a professor, I have, I thought, I really understood the material and all this knowledge, and I wanted to share it with others and communicate with others. And it just wasn't resonating the way I want it to. So that was sort of the impetus was really self-healing and correction of how can I become a better communicator. And you know, that led me to the research, which we can talk about, you know, if you like with the top golf instructors in the world,
James Laughlin
Let's do it. Let's learn what you learned from those instructors.
Brian Glibkowski 08:20
So, it was pretty fascinating. We, I did some research with the top golf instructors in the world rated by Golf Digest and Golf magazine. And the basic idea was to understand what made them effective at providing answers. So, we studied them for two reasons. And I'll pause. One, they were experts, they're in the Top 50, and Top 100 Golf Digest golf magazine lists, which put them in the upper half of the 99th percentile in the world, there are 25,000 golf instructors in the US alone, and way more than that in the world. And this was a Global list. That's one, but two, we studied them because they taught a wide range of students from touring processing and TV to weekend warriors to your young son or daughter picking up the sticks for the first time. And that meant there was no restriction of range. So, if they could communicate with all these different individuals, those that were less knowledgeable, less motivated all these asymmetries than that would work in other environments. You know, when you're selling, you know, the buyers less knowledgeable than you are that you're leading someone's less motivated. And so representative, very unique sample that that we've since found generalizes, to almost any kind of important conversation in business or outside of business.
James Laughlin 09:39
Incredible. And so, what were the different parameters that you guys were measuring specifically with these instructors?
Brian Glibkowski 09:46
Yeah, it was, you know, we didn't know if the nature of that design is grounded theory design, and we sort of come to the research with no real preconceived notions of what you'll find and the way the research work is you sort of gather this evidence you start to do sense-making and sort of the model or frameworks and the ideas that are going to sort of emerge from the research. And that's what we found, what we found are these people that were just unbelievable communicators, and unable to sort of organized how they did it, we came up with these high IQ practices or techniques they used. But let me give you an example of something that like, was amazing. One of the individuals I interviewed was, was on the Golf Digest 50 list, and he had taught half the people on the list. This is like the gurus, Guru. And he's in the confirmatory portion of our research, and I'm talking to him, and he was unbelievable metaphors. I asked him, you always get the metaphors right. He said, yes. And he wasn't bragging, I think this is how good he was. And then he said, If I don't, I'll have another one at the ready. And that's sort of a lesson for the ability to communicate that, you know, you have all the right answers, you're a student of these answers and connecting your experiences to answers. And you can just, you know, have that command of the material. It's like, you know, give me another example, for your listeners, if somebody here thinks they're a great leader, you know, you're a great leader, when you can communicate your leadership and all the six answer modes, you understand all the different concepts of leadership, servant leadership, and, you know, whatever the different frameworks are, you know, those, you understand the theory, you have stories of leadership, you have metaphors for what you think leadership is, you know, you have procedures and actions of how you lead a meeting, you think about all these answers, but you know, so you're a student of the answers, and that's what these golf instructors were, they were a student of answers and to punctuate this, one of the golf instructors had a library of 3500 books. I'm not suggesting everyone needs 3500 books, but they studied everything about golf, and anything related to golf. So, they knew the physics of golf, psychology of golf, sports, nutrition of golf, that is the type of command that the experts have, that those you know, that want to be, you know, communicating about a particular topic at the highest level is to have that level of commitment. So, you know, that offers sort of one extreme for where you can go, but I'll stop there. I'm starting to digress.
James Laughlin 12:25
Now. It's brilliant. Thank you, Brian. So, it sounds like for those to have a high AQ, you've got to go deep on a subject matter. It's not about going a mile wide, and an inch deep. It's about going like an inch wide and a mile deep. So, they develop this AQ, through a really deep understanding of a subject matter. Would that be right?
Brian Glibkowski 12:45
Yeah, it is. But it's also more complicated than that, in that, you know, it is about depth. But when you're an expert, you often start to approach breath as well. So, for example, you know, one of the golf instructors, you know, shared an example, or a story of a metaphor, this particular golf instructor taught Cy Young Award-winning pitchers in the United States baseball. So elite pitchers, and he was trying to compare the balance in golf with the balance in baseball. And he used the metaphor and basically said that the balance in golf baseball and is the same and that the throw in baseball is similar to swinging golf. And you know, so you make this dynamic balance and how balance shifts. The point is this may not be the best example. But you're sort of able to understand another sport sort of horizontally. Or if you're talking to an executive, you know, as a golf instructor, you know how to have metaphors that relate to the business world, you know, so you wouldn't think at first, like knowledge of business, it's important for teaching golf. Imagine if you're a golf instructor, and you're talking to a top CEO, and you're talking about you making some metaphors, and you have references to procedures that relate to mergers and acquisitions. I mean, it seems totally far afield. But that's how you can, you know, connect to someone and really get to them. And that's what these people could do. I got the sense talking to them is golf instructors that, you know, these are like the perfect dinner guests, you could talk to him almost about anything horizontally. So, it's sort of paradoxical, they're yes, they're very deep into what they know. But they also are sort of, you know, willing to make connections to a lot of different areas in life.
James Laughlin 14:36
So, that kind of inspires me to think a little bit about self-awareness. In your study and research define these individuals that had the high AQ, they had a high degree of self-awareness.
Brian Glibkowski 14:48
You know, it's a good question. I think, to some extent, that might be a little bit outside of our scope. But I will say this, I think they thought in terms of the questions and answer types, intuitively. You know, this bottom up, we studied how they did it. So, they did it naturally, it's sort of like, like an athlete in baseball like Ted Williams, he was just a natural hitter in baseball. But he wasn't really a great coach, because he wasn't really aware of how he did it, he just did it. So, to some extent, you know, they could have been just intuitive. And we didn't really ask them that wasn't part of the scope. But I will say for like, the average person, or the average communicator, or anyone who's trying to improve, not at that level, and myself included, there are blind spots, that we don't realize we're not providing certain answers types. So, for example, like, say, sales reps are very focused on stories, but they might not realize other answers are important. You know, as metaphors can really unlock a client, you know, or speak of our colleagues that use a cue in the aviation industry, aviation industry, for example, heavily index on procedures. So if you're a German military pilot, let's say roughly, you got to this is I don't remember the exact but for something like a 500-page manual to be a German military fighter pilot, the German aviation industry has like five acts that it's like a 2500, page manual, nothing crazy. So, the point is, every time something happens in airplanes, everything is we put a procedure around it. But procedures don't always save the day, like, you know, when Sully Sullenberger landed the plane in the Hudson River, in New York, it wasn't the procedures, it was other answer types and AQ terms. And frankly, even very subtle things like, you know, mental models for ideas like calm and referencing stories during their life that kept them calm at the moment that allowed them to save lives, but it wasn't the procedure. So, the point is, for each of us, we might over-index on something, and in that focus on something else, and that was sort of a learning.
James Laughlin 16:57
And how do we catch ourselves when we are over-indexing? How do we become aware of that?
Brian Glibkowski 17:03
I think to start with, it's about realizing that there are six answer types. So, if you don't know their six answer types, then you're not going to know you're missing something, you know, so for me, when I practice, AQ, was the starting point. When I was a professor, in and out of academia, I would teach classes like negotiations, and to be really succinct about this. I knew the theory; I had great stories and great metaphors. But I was falling short on the procedures and actions. I might talk about some technique for, you know, integrative negotiating, and someone would say, ask, How do you do it? And I wasn't providing them, with the level of sophistication of answers and the procedure and action side that I did with the theory side, for example. So, that was frustrating to people. To give you an example, like, you know, how you have to, you know, be aware of and focus on the answers. Like, let's imagine you're someone in sales that loves to tell stories, and I've had this experience where they're so convinced it's only stories that matter. Here's an example. Opposite of stories being important. Imagine you go to the convenience store, and you want to buy a candy bar, a Mars Candy Bar, he asked the clerk, how do I find the Mars candy bar? And the answer you're looking for in EQ terms is a procedure, which is steps, you want the clerk to say go down, aisle one, take a left bottom shelf, you do not want the clerk to give you the history or the story of Mars candy bars. So, it's about its awareness. If we know there are questions that map to certain answers, we can catch ourselves, because we'll know that certain answers have appropriate answer responses. And the opposite of this would be, again, people to sort of rambling, you know, like, we've all been in meetings where everyone just tells stories all the time, like, so how am I Oh, that's the only answer we need. Let me just tell a story. You know, it doesn't work that way.
James Laughlin 18:56
And these answer types are these answer responses. I'm fascinated to find out what they are. So, what are the six different answer types?
Brian Glibkowski 19:05
Yeah, so I'll go through them briefly. What question is answered by a concept in metaphor? So, for example, you know, trust, you could define trust and break it into a metaphor. So, I talked to a consulting firm, one time that defines trust as the client that does more than one type of business with us. That means they trust us. They only do one line of business is transactional. So, you can disagree with the definition, but that's a definition. And they had a metaphor. They said We're the trusted advisor. We're the third card in the Rolodex behind the lawyer and they counted more than us. So again, you can disagree but wow, they have command. That's the what question concept, the metaphor. The why question is answered by a story or a theory. So, I'm not going to give you an example of this. But we all know what stories are, right? And stories have a moral of the story. And that sort of relates to the theory, the theory is cause and effect logic. You know, for example, you know, if employees are engaged, they're going to perform at a higher level, that could be a theory, cause, and effect. And then you can have a story that shares that, let me tell you a story about when our employees are engaged in at least the higher performance and you tell that story. So the story is, you know, emotional connecting to experiences, the theory is more objective. And you can even talk about alternative hypotheses, you know, what else is going to cause performance besides engagement? Maybe it's something else. And then you can also call a theory strategy, you know, what the strategy we're doing. Then you have the how-to question which is answered with a procedure and an action. So, to give you an example procedure that relates to the steps in a recipe, the 10 steps in baking a cake is a procedure, there are steps, and any given step really involves an action like cracking an egg. The real what, a procedure does that catalogs and organizes the sequence of actions, but they're distinct. So, you can tell me the procedure for how you lead a meeting. And then you can tell me a key action you do within that procedure. Any actions really are unique, or best practice. So, you know, if I'm running a meeting, a best practice action could be an agenda slide. And I like to say an example of unique action. If I have PowerPoint, can hold up my keyboard Ctrl B, and the keyboard, if I am in full presentation mode in PowerPoint will make the screen blank. Arguably, that's a unique action, and many people don't know about it. It's not absolutely unique. But I might do that if I want to give the floor to someone asking a question. Or maybe I've deviated from the content in the slide. That's like, you know, high-quality action, arguably. So anyways, those are the six answer types. And they map to different what, why, and how questions.
James Laughlin 22:19
Incredible work in say, the last year or so when we've been through quite uncertain and turbulent times, you know, personally, professionally, nationally, like it's everywhere been dealing with uncertainty, where have you seen this model, really support an organization or support a community?
Brian Glibkowski 22:36
Yeah. There are a couple of themes macro level. One is, I think, going back to the pandemic, you know, both themes relate to the pandemic, but the pandemic and also movements like black life matters. I think there's a general desire within society, to Yes, have questions, but people are interested in the answers, you know, they want the solutions to these big problems, and probably nothing is more powerful to emphasize that in terms of the COVID vaccines, you know, there were questions asked of our scientists, the scientists provided answers, you know, arguably, you know, I mean, of course, it's a tragedy. But, you know, let's say those are important answers for our time. So, you have a similar need for other movements and a desire for answers to movements like black life matters. So, I think there's an idea the answers are important. Related to that COVID in virtualization is putting more of a premium on communication. So like, when we're doing zoom calls like we're doing here if you're doing a meeting with clients, the dynamics have changed, whether it's sales or a meeting, what do we have, you have shorter meetings, people's attention span is less, there's more of a premium, and high-quality communication, like in sales, you know, used to be back in the day, you could take someone out to dinner wine and dine them for two hours, and then you talk sales. Now, even if people move back to the office, people don't want to meet you face to face all the time going out to dinner. You know, it's about a quick zoom call and some sales calls, you know, people report to me the clients have their cameras off. So, the focus on quality answers and conversations matters more than ever. And with AQ, there are two things that it allows you to do. It allows for higher quality answers, but also more efficient answers. So, you respond to the question being asked you respond in the right way more efficiently, you move faster through things so that's the second thing that I think is the biggest application for AQ is based on the virtualization of communication, a crisis of effectiveness EQ is something that can help with organizations trying to be effective communicators in this environment.
James Laughlin 24:59
Really powerful! And say from a parental standpoint. So, you know, some of the listeners will have kids, and I certainly have a little boy, what are the benefits of equipping our youngsters and young leaders with the AQ model?
Brian Glibkowski 25:14
Yeah, I think if we just take a basic approach towards this leaning into what we already value, we value questions. We want our children to ask important questions about the world around them. But I think we also could expect and want them to develop compelling answers to those questions. And it's sort of that simple. And there are ways, you know, we can help engage our students and move them along in different techniques. Like, for example, this is true for sales, it's also true for a child's understanding of something, you know, using AQ, of course, you know, might depend on their exact age, you know, per se, but, you know, one idea is to truly understand something, you need to be able to communicate it in six ways. You know, so if I'm like, in a sales meeting, or something or leadership, I'm talking to my team, I give the story very compelling. And then someone leans in and says, Well, how do I use this in my next meeting? And you have no answer for it, it's not equally as compelling as there’s a gap. So hike, you know, so we should educate our students, I think our children to develop six answers for something that's really important. And that is sort of, a way to gauge the quality of our responses. So that's, that's one thought. You know, and the other thought is, as parents, you can use this to communicate with your children, provide them with compelling answers, engage them in conversations, as we get tough questions, as parents, you know, like your young daughter or our young daughter, my many asks, you know, implicitly or explicitly what is beauty? That's a tough question, right? So, you want to define it as a concept, and you have that perfect metaphor, put that in relief. So, we're not talking of course, about you know, any kind of objective external beauty. But you know, the more inner beauty, you know, how can you frame that? So, the child increases self-confidence and gives them the tools. Those are a couple of thoughts.
James Laughlin 27:13
I love it. Could we try that? Can we try? Ask a question and then you come at it with the Six. Six? Yeah. What's the topic you love? What's a topic that's dear to you?
Brian Glibkowski 27:25
Oh, geez. I like sports in you know, you know, Premier League Soccer like coffee. Okay. Maybe we could work on this together. Or you can ask the question, but you can help me as we're going. Because one thing about AQ, I like to say is, I'm a coach, not a player, you know, I try my best, but I'm making no attempt to say I'm the best communicator, maybe someone else can use these tools much more fluently than I can and that's fine. Go ahead.
James Laughlin 27:58
Let's look at sports. So, what makes the sport important?
Brian Glibkowski 28:06
Yeah, I think, you know, so the question here is just to sort of reiterate what makes the sport important and one thing is with AQ, sometimes if they use the word what that might be a what question how the question or why question that young child may say, how if this sort of map it to which level is that at? And so, what makes sports important? So, I think I'll answer that still. So, what question and I'll say, you know, probably say something along the lines of sports, basically, are a reflection of what we value in life. Okay. So that's a concept answer. And then I'll give you a quote. So quotes are related to concepts, they help us understand concepts. Okay, so I'll give you a quote from one of our AQ partners. Richard Heim, from London. And he told me this, this quote, he said, novices practice until they succeed once. Experts practice until they never fail. You know, so that we think about that related to sports and microphone, you know, sports is the reflection of life. You know, it's something on stage, it has the drama, and we watch these athletes because they are trying to aspire towards, you know, not failing, you know, it's a different level of performance. And I think, you know, as someone that enjoys human capital, and you know, achieving your best you look at these athletes, and everything about them at the highest level is about, you know, developing their skills. They have coaches, you know, around every corner, and you know, those in the coaching business or training business, these elite athletes have everything psychologists, all these teams, and it's sort of a microcosm for what high-performance, you know, is or could be in the real world. We see this parallel. And so that's sort of where my mind goes with this. And I'll pause there, you know, that answer was sort of long-winded, you know, arguably, they could have had a shorter answer. But sometimes when you're doing it on the cuff, you know, it's more difficult to come up with the answers. I just provide just their concept, the answer and you know, go to a metaphor. Yeah, but let me pause there and see, you know, what other questions you have for me about sports?
James Laughlin 30:32
Yeah, my natural question then is, like, I get excited by what you just taught me. And then I got okay. How can I embrace the sport in my busy life?
Brian Glibkowski 30:45
Yeah, I think, you know, embrace sports by being a participant or watching sports.
James Laughlin 30:51
Yeah, I think participation and engaging in sports and teamwork.
Brian Glibkowski 30:57
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, sort of related to this concept of reflection of life? I think so how can you make this part of your life? I'd say is, you know, in terms of, you know, procedure or action, you know, this may not be the best answer, this is sort of my answer, how I sort of view sports. You know, I like to think about sports at the same time and think about other things I want to do in life. And I don't really separate the two, I do that for a lot of topics. But one of the things about sports is about interval training, you know, when you do different intervals, well, that's very consistent with high-performance learning theory. And that's about doing things at different intervals. And not always doing the same thing at one time. Like, for example, there's been studies on sports. So, if you are sticking with baseball, you go to the park and you see children practicing baseball, a bad way to teach children about baseball is for the father, sons that keep you know, the mothers to throw the children to throw the ball at the same speed every time, we do that the same speed every time. So little Johnny or Susan hits the ball, right? And we say, Oh, good job, right? But that's, in a way, sort of the wrong way to teach. What you want to do in learning theory is something called interleaving, where you want to basically vary the pitches, low pitch, fast pitch, curveball, and obviously lower, you know, younger kids, you know, the variance would be a little bit less, maybe, you know, high ball, low ball, slow, fast, might be the way to go. But we learned through interleaving, and we don't learn to improve by just doing the same thing over and over again. So, as I'm reflecting on interval training, it makes total sense as it relates to interleaving. So, this is a reason to do interval training is your training and your fitness, you're doing short sprints, longer jogs, etc., and you change it up. So, for me, you know, this may not be the best answer. But, you know, in getting involved in sports, you know, when I try to think about other aspects of my life and try to connect them together, and it gets me more excited about doing sports. And so that's my answer. That may not be the best answer. But, you know, that's my answer to that.
James Laughlin 33:38
I love it. Thank you, Brian. What I'm getting from this is that AQ, there's no, you can't install a queue and overnight bang, away we go. It's a practice. It's a muscle that we develop. It's a model. I love that. And for the listeners that are listening, going, okay, AQ, is very intriguing. I want to really, you know, go deeper on what are the ways behind that. What are the, you know, the benefits of having better AQ, as a leader, as someone who wants to be a high performer and be world-class at what they do? And as somebody who wants to connect with humans, like better relationships, better health, so you know, what are the benefits?
Brian Glibkowski 34:16
Yeah, let me connect, and don't let me forget the connection to other humans. I want to emphasize that just writing that down, let me give you a couple of benefits for leaders but this you know, I'll say it frame in terms of leaders, a couple of benefits. One is you can connect your experiences to answers. So, you might be frustrated, you're not influencing people, or you're not being heard. If you use a cue, you can catalog the experiences you already have and put those into stories into metaphors into procedures. So, that's a great starting point. Second, it gives you a vehicle to build upon your knowledge. If being a leader is important to your brand, you know, maybe read a couple of Harvard Business Review articles on leadership to understand the different concepts of leadership and choose, you know, the concepts of leadership that connect to you in being a student of leadership. The same goes for all six answer types. Second, you can learn a little bit more about AQ and things we haven't really covered. But there are high IQ practices or techniques, ways to questions, maps to eat the answers and start to learn those and practice those. And that will, those two things combined together to understand the framework cataloging answers as being understanding techniques will increase your confidence. So then when you get into life situations that are difficult, even like the questions, you're asking me, James, I, you know, I wasn't sure and all these, maybe not the best answers, but you're going to be more confident, and it's going to, the third thing is going to happen is you're going to influence more, you're going to your going to win the deals, you're going to have more gravitas in meetings. And those are the benefits. So that's what AQ does it gives you a framework to navigate important conversations, both questions and answers. And it'll make you, by the way, a better question-asker. So, like, I may, you know, ask you something, James, and say, I don't understand why, you know, why do you want to move to this other company? Or why do you want to be a leader? And I'm really looking for our story and theory answers, and I can even help you I can say, can you tell me a story, about why you want to lead the organization? So, I can use my knowledge of AQ to ask for the type of answers, you know, and that's, that's helpful. You know, and I'll just say in terms of connecting to humans, we all want to be understood. And I'll give you a straw-person sort of idea for effective conversation. Imagine your next dinner conversation or your last one that was with a friend. What are those conversations when they're good? Both sides speak equally, both sides, ask and answer questions equally, and both sides care about each other. So, you take that now and transport that idea to leadership or sales or any conversation. That's what you want to do. It's not about you know, you know, just providing all the answers or asking all the questions doing both. This gives you tools to navigate those conversations when you use AQ, last thing I'll say is within those conversations, they can become upward spirals. Start with one little conversation, and then you say a great metaphor. And then I ask a question, we're going up and up and up. And before you know it, that dinner just flies by or that leadership, meeting flies by, sales meeting flies by, and all we know is we just had a great conversation.
James Laughlin 37:43
I think, you know, certainly for me, I can reflect on some recent conversations like that, where it was just an incredible experience. I felt we were equally contributing, there was mutual trust and likeability, and respect. And also Yeah, there was a mixture of stories, metaphors, ideas, tactics, it was you ticked all those. So that's pretty interesting. And I guess this is a very important question. I always like to ask this towards the end. But if we were too fast forward towards the end of your life, and we knew it was your last day, here on Earth, and someone very young, someone very near and dear in your life, it could be a grandchild, great-grandchild, they will say, Brian, how do I lead my life on purpose? What advice would you have for them?
Brian Glibkowski 38:35
I think my advice to them would be, you know, follow your passion. And you hit the fan that passion, figure out what it is, and just follow that path. I think that that's what leads to joy and happiness. It sounds sort of simple, but it's too easy to get distracted from what you really value. I think many persons myself, I think, gosh, I wish I would have done some of these things earlier, the stuff I really love. But don't put it off, and just follow your passion and do it well.
James Laughlin 39:11
That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And as we think about you, following your passion and sharing your research, your wisdom, and of course, your book, I'm going to put a link for the listener right now, in the show notes for Answer Intelligence: Raise Your AQ. I'll be sure to put that in there. So please, share with us what is your passion. Where are you headed? What's the next 5-10 years look like for you?
Brian Glibkowski 39:38
That's a good question. My near-term goal is to spread AQ around the world. We have partners in 15 countries now. And I'm very interested in working with others that you know, want to push the boundaries for what AQ is and how it's used in different conversations. So, I say For the next five years or so at least you're going to be focused on that. And beyond that, I don't know, we'll see maybe it's more of this or could be something else. But I welcome whatever way the journey may go.
James Laughlin 40:12
And I love it. Well, Brian, I'll make sure to put all the details of how people can get in touch with you. Because there might be a listener listening right now that goes, you know what, I want to learn more, I want to learn how we can bring this into our organization, into our team, into our community. So, I'll make sure that we do that. And you never know there might be a very interesting collaboration or partnership that comes from that.
Brian Glibkowski 40:32
Definitely, thank you so much for having me. You were very generous hosts with excellent questions. So, thank you so much.
James Laughlin 40:40
Oh, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on Brian. I'm sure it'll not be the last time we speak. But thank you so much for taking the time to connect.
James Laughlin
Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button. And I'd love it if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks. And leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.