577: Jeff Wetzler - Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life (ASK)
Apr 7, 2024
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Jeff Wetzler discusses tapping into hidden wisdom for leadership breakthroughs. Emphasizes choosing curiosity, creating safe spaces, asking quality questions, active listening, and thoughtful follow-up. Explores empowering co-creation, unlocking wisdom through curiosity, and importance of reflective leadership. Shares insights on thoughtful follow-up in sales and quality questions in leadership interviews.
Cultivate curiosity by asking 'What can I learn from this person?' to unlock valuable insights and understandings.
Establish psychological safety for open communication by being vulnerable, radiating resilience, and valuing honesty.
Deepen understanding and meaningful conversations by posing diverse quality questions, digging deeper, and requesting reactions to capture nuanced insights and promote mutual learning.
Deep dives
Curiosity as a Choice
Curiosity is depicted as a conscious decision rather than an inherent trait, allowing individuals to explore a mindset of learning. By posing the question 'What can I learn from this person?' individuals can cultivate a sense of genuine curiosity, enabling them to uncover valuable insights and understandings from diverse interactions.
Creating a Safe Environment for Truth
It is crucial to establish psychological safety for open communication, encouraging individuals to freely express their thoughts and truths. By fostering connection on the other person's terms, exhibiting vulnerability, and radiating resilience, leaders can create an environment where honesty is valued and encouraged.
Posing Quality Questions
Quality questions play a vital role in deepening understanding and fostering meaningful conversations. Embracing a diverse repertoire of questions, such as headlines, digging deeper, and requesting reactions, allows individuals to delve into varying perspectives, uncover underlying beliefs, and capture nuanced insights that enrich interactions and promote mutual learning.
The Importance of Active Listening and Check-Ins
Actively listening through multiple channels, such as content, emotion, and action, is crucial in communication. By understanding what is said and felt, leaders can respond better without defensiveness. A powerful tool mentioned is paraphrasing to confirm understanding, creating a safer and more attentive communication environment.
Reflecting and Reconnecting for Leadership Success
Reflecting on learnings from interactions helps to update mindsets and actions. By seeking deeper insights from exchanges, individuals can challenge assumptions and grow. Additionally, reconnecting with others to share takeaways builds trust, shows respect, and encourages further sharing and understanding in future interactions.
The ASK approach - Choose curiosity, make it a safe space to tell the truth, pose quality questions (that’s a question that helps you learn something), LISTEN (check if you heard them right, rephrase), then reflect and connect - FOLLOW UP. Make sure the other person feels that you’ve listened to and heard them.
1) Choose Curiosity to awaken your interest in new discoveries.
What can I learn from this person?
2) Make it Safe for people to tell you hard things
Find the right context. Be vulnerable. Radiate Resilience.
3) Pose Quality Questions so you can uncover what’s most important
Questions that help you learn something. What do you really think?
4) Listen to Learn, to hear what someone is really trying to tell you.
Request reactions... What holes are in my perspective?
5) Reflect and Reconnect, so you take the right action based on what you’ve heard.
Update my thinking. Sifting through what we heard. What can I take away of value?
What are the best questions to ask in an interview for a job:
As the interviewee, ask them what concerns they have about you? They’re going to talk about these when you’re not in the room. You might as well talk about them together when you’re in there…
As the interviewer: Fast forward 1 year. There are two scenarios. 1, you crushed it. 2, You didn’t. Tell the story of what happened in each of those scenarios…
What did Jeff learn from his work as a magician?
Magic trains you to hold your cards close to your chest, that’s what makes the illusion work…He dreamed (still does) of someone asking him, so what do you think Jeff? He’s held back so much because he wanted people to ask him what he thought… It's like he needed permission.
When pollsters asked Americans, “If you could have any superpower you wanted, what would you pick?” Two answers tied for the number 1 spot. Reading other people’s minds and time travel.
Asking helps you read people's minds.
Key learning from Chris Argyris:
How smart people fail to learn... They don't ask.
A child asks 25-50 questions per hour. An adult. A tiny fraction of that. Curiosity goes away as we age if we're not intentional about it.
"We're all stuck inside our own certainty loops."
Leadership hiring must-haves...
Alignment with the mission
Core values
Track record
A learner
Learning design – How to make your next leadership retreat as impactful as possible? ASK the participants to help you co-create the event.
We often miss out on goals, opportunities, and relationships because we don’t know how to ask the right question, in the right way. Yet this critical strength can be learned, and transform your career, organization, and relationships.
Career and Life advice: You don't have to have it all figured out. WHO matters more than WHAT.
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