Season 6 Episode 1: The Word on Coaching - WHO

This episode features David Burkus.  He is the bestselling author of four books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USAToday, Fast Company, the Financial Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS This Morning.

In this lively discussion with David, we talk about the importance of understanding your "Who"  as in who does your work serve.

David challenges conventional thinking that the why or what is most important and presents the benefits of truly understanding who is impacted by the work that you do.

Check out this episode as we share some stories and a few tips on how to leverage understanding your "who".  And listen in on how it can shape the way you set goals.

We hope you enjoy this episode.

Check out our best-selling book The Word on Coaching. A great book to buy for yourself and to give to others!

Amazon.com: The Word on Coaching: 9781737643807: Neely, Debby, Auger, Joann, Fuselier, Kevin: Books

Also, please check out a quick guide about powerful questions: "Embrace the Power of Questions!"    A Quick Reference Guide to Getting the Answers You Need. 

Recommended Books in this Podcast Episode:

The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking: Martin, Roger L.: 9781422118924: Amazon.com: Books

Amazon.com: Pick a Fight: How Great Teams Find a Purpose Worth Rallying Around (Audible Audio Edition): David Burkus, David Burkus, Audible Studios: Books

Transcript

Kevin 0:08

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Word on Coaching podcast. I'm Kevin. I'm here with Joanne. And Debbie. Hi, everybody. Guys, We are coaches three. Three friends with years of leadership and coaching experience who wanna share our passion with others. Our podcast, our four leaders, whether you have the formal title or not, because we know a lot of you out there are leading without a title. We focus on one word that relates to leadership and coaching. We know leadership is hard, so we along with our guests, give you tips, information, a fresh perspective and always a lot of support. We got. Today we are excited to welcome David Burkus. David is one of those people I know from a lot of different places. We actually attended the same graduate school program. I think we had a couple of classes that overlapped. I've seen him as a speaker, he did some work for an organization that I was with and kind of follow him from afar and has watched him be an author, a speaker. Thought leader. I even accused him of being a futurist yesterday, but he can defend himself if he wants to. So, David, why don't you share a little bit more about yourself, your work whatever you'd like to share

David 1:27

today. Thank you. That was pretty good. Yeah. I still don't know how I feel about being accused of being a futurist. Honestly, it seems like an easy job. Nobody ever keeps track of whether or not you got it wrong, but So my, my name is David Buras, as he said. I'm, I'm an organizational psychologist by training. That was the program. Kevin and I went in, I went on after that and did a doctored in strategic and organizational leadership. I taught business school for about almost a decade. And in that time I was also writing books and doing research and traveling around and speaking. And then a couple things happened prior to Covid. The speaking engagements got so frequent that I couldn't stay in the classroom all of the time, so I had to start scaling down. and then when Covid happened, because some of my work focused at the time around remote and hybrid teams, and isn't it crazy there's these companies that exist without any actual home office? People started calling a lot more frequently, and so I had to kinda leave it entirely. And so since about mid 2020, that's been the focus entirely. I like to say, I try and help leaders and teams do their best work ever. Right now that includes wherever they might be.

Kevin 2:31

For today's episode, we always choose a word, and the word for today is who. Yes. You heard me right? Who? I hope this speaks your curiosity. David and I were having a conversation about what the word for today would be, and he chose who, and I sat there and I kind of looked at him like I said, like who, as in who or who as in who. David, can you shed some more light on. And some insight on why you chose the word who.

David 3:01

Oh, I thought it was, I thought it was the who, right. Bob O'Reilly. It's a great song. No. I, the, the, the why I chose who is that I've actually had a problem with the word why, for a long time, since it was really popularized about 15 years ago, and I don't have a problem with it specifically. You know, I, I believe work is too important to our lives to have it. Suck, for lack of a better term. I believe it's, it's too important to our lives to have it not be a source of meaning and a source where we feel like we've actually contributed something to the world through our work. And that's what that the idea of having a powerful why and knowing your mission and vision, et cetera. But I think a lot of organizations took it. And then just did what they wanted to do with it. They just rewrote their mission statement. They just started telling these bold and grandiose stories and, and we started talking about, I mean, disruption is the new keyword for what you're gonna do, or we're gonna innovate or we're gonna do all this stuff. And, and in reality, people. Judge whether or not they're making a meaningful contribution to the world based on the people they can see and how those people are affected. Right? Like your, your brain is hundreds of thousands of years old, long before technology that allowed us to record this podcast existed, and we had a much closer circle then. And so we judged whether or not we were making an impact by whether or not we could see the direct beneficiaries of our work. And so I think the that while meaning and making a meaningful contribution and having a why is important. The best answer to a why is actually who, how much can you point to who is served by the work that you're doing? Who benefits from that work? And if you can't do that, then there's a pretty good chance that the people who are being asked to do that work are gonna find it meaning, Are gonna be drained or gonna be disengaged are are, are gonna try and find meaning somewhere else, probably at a different organization.

Debby 4:42

So I'm glad you're not offended by the word. Why David? Cause I'm gonna ask you to drill a little deeper down into the Why So tell us our audience's leaders, whether they have the formal title or not. So tell us why is this important for leaders specifically to understand this concept

David 4:59

of the. Yeah. Well, I think if you lead people, your part of your job is to provide this answer to who is served by the work that we do. I, I sometimes say, if you're a leader in any role, whether you're a C-Suite leader or not, part of your job as Chief Storytelling Officer for your team, can you tell the story of how the work we're doing serves specific people? Are you capturing the stories and examples and, and, and I'm not, I don't mean to overload it, right? This isn't like you need to do this incredible marketing campaign where you're interviewing all of the stakeholders that are served by your organization. It can be as simple as sharing that. Thank you. You got from a different leader for work, your team did, but making a point to share that back to the team. Right. So I think this is so important because that's where people kind of look for, right? The, I mean this, if I'm being totally fair, the single most important place where we wanna know we're making a contribution is directly from the person we're helping, but we don't always get to hear from that person. And so it, it's incumbent upon team leaders and leaders at all levels who have better access to that, those stories, to be able to bring them back to the team and be able to share why, why the work we're doing is so important by sharing with us who is served by that work that we.

JoAnn 6:06

I like that whole concept. And you know, can you talk a little bit more about the how, how, so, I know I heard that, you know, leaders come back with stories, but what are other ways that they can help their folks understand the importance of who and who they serve?

David 6:24

Let me teach you a, a fun experiment I do with some of the teams that I work with, and then I'll sort how that experiment leads to two types of answers, right? I actually, with a lot of times with teams, I like to play a game we call the, it's a Wonderful Life test, right? And if you remember the movie, it's a Wonderful life. Man's going to Commit Suicide, and the Angel, Clarence, which is a terrible name for an angel, let's just be honest, comes to him and shows him a world in which he doesn't exist. and then gets to see how much worse, essentially, how much worse the world is without his positive influence on the world. And then Clarence. Clarence, I wanna live again. We all, we all remember the movie. We all have been forced to watch it, several Christmases, et cetera. I like to play that game with teams, right? Like obviously not as morbid. We don't all have to commit suicide. But imagine your team just disappeared tomorrow. Like something happened. You were accidentally removed from payroll, you were laid off, you were for whatever reason. Let's do this hypothetical thought experiment. Your team doesn't exist. What changes? What changes inside the organization who is frustrated with not being able to get the work that they need? What happens external to the organization? What, what happens? What are the consequences of that? And I, I will say, I, I'm always crossing my fingers cuz they're, I may one day run into a team where they're like nothing. They just get on, you know, Upwork and hire it out. But that has yet to happen. And that can be a really powerful way to get a team to sort of, Who their primary, who is. That's a weird sentence, but we're gonna run with it. Now, that comes in two forms usually, right? It comes in internal or external. Not every person in every organization, especially a large organization, has a meaningful answer to that. Who is served question that is the customer or the end stakeholder. Sometimes it's just. Internal. We support the efforts of this function by what we do, right? We're not the ones out there interacting with customers. We're not the ones interacting there, making the change with stakeholders, but the work we do does that, right? So if it's an internal one, there's a couple things you can do beyond stories, right? I, I mean the, the number one thing I think you can do is try and make metrics meaningful. Every organization has metrics you can't manage without some level of metrics, but metrics are also. Numbers, you can't really feel them. Right. You, I mean, you can feel threatened if they're going the wrong direction, but that's about it. right? And I liken it too. A lot of times metrics are sort of like, if we're just managing for that, if we're just talking about that, that's like being in a car and saying, congratulations everyone, we have accelerated and now instead of 55 miles per hour, we're going 65 miles an hour. And like. Where are we going? Like we should probably start with that one. So when I say make metrics meaningful, take the time whenever you're revealing them, whether it's, whether weekly, all hands meeting or you're one, one-on-ones with people where you're talking about the ways in which they're assessed. Make sure you can kind of tie that back into the results of your experiment, where you're kind of internal, who is. I also encourage a lot of leaders when I'm working with like a, a large organization and I can talk to lots of managers from lots of functions at once. I encourage them to share gratitude with each other a lot. You know, I already said capture thank you notes and that sort of thing, but if we don't get into the practice of having those cross-functional. Thank you notes and expressions of gratitude, then we don't give other managers ammunition to come back and do it. I did this exercise a couple years ago with a, a senior leadership team. It was only about the top 17 in the organization, but they were talking and at one point there was like this click moment and one of the people in charge of operations who was in charge of basically installing all of the equipment that this company does. Was talking about an incident where someone from the pro procurement department essentially helped them get something in at a price where they could actually make it profitable. And he was like, we never went back and showed you the results of it, but it's actually our most productive plant at this point. And he had no idea. Right? And these two people supposedly are supposed to be in the same. C-suite together and they don't even know, right? So if you share those now, now that guy from procurement can go back and tell his whole team. I know it seems annoying. I know it seems like we're haggling, we're hasling people and going over all the little details, but look what the results of that work are. Right? So, so those are kind of two ways you can do it internally. If it's external, we already talked about one, which is what I call collecting impact stories. Every time you see an example externally, whether it's a news story or whether it's somebody who contacted you, capture it and save that. So you can share that that external. But the, the single best way I think you can do it is actually to outsource it. In other words, to put people in direct contact with those beneficiaries to the extent that it's possible that might be bringing them in. There's a lot of different organizations that do that. One of my favorite examples Medtronic under Bill George, one of the things they would do at every holiday party is they would invite patients who had their pacemakers and other devices into the holiday party, just to spend a couple minutes talking about. the experience they went through and then what their life is like now. And I think a lot of organizations could do that, right? It is a cost, but it's a minimal cost of effort and time to kind of outsource that and, and bring it in from outside. Two ideas for you, right? 1, 2, 2 categories, internal and external, and two ideas for each category. How? How's that? I love that.

Debby 11:12

That's great. Yeah. I think it's so interesting because I, in the last couple years, I feel like a lot of the clients that I coach leaders. Talk about looking for what is the value I bring? Wanting to feel more fulfilled in their role. And the who really gets to that for them, they, and I think the part of the issue is they just have never thought of it. They think of how I do my job and what I'm doing, but they don't think of the WHO piece, which is so powerful.

JoAnn 11:39

Yeah. And if I could tag onto that too, is that that's one of the things that I've. about talk coaching some of our leaders is like, who is this going to impact? Who, who should be in this conversation? Who do you think would appreciate knowing this? And so you've just kind of affirmed some of the things that I, that I've tried to remembers is like, who's gonna be touched? Who's, who needs to be sitting there with you right now? I had a leader the other day. I was really frustrated because something wasn't going according to his plan. And I said, well, who have you talked to about it? Nobody. It's my plan, I said, do you, you think the people that it's impacting, it might be helpful to find out what they think and he's like, he hadn't even thought about who he was thinking about. This is what needs to be done and this is how it should be done. So this is very good timing, Very good timing, David.

Kevin 12:38

I'm always a proponent of slowing down long enough to think about some of these things because I think sometimes we just get so transactional that we never stop to think what is the connection of the who. Like you said, they were in the C-suite together, but they never had that conversation and even think, surely they know what the outcome of that. Thing was, but sometimes we never go back and share the impact or the outcome of those different things. And so very, very interesting story. Most of our podcast, one of the things we wanna do is give people tips and tricks and strategies or different things that they can do. So I wanna. Talk about maybe one-on-one coaching or giving feedback to your people. Can you tell us a little bit more of how we can use this concept of who to support leaders in being better coaches in their role and giving better feedback or acknowledgement or whatever that

David 13:31

might be? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I mean the, the, the first is we, Is that idea of making metrics meaningful. Right. But when I think about coaching, I think of most of what I know about this whole world. I know from one of my mentors and friends, Marshall Goldsmith, right, who pioneered that sort of stakeholder centered coaching model. When Marshall would work with a client, Marshall would basically judge his success based on whether or not the people that worked with that client felt like he had made a positive behavioral change. Right? He or she. Positive behavioral change. In fact, Marshall got so bold that basically he said, I'll work with you for a year, and if they don't feel like you've made a change, you don't owe me anything. Right. Of course if they do think you've made a change, you owe'em an awful lot of money. That's why he was like the world's most booked executive coach. So I, I think about that in the context of you in coaching your employees coaching, anything that we, I hate the term soft skills, I'm just gonna be honest. But anything we might call that more behavioral, interactional coaching, et cetera. Reminding people that everyone has stakeholders, right? Your coworkers are your stakeholders. You're trying to get better. You're trying to be a better performer and deliver better results to enable people to be able to do their work better. But you're also trying on, on that soft side, you're trying to develop more emotional intelligence to be able to collaborate with people better, right? There are other people whose lives are affected by your. Your work at their work. And so you know that that can turn into a conversation where we connect, the reason we're working on these things, the reason we're seeking improvement in this area or, or just growth in this area that we're already good at, is that it helps other people in the organization too. And, and I find that that really does That does motivate people. It seems a little corny. But I think about my own life. There were a lot of things I wanted to improve in my life that I just didn't until I got married. Then I decided I wanted to improve them because now there's a, who benefits from those self-improvement? Had children. Now there's a whole new list of things I wanted cuz I have people looking up to me as a role model just cuz I'm. Well, they have to look up to me. I'm gigantic compared to them. Right? So it, it really does tap into what's what psychologists often call pro-social motivation, right? This idea to improve our own lives or to work hard or to put more effort into something. Because we can see that who, and I think as we're coaching people, just, it doesn't have to be the dominant part of the conversation, but little reminders of that, that we're doing this for more than just you. You're, yes, your life is gonna be better if you make these improvements, but there are other people whose lives are made better too. For a large percentage of the population, that's actually a more powerful motivator than the the benefits it brings to oneself. When you were sharing that,

Kevin 15:55

I was thinking about an experience that I had when I was supervising a team early in my career and my team had gotten behind and we had work kind of stacked up on our desk that was getting behind and there was a lot of frustration on the team so one day I just called a timeout and I said, let's talk about, let's talk about our work. So I went to someone's stack and I took out a request for work that was in their stack. it may have been a change of address. and I talked to my team. I read it off. Karen Jenkins from Iola, Oklahoma is asking us to change her address to her daughter's address because she's had to move in with her daughter. She's been a policy holder with us since 1972. Mm-hmm. and she pays us premiums every month. and all she wants us to do is to make sure her mail goes to the right address. Because what I detected with my team is the work had just become a big stack of work. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It wasn't connecting to a real person waiting for this thing to happen. It had just become a stack of stuff. And I said, we have to understand that for each of these pieces of paper, there's a person. who's expecting this thing to happen and we're not doing it for free. They're paying us Yeah. To do this. And that's all they asked. I said, an address change, I said, A person should not have to wait this period of time to just get an address change. And what it did, it transformed the way my team really thought about the work. It was like, it's more personal. There is a person, there is a who, yeah. Attached to each one of these transactions. Yeah. So he kinda shifted the tide from my

David 17:40

team. Yeah. So what you, what you're talking about in a, in a book I'm working on now I, I love that I, I call it pausing for purpose, right? And I stole this idea from Beth Israel, Israel Deaconess Hospital in, in Boston, which is large, large hospital system in Boston. Their surgical teams in the, OR started developing this ritual. That I don't, I don't remember what they called it. I sort of sterilized it. So I call it pause for purpose, but essentially you've got a routine checklist. Every op or has a checklist now, okay, do we have this? Do we have this? Have we sterilized the equipment? Have we done this? Have we done that? But what they do is towards the end of the checklist, they take a pause and they review the patient information, and they review it in a way that humanizes it. So they'll just, before they're ready to begin the procedure, they will say, okay, everyone, just a reminder, this is Betty Moore. She's 74 years old. she's the mother of three children. She. Said 12 grandchildren, and she is relying on us today to open up the artery in her heart so that she can experience more time with her grandchildren. Like that. Pause, right? And then think about what you do if you're in that or now, and you've, you know, that's that person, right? The same way you transition to form. Into a person you would think that working in medicine, you can very easily do that, but you don't. Sometimes it's just new patient, new patient, new procedure. New procedure, right? Half the time, you know there's tubes coming outta their face and they might even have their upper half of their body blanketed by carpets, et cetera. So you forget that you're actually working on a human. So that little pause for purpose can can do that. For a lot, a lot of teams. And so I'm a, I'm a big fan of that, whether that's doing that like your weekly all hands meeting, Hey, I pulled this story. Let's talk about, about this. Or, or whether that's, you know, there's there's an old apocryphal story. I don't even know if it's true, but it's a good story, so we'll go with it. Of Amazon. In the early days in every meeting room, there was always an empty chair as that reminder that like, we're doing all of this for the customer to provide the best customer experience possible so no one sits in that chair. We leave it empty. So we all have that visual memory that there's a person there. Right. A any of those things can be a powerful way to remind people. That's why we do what we do, right? We, we don't do it just because we wanna improve or cuz we wanna grow or we wanna make more money. We do it because people are actually served by that. And that's how we draw meaning from the world. David, we

Debby 19:47

sometimes talk to leaders about, you know, there's different kinds of leaders that you can be, different ways that you can show up for people. And one of those is you can be a very transactional type of leader or you can be a transformational. Leader. And sometimes we hear from leaders that they're just so busy, such a fast paced that that's why I like your word pause. Right. That they're, they don't take the time to pause and think about it. And I feel like we started down this road and, and more and more when you're talking, I'm hearing that transformation like this is really about transforming people to do their best work and be the best that they can be in the workplace. So will you talk a little bit more about that? How this concept of the, who can help leaders really be more of that transformational leader versus a transactional

David 20:31

leader. I'll tell you what I'll do, right, because I think, like you said, we can see easily how this plays into, you know, idealized influence and motivation in a transformational leadership model. I'll make the transactional case if you want, if you've really got those leaders that are stuck. Right. Well, cuz we know this from research in a myriad of different places. Like one of my favorite studies, again, there's a whole body of literature around what's called pro-social motivation. And one of my favorite studies happened in call centers. Of universities who that are fundraising. Right? And, and Kevin and I both went to a big public state school, so I'm sure you get these calls. I get these calls right, that are calling student workers, calling, asking for requests for donations. And it's a draining job. The average turnover in these types of jobs is, is 400%, right? Every few months the whole group leaves and doesn't wanna come back. And in one experiment, essentially we took half the call center and we gave them a break. We took the other half, we gave'em a pause for purpose, a pause for purpose, where they got to. Will. Will was the beneficiary of their work. Will had received a scholarship fund. Will was a first generation college student whose family would've never been able to afford to go to a school that prestigious, had it not been for that scholarship money. At the end of five minutes it was over. Put everybody back. No sales training, no. Like how to be more charismatic on the phone training. None of that. But in the month following that little meeting, the people who got to meet Will may double the number of phone calls per hour and spent twice as much time on the phone. In other words, in very real numbers, they worked harder. And they made four times as much in donations. Right? So even the results are there. So if we could just go transactional. There's also a, a whole other body of research around creativity and innovation and problem solving that when you are facing a problem, actually reframing it and saying, if I were helping someone in this situation, What advice would I give them? In other words, if I make up a hypothetical who I'm actually more creative. So if we think about how our work helps solve other people's problems, we're, we're more likely to stumble into new innovative ways to serve that customer, to serve that internal customer, et cetera. Right? So yes, absolutely it can, it can work from a transformational standpoint. But the funny part is there's. Overwhelming and continuously growing body of research. That suggests this works pretty well from a purely transactional standpoint, at least what we put in that little pause has a pretty big output. That's a great story.

JoAnn 22:44

I'm going to borrow that.

David 22:48

Oh no, feel free to do it. I, I will, I can tell you much, much more about it when we're not recording, cuz there's certain things I know about it that were left off the scientific paper.

JoAnn 22:59

Well, you know, taking that same concept and, and applying it to goals, you know. Goal setting is a big thing, right? We wanna set goals. How, as a leader can I make the who more connected to the goals? And how can I support those that I am leading, be more connected, their goals, be more connected to who we serve.

David 23:20

So I think, you know, as we were talking about a bit before, this idea of ma making metrics meaningful. So whatever we're judging our growth on, whatever our goals are on, if we can take the two sentences afterwards and say, and here's what that means. But truthfully, if we think about bigger goals, I think it's worth coming up with. Meaningful metrics that might be different and specific to our organization. Right. So I'll give you an example. I'm, I'm a huge fan of this company and, and partly cuz I'm friends with the owner. But I met him after I became a fan of the company. Like I sought him out. But there's a company based at a British Columbia called Pila. and Pila makes cell phone cases and sunglasses and computer cases and all sorts of stuff out of plastic that's not plastic. It's biodegradable. If composted, it's made out of farming byproduct. And so if you throw it in a compost pile, unlike your cell phone case, it doesn't stay on the planet for 10,000 years. It doesn't end up in the ocean. It just biodegrades into dirt. and one of the things they do is they convert their sales numbers into the, the tonnage of plastic that has been saved from the ocean, so the number, you go to their website right now and you can see it, you put an item in your cart and the number changes and at every, all hands meeting at every time they come together. Yes, they look at their sales numbers and their ad spend and what's the return on investment of that is. But there's one more metric in there that is specific and unique and a specific goal that they've set that re reinforces that why they're doing what they're doing, who is served by the work that they're doing on that new metric. So I think that might actually be the other one. Is there a new and actual who focused metric we could start tracking to? It's, again, it becomes specific to each team in each organization, but it's, I think it's always worth the first step is make the existing metrics we're judging on meaningful. Tell me what happens once we go from 55 to 65 miles an hour. But then if we wanna find a whole new way to measure progress let's do that too. Well, I think I'm

Kevin 25:05

gonna steal that one. A who metric, who metric in time goal two. Who is going to be impacted by this? by this effort. So that, well, that's sneaky. We'll be stealing some of your stuff. David Well, David, before we let you go, we have something that we do. We have some questions that we ask all of our guests, and they're not meant to be hard but maybe they might be, but we'll give you a chance to to respond to these. The first one is a softball. What is a book that you think a leader coach

David 25:43

should read? So probably the one I recommend the absolute most is a,, now it's an old book, but it's a book called The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin. Roger was the dean at the University of Toronto business School Rotman. Honestly, his leadership at Rotman is worth a case study in and of itself, cuz he took it from sort of a r. Random backwater University to the most prestigious business school in Canada. But he wrote this book based on interviews with all sorts of CEOs from a strategy perspective, had had managed to combine both cost leadership and some level of differentiation. In other words, they were faced with an either or choice, and they chose. No, actually let's do'em at the same time. And so he calls that the opposable mind. You look at two opposing ideas, two opposing strategies, and you find a way to reconcile in your head and make it work. And that's a huge competitive advantage, right? So I, I absolutely recommend that book to a lot of places, cuz I think it's, if you think about the context of coaching, coaching your team, et cetera, coaching individuals on your team. there's a lot of times you're thinking, oh, this isn't gonna work. I need to do this or this, and there may actually be a a yes and an all encompassing solution. We just need to think a little bit differently on it. And the opposable line kind of outlines how we do that. It's a, it's a great read. Okay.

Kevin 26:51

I'm gonna throw one in here from the David Burkas collection. Which book would you recommend people start with in

David 26:59

2023? In 20? Well there's a, there's a great one coming out called Best Team Ever that's coming out later in 2023. But I'll tell you another one. If you're listening to this, then you probably like audio. And just before the pandemic, we released this really cool project with Audible called Pick a Fight, which was about how. Teams and individuals are motivated. And essentially I said you could take your existing mission statement and you could put it into one of three archetypes. One of them is who, by the way. But there are also other, other archetypes you could put it into the way you talk about it. And then that determines how powerfully, like you can't send mixed. Messages, if you've picked that, we are disrupting, we're revolutionary. You have to stay in that lane and, and that changes your languaging. And it was a really, really fun project to do. And we released it on February 28th, 2020. And so for two weeks it did great. And then no one cared about audio because no one had a commute anymore because of the pandemic. So very few people have picked it up since then. But if you're a fan of audio, you're listening to this podcast, you might enjoy that one too.

Kevin 27:56

Cool. Thank you. This next one is, in your career, in your life, you can think about a mentor or a coach or just someone that you know. Has anyone ever asked you a question that gave you pause, and what was that question? What's the question that made you pause and think differently or even

David 28:17

change your behavior? Well, yesterday my son asked me if there was ever a film for which the sequel was better than the original And I, I still don't know the answer to that question actually, so there's that. But no, a actually, actually, if I could think about the deepest, the question that makes me pause the most often, maybe not the deepest, is actually also from my kids. We had this habit, my, my, it came down through my wife's family. I think it happened when she was a little girl. Her parents did it. She does it with our kids. But she asked them, at the end of the day, we're tucking'em into bed and she'll ask, what was the favorite part of your day? Right? A conversation starter in essence, not just how was school fine, but what was the favorite part of your day? Well, they started asking it to us too during bedtime routine. And I will tell you like it's if, if you can't think of something quickly, Too many days in a row. You need to rethink your work. You need to rethink aspects of your life. Right? I think it's possible for adults to have bad days where there is no answer to that, but if you've got two or three of'em in a row, you've got a problem and you've gotta think pretty differently about your life.

Kevin 29:16

Well, that's, good one. So the last question is, beside the word who, what is your word on. Oh,

David 29:26

does it have to be one word? I, I mean, I could, I could tell you that from a, from a coaching perspective the single most useful phrase I've ever encountered is, tell me more. Right? We do an awful job when we're trying to coach our people. Coach anybody. We do an awful job jumping in and giving advice quickly. They tell us about a specific situation. and then they give us, that's a consultant. That's not a coach. Right? And as a coach, if you're really interested in that, probably the most powerful question you can ask is nothing other than, tell me more. They give you the question, you're, you think you know what you're gonna say? You think you, we naturally do it. My friend Michael calls it the advice monster, right? We naturally do that. But pause that and instead just say, tell me more. and, and usually you'll find you don't need to offer advice anymore if you ask, tell me more enough times in a row, they're like, yeah, that's it. Thank you so much. And they leave and you're like, well, I didn't do anything. I just kept saying, tell me more.

Kevin 30:18

the art of coaching. Right, Well, it has been a pleasure. I've been intrigued. Inspired, and as always, we wanna thank our audience for listening. we'd like to encourage you to check out other episodes of our podcast. We also have written a book called The Word On Coaching. It's out there available where you buy books, and our advice is always buy a book for yourself and buy a book for a friend or someone who needs to be better at coaching. Also, connect with us on Facebook. We are on Facebook at Coaches three and. I want to thank everyone. Thank you, David. Thank you, Joanne and Debbie. And that is the word on coaching.