Questions we ask them all day, but often.
And how well do we ask them in our leadership role?
How do you use questions to help you be a more effective coach?
And if you had greater skills and confidence in asking questions,
how would that change your results and outcomes as a leader?
It's a great question, and these are questions
that are that matter, and they're the kinds of questions
we're going to explore during this episode.
So welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast,
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And after all of that, we've got the administration out of the way.
Let me bring in my guest.
It looks like we might have a technical challenge.
Let me check on that really quickly.
See if that works.
And if it does, great.
And if it doesn't, we'll move on.
We're going to move on.
So let me introduce my guest.
His name is Dave Reynolds. Let me tell you a little bit about him.
He is a serial entrepreneur who has launched and developed a variety
of new products and services for nearly two decades.
He is the founder and CEO of the ruminate Group,
a growth consulting firm that helps clients think strategically,
facilitate team growth, and navigate crucial conversations.
With a background in sales leadership, performance management, and succession
planning, Dave is passionate about growth, acceleration
and how asking the right questions yields the best answers.
He explores those passions in his new book, Radical Growth
transform into an unstoppable leader through mastering the Art of questions.
I mentioned he's in another country than me.
He's in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada today.
And so hey, welcome, Dave.
So glad that you're here.
Appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Kevin, for having me.
And fantastic introduction.
Well, I took the one your mother gave me.
So let's see what we've got.
Someone here, this in Vienna, and we've got someone who's here in Houston.
And we're glad that, that they and others are with us.
So what I want to do,
Dave, is sort of start out by making an assumption,
and you can tell me if my assumption is correct,
that when you were like,
I don't know, eight years old, you probably weren't
expecting to be,
a person who's written books and that sort of thing.
I don't know, maybe you thought you were going to be a hockey player, I don't know.
But my question is like, tell us a little bit more about that journey.
In short, that leads you to this place and the writing of this book.
Yeah.
It's funny, when I look back and where I would have been a,
I think I always knew I was going to be a salesperson in some way.
From persuasion to just being talkative, but
never thought that, I would wind up here.
And so anybody ever ask?
It's kind of a serendipitous moment of how one area job moved to the next.
So it's been really exciting.
And navigating to entrepreneurship, from inventing new products
to launching new products to getting into consultancy
just by, you know, asking a lot of really intuitive questions
to a friend of mine that led to, hey, why do you start consulting for me?
And I said, yes, and I'll figure it out.
So here you are.
So why the book specifically?
You and I were talking before the show started.
Before we hit record.
A little bit about what the book's doing for you since it came out, but, like, why?
What led you to to decide to write the book?
Yeah, well, two things.
I think it was always on the bucket list,
that I always just said, I really want to write a book.
I was just always, in admiration of people that wrote.
But the second part was with, we serve clients
kind of all over the world, very industry agnostic.
And we were going through the process of
doing a lot of executive coaching for their teams,
and they were just seeing so much growth.
And the CEO said, cheese, if you could just package this in,
you know, book our program.
She said you could you could do really well with us.
And so I didn't think about it until later that night, you know,
always got the abundance mentality that said, yeah, we should share this.
We should give this, even though a lot of people try and keep those tactics in.
So we actually developed the actual training program,
but we, we actually led with the book first.
And, that's what got us here. So,
the CEO, it was, an admiration
and thankful that, they said, hey, you know, we should put this in a book.
I love that.
So in True Salesman,
fashion, I suppose you have.
You make a pretty big promise in the subtitle.
You say, transform into an unstoppable, viable leader.
So let's talk about that word unstoppable
just for a minute, because it's a big promise.
And I'm.
And I'm confident that you use the word intentionally.
So let's just talk about that a little bit.
Why unstoppable.
And, is it really true
that if we master the art of questions, we can become unstoppable?
Yeah. Amazing question.
And I think that I actually never been asked that before, but
the reason why we created that subtitle was that we, the leaders that we work
with, that really start going through and seeing the value of asking questions,
you really starts breaking through the limitations
that a lot of people set for themselves,
not just individually, but teams and organizations,
because we start to think differently when we ask questions,
we increase our level of ownership and our level of accountability,
which overall, you know, increases our level of execution.
And a common question I asked clients that I work with is that,
hey, if you went back two years
to where we started and you kind of saw yourself today, what would you say?
And they're they're really kind of dumbfounded
that they said, like, I just I wouldn't even know the person I am today.
And I think that being a leader that masters there are two questions
is you can create leaders that create leaders and
and really can kind of change your future just by really grabbing
that skill and mastering it.
So one of
the things that you talk about throughout the book,
and it really is, I think, hinted at in everything you've said so far,
is that you're a believer in creating a culture of coaching.
And I said in the opening that you can't detach coaching from questions.
So what do you mean when you say a coaching culture?
How would I know?
Why would I want it, and how would I know if I'm moving towards it?
Yeah.
And so we we are always an area where a lot of people want a strategy.
They want the strategy that's going to work.
And that could be a coaching methodology.
But it's the idea that, you know, culture and strategy.
And I think the old saying was that culture is strategy for breakfast.
We really want to make sure our coaching culture isn't just about,
you know, introducing, say, radical growth as a strategy is
we want radical growth to be part of, you know, organization's culture.
So they're sharing the terminology.
They're owning implementation.
And and coaching is being done everywhere in the organization.
And you'll see in the book
we talk about coaching up, coaching down and coaching across.
Coaching shouldn't always have to be a leader to an employee.
It should be peer to peer.
You should feel comfortable to lead up.
And that's when we really see organizations that embrace
coaching culture.
And that is an incredible thing because you don't feel like you need to lead.
And and only one direction.
It can be multi-dimensional.
And that's where we see the biggest influence of our growth is
when we see, you know, culture, coaching culture, take flourish.
All right.
So we want to create a coaching culture.
And and we've said that questions are a big part of it.
And so I want to talk about as we promised in the episode
title, talk about the Art of questions.
But before we get to the art, you say there's also a science to questions.
So tell me about the science of questions before we dive into the art.
Yeah, it was interesting when we were working
with our publisher on this and we were kind of said, hey, you know,
there's an art and science to it, you know,
because you can see when you watch somebody ask a question,
it looks like you couldn't replicate that same process.
But the science side is we really go on the idea
of when you're being asked a question versus being given direction.
You know, there's a totally different a neurological response
on how you actually own the response,
because you have a sense of ownership over it.
And that's like what we talk with storytelling and or coupling, like
there is an actual relationship that you're creating
by asking somebody a question versus telling them what they need to do.
And this is really where we get more people involved in the commitment stage,
because the answers are coming from them.
So they have a sense of empowerment by providing those answers.
And in a lot of cases, we all know great questions.
You know, you have to ask multiple, so you can't live in a service
all the after and get deeper and people get a stronger
self-awareness over being asked deeper questions.
So we get a lot of moments where they're having those realizations
and you can actually see their body language change.
When you can tell that they've had that dialog
internally the whole time, and they'll say it.
And our response right away is, is that the first time you said that out loud?
And they're like, yeah.
And when they vocalize it, it just changes the relationship.
But the response.
Yeah, thoughts are fuzzy.
Words bring clarity. We can talk. We can think about things a long time.
But when we say them or write them, it changes everything.
And I often say, Dave, that people don't argue with their own data.
Right.
So once people have said something, that's where
that that's a big part of where that ownership piece comes into play.
So I really appreciate that we started there.
So and by the way, everybody, in case you're wondering, to think
that this is an easy conversation for me to have when the guy
who wrote the book about questions is here and I'm sure he's, he's mentally
thinking about critiquing how well I'm doing it, asking questions.
So I want to talk about barriers because like,
so far everyone would say, yeah, questions are good.
All good.
It's like it's like in the US
we'd say that's motherhood and apple pie like of course better questions.
And yet there are barriers, especially as leaders.
There are things that sort of keep us from doing it.
And this to me is one of the most important conversations
for us to have here.
And I hope that everyone who's listening is, like, ready to take notes here,
like from your perspective and in your experience, Dave, what are the barriers?
Yeah.
The immediate barrier that I would go to right away would be
that more relationships have ended by what wasn't said.
And what was that?
So I'd say more people just avoid asking questions or having the conversation.
That would be one of them.
And the second one would be, and we've already mentioned
is they ask questions and they accept surface level responses.
You know, hey, how's your day going? Good.
How are sales? Good.
And we accept these surface level responses versus,
excuse me.
And you're asking amazing.
You know what's good, you know, and session sales.
And they're saying, oh, and you're asking
what's your what's your goal for the month?
And you're going a little bit deeper.
So surface level for sure.
Looking for a reframe question.
So if somebody says, you know, I don't know.
Sometimes people might ask if you did know, what would you say.
And, and sometimes you just have to look
at different, tactics like mirroring.
And I would say the biggest barriers are people avoiding the conversations.
I would say living at the surface level.
And I'll probably another point is being proactive
with your questions versus reactive.
So a lot of times where somebody might ask a question or reactively, you might be
actually stimulating an emotional response versus a logical response.
So that would be really what I would say.
Some of the biggest barriers are when
because when you're asking proactive questions,
you're invested in the conversation versus you're looking at checking a box
in a reactive environment.
One of the things
that I find and so so speak to this if you want.
One of the things that I find for leaders a lot of times is that they're,
they're afraid of asking because they don't know how to respond
to the answer or,
they don't ask because they think they already know.
Yeah.
Comments about either one of those thoughts.
Yeah.
And I think like that's it's like, can I be a subject matter expert?
Can I respond to that?
So people will feel like they need to immediately respond
and there's actually something really graceful about pausing
and asking for a moment to think about that.
And if anything, it actually,
stimulates a deeper conversation.
I really agree with you a lot on that is like having to feel like you.
You need to know all the answers.
Actually, if anything, when I enter an organization, the reason
why we're industry agnostic is sometimes the less I know, the more I can help.
And so what I mean by that is if I'm just curious,
I don't I don't have to really be the technical expert,
but I can actually pull more information out of the person I'm working with
and get it into a better system just by being curious versus, hey,
this is how I've done it, this is how you should do it.
And that for me is a great approach.
Yeah, I really do love that a lot.
I want you mentioned something in the book,
and I think this gets at this point, it
if we are if as we get better at asking questions, we can do what
you suggest here.
You suggest that we need to move from being transactional
to being transformational.
What do you mean?
And what's the difference?
Yeah, transactional.
We see a lot of times, especially coaching in certain environments,
they're they're kind of ad hoc. They're,
they're doing because they have to do it, not because they want to do it.
It might be a KPI or a metric that needs to be met to have coaching.
Transformational is is going.
I'm making an intentional, proactive investment in coaching that I remember.
I've actually been in telecommunications.
We had to coach a certain amount of time, but once I started shifting
into seeing coaching as my competitive advantage for growth,
I really started realizing, oh wow.
And by having consistent coaching conversations, I'm actually
creating more dynamic leaders,
higher performing sales executors.
And not only am I making them better,
I'm actually teaching them a skill that that's transferable to their team members.
So the transformation happens
on also getting people outside of their comfort zone.
But we're doing it in a way that they're really owning that process along the way.
So that's that's really where we see a lot of transformation, is really about
getting them into that growth mindset, but also pushing them outside
of their comfort zone and, and where they're they're owning the next steps.
I think it's interesting that the way you describe that,
that shift for you was a transformation going from
I have to coach to I get to coach or I want to coach
or there's great value in me coaching and and anytime.
And so that same transformation hopefully is occurring for all of you
listening in terms of, it's okay for me to ask questions.
I want to ask questions, I can ask better questions.
And if I'm going to ask better questions, one of the things we need to know is
what are the kinds of questions we can ask.
So, we learned a little bit of this in school, but we've all slept since then.
But you you take us a step further in that.
So when you think about it today, for us in the workplace,
as coaches, as, as as team members, what are the types of questions
we should be considering?
Yeah.
So when we look at just your basic open ended questions,
I think we're all anybody that's on this show is is listening.
We're already already doing these open ended questions.
We're asking big or broad questions.
But what I'll I'll challenge everybody on around open ended questions is start
with big and broad opening questions so you can ask an open ended question
so people feel comfortable and they give momentum into asking questions.
And they can be more specific with an open ended question to get more detail.
I really feel that asking confirming questions
is a really great strategy for two reasons.
It shows your listening because as a confirming statement,
you're having that say, you know, just to clarify what you just mentioned
was and you'll go through the area of of just telling I heard what you said
is, is that the most important next step that you're seeing?
And then they're using that opportunity to kind of confirm that,
those are really great.
One that's had a big impact.
We've worked with a couple big project management teams
is actually leveraging mirroring questions.
And we have an example of this in the book.
And, I remember one of our clients is saying, you know, we're really stuck.
You know, they're just not being not being helpful.
And and I know they're off track, but they won't admit they're off track.
And we went through this whole area where I said, okay, grab a timer.
And here's a set of questions I ran through.
And so when she did a project,
they say, hey, can you give us an update on the project?
And she says, yeah, projects go well.
And the goal with Mary
is always saying the last three words that the person said in a mirroring fashion.
So she said the project's going well.
Put on the timer, let the silence happen.
18 seconds went by, which probably felt like two days, and they.
Said it felt like two days.
I have stories I can tell you about that 100%.
It felt like forever.
Okay. But 18 seconds later, what happened?
10s later they said, you know what?
We've we've run into a couple roadblocks.
And she said, okay,
you've had a couple roadblocks again, hit the timer.
So she said she went for 15 seconds and they came out
with, we've got some, you know, issues of timing.
You know, we don't we don't know why the budget's off course.
And we're seeing these things.
And she did still
keep doing the mirroring activity until they got into a deeper conversation.
She said the relationship was never the same after that.
It was perfectly on point where they were engaged.
They were part of the process
because they were they were worried about putting these on the table.
But when you give people space and timing to really respond,
but you give them in an area where they really have to own the truth,
that is where mirroring really, truly comes into practice.
And, it's such an exciting activity,
but extremely difficult to wait 18 seconds for somebody to respond.
That's a long time.
But here's the thing the longer you're waiting,
the more you're especially if there's positional power, which you describe here.
Right?
The coach, the boss, the leader person.
The longer we're waiting,
the more we're showing them that it's okay, that we really do want to know
that we're not just asking the questions
on the checklist that we really want to know,
and that space is giving that person time to to think that through,
think it out, decide how they want to say it to your point earlier,
and it can make all the difference.
And that's, that's a that's a drastic length of time.
Let me just tell all of you, it probably won't always take that long.
But I love that strategy, that mirroring strategy.
And you use something similar earlier in the conversation when you said,
well, someone answered, I don't know.
Well, if you did, no, what would you say?
I thought that was a brilliant question, and I wanted to bring it back
in case someone missed it before.
It's a great question.
If you did know, what would you say?
Because that's that's setting the person up.
To have
enough confidence to say what they're probably thinking.
Right. I just I just love that question.
I want to make sure that everyone sort of had that locked in for themselves.
So, life life hack heaven.
I was driving the other day with my girlfriend and,
we said, you know, how do you, where would you like to go eat?
And, you know, and she said, doesn't matter to me.
And then I said, well, if it did matter, where would you like to go?
And she said right away the exact spot where she wanted to go.
I was like, oh, this is working.
You just so
you just salvaged relationships right there, Dave.
You didn't even know that you saw if you're watching everybody.
I kind of went like this
because every buddy that's in a long term relationship has had that conversation.
I promise you that they have.
And, what what a great what a great, great way to do that.
By using Mary in questions, we talked about open
ended questions, starting broad and getting more more specific.
We talked about confirming questions or paraphrasing questions.
We've talked about mirroring questions.
Any other question types you want to talk about before we move on?
Yeah, I would say to go back to the idea of surface level elements.
I would go into more of the probing questions
and I would say this is where leaders can probably strengthen
the most is that, you know, just asking probing questions.
And that doesn't mean asking the same question.
It's a matter of looking at a sequence of questions.
And I remember walking with the CEO by kind of one of the sales teams.
And see, you kind of want to show me how to connect with everybody.
And he talk to the sales manager.
He said, oh, our sales.
The sales manager said, oh, they're good.
And I and I walk by and I could see us.
I was close enough with them that I said, perfect, hey, sales are good.
I said, how's your month gone?
Pretty good too.
So give me similar responses, like what was your goal for the month?
And they shared their goal and they said, amazing.
Like, where are you at month day?
He shares it. And I said, okay, interesting.
I said, are you on track to meet your goal?
And he said, well, not really.
And I said, okay, interesting.
So sales are good.
And we just kind of had a fun way of challenging each other.
He said, these are some of the areas that we're we're stalling in.
And it was interesting because you had to go 3 or 4 layers deeper,
but it was interesting.
I watched in the office next week, the CEO
and he came out and said, hey, we're back on track.
And so it was interesting by probing and caring and investing,
we created a relationship with each other that he felt that he wanted to share.
Having committed to making a change versus getting away with a surface
level question and going back to not being on track.
So that highlights two things.
Everybody.
Number one is it's something that we said before by asking the question,
you get people out of their head and putting words to it,
which changes their understanding as well as the commitment, as you said.
But the other thing
that questions do for us is they can be a way to build relationship.
And if we as leaders want to be more effective as leaders,
we want to have better relationship working relationship to other folks.
Questions.
One of the very best ways that we can do that.
So, let's talk about follow up questions, right?
Like or follow up in general.
Let's spend a couple of minutes there
before we sort of round into the final turn here.
Yeah, I would say follow up systems and follow up
questions are probably what has helped us drive the strong ROI for organizations
and probably the stronger systems that we teach our teaching and coaching process
is that every time that you're finishing, say, coaching or conversation,
there should be a commitment to some form of action
that comes from the progression or coaching.
Now there's two scenarios that people are used to a coach
that follows up and a coach that doesn't, coach that doesn't.
Okay. Got away with it.
Accountability drops.
The coach that starts the next session by saying,
you know, what actions do we commit to on our last session?
And they talk through them. Amazing.
Can you walk me through how that went or how did that go?
And if you create that environment of accountability,
that follow up system not only holds them accountable
to being the best version of them,
but they know somebody who's also invested in their success
because they cared enough to follow up to make sure that they execute it.
And that's not only created a great investment between the two of us
or the group that we're coaching, where,
they just feel like they they've got somebody in their corner.
And a lot of people see accountability as punishment, accountability
for us as motivation to go further.
Yeah.
If I sometimes say
some people think accountability is the longest four letter word
in the English language, but it doesn't have to be,
because really, what accountability ultimately is ownership, right?
That's what I love that you tie tying that to motivation,
I love that. So,
one more work related question.
And yeah, a lot of folks
who are watching or listening are
their leadership.
Context is different than it was,
say, five years ago, because either they have folks who are fully remote
or they only see some of the time, so that means some of the time,
all of these questions and these skills of asking questions
and building a coaching culture are all happening at a distance.
Do you have any specific advice?
If there's
anything change in our conversation, or would you put an addendum on anything
we've talked about? When you're doing it at a distance?
Yeah.
And this actually happened when we saw a lot in the pandemic where
people switched to being in that remote environment.
I think you can still have a very candid,
direct conversation in a remote environment.
I think initially a lot of people coached in teams versus coached individually.
And we really wanted to make sure that people got back to, you know,
you can do remote team conversations, but you should always
still commit to doing that 1 to 1 conversation.
And we always go back to the care and candor side.
Is that you?
You might care, but you might not be candid.
So you create distance.
You know, you might be candid, but you may not care.
And you create dysfunction.
But if you have care and you're candid,
you can create those transformative environments.
So I would say that remote always makes me feel like they're connected to the team.
You're connecting to their contribution, you're getting them to open up.
Because especially people
in remote environments, depending on what their role is, they can feel very siloed.
They can feel very disconnected that that investment into
that conversation can really pull them back together.
We had multiple organizations that I was a tech company
I would think of as seven different countries,
and they just weren't used to managing people in a 1 to 1 environment.
Even if there were short conversations.
It's that small investment that adds up over time.
And we always use this Stephen Covey, the emotional bank account,
and that is huge because that just adds up over time.
100%. I agree with you on percent.
A couple things.
Before we go, I'm going to shift gears.
I want to ask you, Dave, what you do for fun.
Fun. There is a lot we run a lot.
I do triathlons, I do do our funds.
Give me more than run.
Yeah, a little bit.
Swimming and bike making involved.
Yeah.
And I just got into a time trial
bike this year, so it's a totally different, world.
And having your kind of your hands out on the road.
And I've kind of done Brazilian jiu jitsu for the last 12 years and got the chance
to travel all over the world for Brazilian jiu jitsu.
So I wouldn't say there's a sport I haven't tried, but
that's usually what keeps me stimulated is, is that there's
sports running triathlons through athletes and Brazilian jiu jitsu.
So everybody Kevin is guilty of the stereotype.
At the beginning.
I said, the man's from Canada, so I used to I, I went to hockey,
I just I messed up right from the start.
So so Dave, what are you reading these days when you're not running or jiu jitsu?
Doing. Yeah.
You know what?
I actually just went
and got a couple of new books last night, and I was actually an avid reader.
I've been waiting to get this book for a while, and it was, by
Back to Your Time, Dan Martel and, big fan of his work.
And really, as we're growing and scaling, we're trying to really put better systems
in there.
And, you know, the
book is really just dedicated to putting better systems in place to grow and scale.
And the other book that I picked up as
well was the 8020 principle, which I think is, Richard Kosh.
And we speak to this all the time,
and I'm always looking for those extra little tips, tricks, quotes.
So I'm really, really looking forward to diving that one.
But I'm going to I'm going to go through that buy back good time first.
Real big advocate of what Dan does.
We'll have both of those in the show notes, along with, information
about radical growth
transform into an unstoppable leader through mastering the art of questions.
As I hold this up, Dave, where else,
do you want to point people, or how do you want people to
if they want to connect with you, learn more
about what you work, where you want them to go?
Yeah.
If you want to reach out to us on our website, ruminate group.com.
We're very active on LinkedIn as well if you want to check us out there.
And same thing for Instagram.
But, yeah, we're excited to reach out and connect for everybody and,
really appreciate the end of the show and, be able
to promote what we've been up to and, love the questions.
I'm always, always involved with the.
Ruminate, the numeral eight group.
So are you am I in eight group.com?
For those of you that can't see it, it was on the screen.
But if you want if you're listening, that didn't help you.
So, before I say goodbye today, then before I say goodbye to you,
I have the question for you that I ask you every single episode.
And that is now what?
What action will you take as a result?
Like if you didn't write down 4 or 5 specific questions
from Dave, you might want to replay this and do that.
But whether it's that or whether it's something else that you took, what are the
specific actions that you want to take as a result of being here?
Because until you take action, this is not nearly as valuable as it could be.
It's sitting here like like, soil unplanted.
But once you plant the seeds and take the action, then
a harvest can come your way.
So, Dave, thank you so much for being here.
We we had a fit and start.
We were planning to do this.
I don't know, six, eight weeks ago.
And I'm glad that we finally got the chance to do it.
Thanks for joining me.
Thank you. Kevin, I really appreciate being on.
So everybody, if you enjoyed this, make sure you come back.
How do you do that?
Make sure you're subscribed wherever you're watching or listening.
And make sure you tell someone else to come
listen to this or listen next week, because next week we'll be back
with another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.