In this episode of Business Explained, I interview Michael Bungay Stanier, author of “The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More And Change The Way You Lead Forever.” We discuss how to use some truly powerful coaching questions to boost your ability to help others.
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It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s time to confront our fears…
The Evil Queen stood in the doorway. The terrifying thing wasn’t the smoke rising from her hair, the sinister red glow emanating from her fingertips, or the half-eaten apple rolling on the ground beside the body of Snow White in the background; it was the look of naked vulnerability on her normally regal face. The source? The crumpled paper clutched in her right hand: the results of her 360-degree evaluation.
The Evil Queen doesn’t think of herself as evil. Neither does the Tasteless In-Law. They may always show up with the best of intentions, but they just don’t seem to “get” that bringing fireworks for the kids’ birthdays is just awkward. Or how about that yearly impression at the Thanksgiving dinner table that, in the words of Avenue Q, is “just a little bit racist?” They can’t fathom that some things are just … inappropriate.
Unfortunately, there are times in our lives where we’re probably the ones with cringe-worthy conversation, only everyone’s too polite to tell us. After all, those fireworks seemed like a perfectly appropriate gift for little 7-year-old Sydney. There’s one way to know if we’re That Inappropriate Person, however, and it’s the scariest thing we can do: ask.
Approach a friend, family member, or colleague. Simple ask, “I want to be the best friend possible. Can you tell me how I’m doing? Please be honest. What can I do better?” If they have hard feedback to hear, it’s probably just as hard for them to say, so take it well! Write it down, smile, and say “Thank you.”
Realize that other people see us differently than we see ourselves. You may think you’re a Superhero fighting for Good, but the people around you find you a bit more of a Monarch of Evil. By finding and closing the gap, you can bring yourself closer to making the outside you match the Superhero You.
So get moving! Use the answers! Read over the list of feedback. Choose one thing to change, and for 90 days, change that one thing. Then when you’ve mastered it, go on to the next thing (trying to accomplish all the goals on the list at once is just too much). Then ask again, to find out if you’ve made the change.
This even works for the Evil Queen. She’s learning. She’s decided to lay off the poison apples and put her efforts into doing good deeds, like finding homes for orphans. She says there’s a gingerbread house just beyond the stream that is happy to take as many orphans as she can send over. It isn’t perfect, but it’s progress.
If you want to change your life, how do you do it? I used to think it was hard. Then I realized that most of the opportunities in life have come through one simple activity: talking to people…about stuff. Who you talk to, and what you talk about, ends up building your reputation, and gets people thinking of you in ways that lead to new opportunities.
You don’t always have the power to talk to the right people, but you always have the power to talk about the stuff you think is important. Once you start talking about what you care about, you quickly find the other people who care, too.
Start by changing the conversation with your current group of friends and colleagues. They’ll make it clear really quickly if they’re the wrong audience.
A mid-50s postal clerk called for career coaching. She’s close to retirement. In her spare time, she’s designed a low-cost, easy-to-assemble housing unit she believes could revolutionize third world housing. Her co-workers all pooh-pooh her idea: “You should realize you’re just a postal clerk with delusions of grandeur. At your age, you should just be thinking about retirement.”
Those weren’t the people to talk to. Talking to me was a good next step. I don’t have third-world housing connections, but I know people who do and can refer her. She changed her conversation and is already getting closer to people who can help realize her dream.
Be on the looking during the conversation, and pounce on opportunities as they arise. Last year, I was going through career angst. The only things that seemed exciting: theater and saving the world. Sadly, theater is tough to make pay, and there weren’t any save-the-world job openings on Craigslist.
I was talking with my friend Jason about my desire to save the world. Lo and behold, he had just been tasked with the job of … creating a conference to save the world! Hosted by MIT, the SOLVE conference would convene movers and shakers, technologists and policy makers, and be about initiating real action to solve world problems.
I immediately asked to get involved. I presented my ideas to the SOLVE team, and was given an invitation as an attendee to SOLVE 1.0. Will SOLVE be the right vehicle for me? Who knows. But one way or another, it introduces me to a new community to talk to, who share my concerns and aspirations. And therein lies opportunity.
Now it’s your turn to change your life by talking to people … about stuff:
How you describe something—the words you use—can dramatically affect perception. That’s the entire principle behind the business concept of “market positioning” as laid out in the seminal book, Positioning by Ries and Trout. Call Government insurance claims adjustors “death panels” and you can get a populace up in arms. As long as you don’t call private insurance claims adjustors the same thing, that framing can easily be used to get people extra-scared about government health care funding, while quietly directing attention far away from the private insurance adjustors who routinely find reasons to refuse or limit claims for necessary procedures.
Today I’ve noticed a business practice that uses a clever description to engage in the purest form of class warfare I’ve ever seen.
From what I can gather, when people use the phrase “class warfare,” they are referring to one socioeconomic class deliberately targeting another socioeconomic class for purposes of exploitation or taking what they have, ultimately without really doing anything to deserve it.
Let’s think this through. How do you know someone is in financial straits? Well, if they are having trouble making ends meet, and occasionally overdraw their bank balance.
Let’s consider a not-so-hypothetical “Janice,” who uses the same bank as I do. Janice is a house cleaner, who lives month-to-month with barely enough to pay her bills. Janice has a larger-than-expected automatic payment go through her checking account for $350. The bank charges a $35 overdraft fee, plus $5 every three days as a “continuous overdraft fee.” There’s an amount of money Janice is expected to pay back ($350), and the bank has temporarily allowed Janice to use that money. They not only charged a 10% immediate fee, but they are charging a 1.42% fee every three days, and they expect to receive the money back.
IN WHAT UNIVERSE IS THIS NOT A LOAN???
And on an annualized basis, $5/3-days on a $350 balance is $608 per year. $608 interest on a $350 balance is a 174% effective interest rate. If you fold in the $35 initial fee, that brings the interest rate to 184%.
184%. And by calling it a “fee” instead of a “loan,” the bank gets to charge 184% interest.
And note: this is the most reasonable way to model the situation. If Janice had paid the $350 back the next day, she would still have been charged $35 for a 1-day loan, which is an effective interest rate of 3,650%. Yes, you read that right. By paying back her loan after one day, she was charged 3,650% interest.
Who gets that money? The rich people who own the bank.
If this isn’t the purest, most exploitive, outrageously usurious example of class warfare, in which the rich target those who are explicitly out of money and charge them fees that make Mafia loan sharks look like amateurs by comparison, I really don’t know what is.
So what’s the solution? Well, other than a return to the early 1980s, where banks paid interest and didn’t charge fees, and when overdraft fees were more like 18%/year at the most, I don’t know. Apparently that scenario is considered to disastrous and horrible to contemplate (at least by the banks).
Maybe it’s time to nationalize the banks. Please. Because private banks are destroying America. I’m sure my conservative friends will have all kinds of reason why this is a bad idea. They will shriek and tear their hair out because I am suggesting something that is so UNFAIR and SOCIALIST. But then, having enough money so they don’t get overdrawn, they are never routinely charged 36,000% interest on their overdraft loans. Instead, they scream bloody murder at the thought of having their top marginal tax rate increased by 2-3%, because that’s so horribly crippling that no sane $150K/year person should have to bear that unspeakable horror. And as for Janice and her 184% bank loan, well, that’s just the penalty she pays for the crime of being poor. I agree there’s crime being committed to here—not legally, but morally and ethically—and it sure isn’t coming from Janice.
CORRECTION In the first revision of this article, I erroneously wrote that the $5 “continuous overdraft” fee was weekly, and Janice’s effective interest rate for a yearlong overdraft was 74%. Further reading of the bank’s fee schedule reveals that it is every 3 days, not weekly, thus bringing the interest rate to 174%.
Last week I wanted to buy product X, locally. I couldn’t. Every search phrase I could come up with took me to a custom site from a big company. “Widget, Miami, FL” didn’t go me Miami Florida local businesses, it gave me specially crafted, search engine optimized pages from Walmart.com, saying “Miami Widgets” on a domain that redirected to Walmart.com.
I rarely issue proclamations about the future, because I’ve noticed that my ability to predict trends is reasonable, but my ability to pick the timing of those trends sucks eggs. But let’s give it a shot:
The more that media companies and software companies and game companies rely on advertising as their primary revenue base, the more the supply of advertising spots will increase. Eventually, the supply will exceed the demand and, except for a few extremely high-traffic sites, ad prices will be driven down … because ads will become much less effective unless the advertiser has the time, money, and skill to do the detailed analytics needed to find the few venues where they get a positive ROI on their money.
This will drive a lot of the ad-supported businesses out of business, because they just don’t have the reach to be able to be one of the high-value ad space suppliers.
This will drive a lot of smaller businesses out of business, because those smaller businesses don’t have the resources to spend on marketing analytics, which will become necessary for finding the few advertising outlets that actually work for those small businesses. The marketing analytics will become a cost of being in the game.
In other words, the internet will drive us toward a more anemic economy where there are a few big-company winners, and those without the resources will lose.
(Essentially, the internet raises the playing field for everyone to the point where only big companies can survive.)
There will always be exceptions for specialty niches, but not for general commerce.
I hope I’m wrong, but I from what I see on the ground, it looks like a plausible scenario.
The essence of a strong brand is differentiation in a way that makes customers want to use your product or Service. JetBlue has announced a decrease in legroom and increase in baggage fees in an attempt to boost lagging profits. All I can say is, “idiots.” The entire key to branding is to have strong differentiation from your competitors. In Airlines, the only differentiators are where you fly, your prices, and your service experience.
For JetBlue, service experience has long been a serious differentiator. I would go far out of my way to fly JetBlue instead of other airlines, and I’d pay more, because the experience was just so nice. The fact that the fares were competitive was nice, but I would have paid a premium for the level of service I got.
So now that profitability is lagging, how does JetBlue choose to respond? By attempting to maintain low price position and moving towards a low service position too. Heck, what are commodities for, if not as a dying place for once-strong brands who bow to the short-sighted idiocy that has become the financial markets.
The current JetBlue executives should have their salaries and bonuses clawed back in five years if this does, indeed, herald the beginning of the end of a once-strong brand.
SnapChat just revised their privacy policy. I decided to read it. It looked pretty good. Then I got to the section How We Use Your Information. How does SnapChat use the information? To provide services. To communicate with me. To monitor trends. And so on.
The final bullet point? Carry out any other purpose for which the information was collected.
In other words: SnapChat has no privacy policy, and places no limits on what they can (and presumably will) do with your information.
Google’s privacy policy is similar. It sounds really grand, but if you read it carefully, in critical areas it exempts Google from any actual restrain on behavior by including similar clauses to the SnapChat clause.
Please face it: Silicon Valley, that supposed bastion of libertarian respect for individual rights, is no such thing. It’s a collection of disingenuous, deceptive, liars who are happy to write multipage privacy policies for PR purposes, which have no teeth whatsoever.
Be very, very careful of anything you put on a computer you don’t own. And I’m sure that the license agreements we agree to when we buy our computers and install Windows or Mac OS X will contain similar escape clauses if they don’t already.
If a policy does not have genuine, real teeth (“Corporation agrees to pay $1,000 for every violation of our privacy policy”), then over time, all such policies that supposedly protect consumers will be eroded. It seems to be a natural law, and it makes me believe more and more in regulation. I would rather slow progress than have process come at the expense of the well-being of consumers. Business was invented to serve us, not the other way around.
Corporations seem to be nothing if not explicitly immoral. It is very sad to watch.
The way people define industries is really quite interesting. I’ve once again been asked to be a judge for the Harvard Business School New Venture Competition. They asked what industries I’m comfortable commenting on. It’s a surprisingly hard question to answer, because it’s quite unclear what an “industry” is. Here are a sample of a few things that people call industries:
What makes these an industry? Is it that all members of the same industry share the same markets? Is it that all members of the same industry share the same employee skill sets? Is it that all members of the same industry produce the same kind of products?
Every definition I’ve tried has glaring exceptions, which makes me wonder whether thinking in terms of “industries” really makes as much sense as I’ve always assumed.
Perhaps it makes more sense to think in terms of:
What do you think?
Chuckle. I deleted WHISPER because it was vapid beyond all belief, and not particularly interesting. It turns out that the stuff people say if they’re anonymous is droll, predictable, and mainly drivel. Except … it turns out that Whisper was tracking people after all, even the people who had asked not to be tracked. I think this is hilarious! To those who think “the market’ will eventually take care of our privacy, this is yet another example of … NOT!
Read the Guardian article about the little violation of user privacy Whisper engaged in:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/23/10-questions-whisper-senate-hearing-privacy
Many of my friends believe there’s this invisible thing called “the market” that will magically provide us what we need to be safe as a society. I just don’t buy it. “The market” encourages all businesses to exploit every possible opportunity for profit, including those that are ethically gray or downright evil, as long as they’re legal. Whisper, it seems, is no exception.
I’m sure you have never asked someone to work for free. But just in case you know someone who has—or if you’ve ever been asked—here’s the kind of thing you really should say.
Today I received this letter:
Hello Mr. Stever,
I am writing to you on behalf of XYZ, a non-profit, CSR project of ABC (a $4 billion conglomerate operating in 16 countries). … We bring together advisors and speakers from some of the top business schools in the world… we are committed to building local intellectual capital and leveraging a business model that ensures sustainability and relevant development opportunities to our present and future business leaders.
To begin a relationship, we would be interested in having you as one of the subject experts for our Webinars to conduct a live complimentary webinar on a topic of your choice, and also offer you to write exclusively on our blog<.
My response:
I find your request confusing. I am a professional, who has spent several hundred thousand dollars and several decades developing my expertise.
While I believe I might have valuable content to offer, the key word is “valuable.” You say that you are a project of a $4 billion conglomerate, yet your business procedure seems to be asking people such as myself to work for free. That doesn’t sound like partnership; that sounds like crass exploitation. You have the money to pay your vendors, you would just rather have them work for free.
That is not the kind of business practice I stand for or am interested in. If you are training entrepreneurs, it is a business practice you should object to as well—any entrepreneur who does not make sure they are well-paid for their product will quickly go out of business. I strongly suspect that neither you nor the CEO of your organization work for free. I can only follow your lead and decline your offer, in favor of clients and partners who believe in paying for the value I provide.