Do the people that surround you tell you the truth? Do they raise their hand when they disagree with you? When you're in a meeting and you ask a question, do you get blank stares or maybe some nods, and then the meeting is over? In today's episode, we're going to talk about how can you get people to tell you the truth, even and especially when it's a hard truth to tell.
I'm Carolina Zuleta, and this is the Visionary's Pursuit podcast.
I designed one of my programs to teach people who are managing teams for the first time how to do it. And recently inside that program, someone asked me, "How do I get my team to ask me more questions?
Sometimes I finish telling them what I need them to do, and I even ask, 'Does anyone have questions?' But most of them just nod their heads and go." And I don't think this is something that only happens at the initial stages when you're learning to manage a team. I think it happens often with leaders.
And it opened a very interesting conversation. That is, how can we make it super easy for other people to give us feedback, to ask questions, to push back? Because especially as we grow in our careers and we become more powerful people, more influential people, because of the inherent difference in power, it's harder for people to come and tell us something they know that we might not like, that might make us uncomfortable, that might make this hard
I think this is also true for any of us who are parents. How do we make it easy for our kids to raise their hand and tell us something that feels scary to them? Plus, if we look at it in our society, we've all been taught, maybe not directly, but we've all learned that when someone lied or didn't speak the truth, the problem is the person who didn't fully speak up or the person who lied or the person who stayed quiet and didn't ask the questions or didn't say the hard thing.
But some years ago, I heard a story that has stuck with me throughout the years, and it's the following. The story goes like this
A father discovers that his son has lied to him, and the father feels incredibly hurt because that's not what he has taught his son. He's always aimed to be an example of speaking the truth in front of his family.
And in general, they had a really good conversation. So the son is also worried and concerned that the father found out, and he's waiting for his dad to come and punish him. But instead, what happens is that his dad comes and says, "Son, you lied, and that's not okay. But I wanna understand why this happened.
So I'm going to walk to the next town, and through my entire walk, I am going to reflect to try to understand what is it that I did that made it not safe for you to tell me the truth."
And the reason why this story has stuck with me is because the blame becomes shared. The responsibility becomes shared. Of course, his son made a mistake. Of course, lying is not okay. Of course, his son bears some responsibility. But the fact that his dad is reflecting on what is it that he is doing that created an environment in which his son had to lie to him also shows that the responsibility sometimes, and I would even say like most of the time, in some percentage, belongs to the receiver as well.
So when this student was asking me, "How can I create a space where people ask more questions?" My answer was, "First, we need to understand how we are behaving. What is the environment that we are creating? How open and safe are we making it for people to question, to give feedback, to raise their hands and say something that is uncomfortable or hard to say?"
And as you're listening to this, I want you to really think about all your relationships at work and your personal life. How easy do you make it for people to give you feedback? How easy do you make it for people to be honest with you?
And you don't have to wait until a big moment or a big lie or a, tough situation to arise. It's in those little moments that you start building the trust with the people around you, so they feel more comfortable telling you the truth So I'm gonna give you some very specific tools.
So first it has to be the awareness, the awareness of how do we react when people ask us questions. When we're leading and we have a business to lead or so many responsibilities and we're going from one thing to the next and we're moving so fast, sometimes it's easy to cancel the one-on-ones with our team because it's true, maybe not having that one-on-one in that moment is not gonna kill the deal or create a big problem. But it does send a signal that I don't have time for you, or what you have to say is not important. even today, I have clients who are at the top of the organization, and they are concerned to ask something of the CEO because they see the CEO so busy, they don't wanna take time. They don't wanna bother that person with their thoughts or with their questions
But the CEO is missing out on their thoughts and their ideas on things that can potentially make the company way better or get to a certain outcome way faster
So, the first very practical tool is make time and create space in which you connect with the people around you, be it your business partner, a client, your team, your spouse, your friends, your family. I want you to take a moment and really consider how often do you sit down and ask them questions and create the space to be able to hear their real thoughts.
First tool, give them space, create time. Number two, Because what we're talking about in this podcast is people telling you something that actually feels hard or feels uncomfortable, fish for that information. So my favorite framework for giving feedback and receiving feedback is to not say, "Okay, so what is it that you think?
Do you like it? What are your thoughts?" Those are such open-ended questions that it takes a lot of courage for someone to say, "Actually, , I don't like it." But if you go and ask a question like this: "Okay, tell me two things that you like about this project and two things that you don't like," or, "Tell me what are the three things that you think might get in our way from achieving our outcomes?"
Or, "I am your manager. I am your leader. Give me two ideas of how I can better serve you, and please make them real and critical." When we ask more specific questions, we help the other... we make it easier for the other person to answer and give us the information that we don't know
I was coaching a client once and I felt there was something that we were disconnected I couldn't pinpoint I had asked her questions that are easy to respond but don't draw the truth.
"How is the coaching going? Are you enjoying it? Is it valuable?" "Yeah, of course," she had answered. Until I asked her the question, "Tell me two things that I'm not getting about you. Tell me two things that I'm not getting about your experience or your goals." Initially she was like, "No, I think you, you do get me."
And I was like, Okay, but I'm sure there's two little things that I haven't. Or just one." And it opened a beautiful conversation about what I wasn't getting about her and what I wasn't fully getting about her process. And I'm so grateful that she answered it because then we were even more connected.
So second tip here is ask questions that are more specific and allow the other person to give you those hard thoughts or questions in a easier way. And the third tool that I wanna offer you is how you receive them. So when people are brave and courageous to tell you something they know you might not wanna hear, How do you receive it? Your reaction in that moment is the reason why other people will tell you the truth or not
In the book The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek tells a story about something that happened at Ford some years ago, and please go read it from the book because I'm not gonna get all the details exactly. But it was something along these lines.
A new CEO arrived to Ford, and Ford was really struggling in that moment. A lot of things were not working. But when he would come into the meeting and ask the C-suite, the highest, the top leaders of the company, what were the problems they were seeing, people wouldn't answer, or they would just talk about smaller things, things that they could fix easily.
Nobody was really addressing the problems they were seeing. And the CEO just kept asking the same question, "Okay, tell me what is the one thing you're seeing we can, can improve?" Finally, one of the leaders raised his hand and spoke about something that was tough to talk about, and the leader's response wasn't, "Well, why?
Why are you bringing this up? "That's under your purview. You should have figured it out." He said, thank you so much for bringing this up. Okay, everyone, let's celebrate Alex bringing this up, and let's now all get together, and let's brainstorm how we can fix it."
His reaction gave a signal to everyone else that now it was safe to bring another problem, and slowly but surely, people started bringing up problems to him. And because they were putting the problems and the issues on the table, they were able to solve these problems, work as a team, and turn the company around.
the third tool is to have a very open reaction to when people give you feedback. And this can be done in all kinds of scenarios. One of my good friends corrected me in a mistake I was making grammatically in Spanish, and she's like, "I'm so sorry to correct you, but you don't say it this way, you say it that other way." I smiled and I laughed and I was like, "Oh my gosh, thank you so much for telling me.
I really appreciate it." And she was like, "Oh my God, I was so worried. I didn't know how you were gonna react." So how you react to when people take that first step is a signal not only for that person, but to anyone else who is in that environment that you are a safe person to contradict, to challenge, to give feedback, to ask questions.
Because as you grow, having people that are telling you the truth is gonna make you even better. If you surround yourself with people who just wanna say yes to you, who wanna please you, who wanna make you happy without telling you the truth, when you create an environment where it's not safe to speak up, there's a lot of risk.
Number one, personally, you'll never have sincere close relationships. You're just gonna have relationships with the version of your friends and family members and employees that they think they need to be in order to be close to you, but that's not real. Second, there's gonna be mistakes happening.
There's all this research of accidents that have happened, of big losses companies have had to face because employees knew there was a problem, but they didn't speak up.
And there's also a ton of research that in companies where employees don't feel safe to raise their hands, innovation, gets affected, progress gets affected because you are not getting the best ideas. You're just getting the ideas that are coming from the top of the chain. And by the way, not always the CEO is the person that has the best ideas.
We are not the ones that always have the best ideas. Creating an environment where everyone can share freely is what allows the best ideas to surface and when the best ideas surface, then we become the best companies that are beating competitors, that are, innovating, that are winning awards But in order for us to be able to have a good reaction when someone contradicts us, give us tough feedback, we need to do deeper work. Because it's in our human nature to want to defend and to be reactive when someone is telling us something that doesn't feel good.
This is the work that we do in coaching. We look at your limiting beliefs, your reactive patterns. We learn tools that help you stay calm under pressure, to regulate your nervous system when you're receiving information from which you wanna defend and protect.
So if you're an ambitious leader, a visionary, you have a hunger for creating something big and meaningful, the journey there, the person you need to become in order to create that starts here.
It starts in looking at your own programming, the beliefs you have, the ways that you react, how you navigate your emotions. When we look out into the world and we see these leaders that we admire, it seems like they were born with everything figured out.
Maybe they don't have the emotions that we have. Maybe they don't carry the anxiety or the stress or the reactivity we see in ourselves. But the truth is that many of these powerful leaders, at least the ones that I admire, you can see that they have learned how to be emotionally intelligent, to understand and redirect their thoughts towards the things that they want, to the creativity, to the innovation, to the possibility versus the contraction, the fear, the doubt This is the work we do in coaching, and if you're a visionary, I would love to meet you and talk about how I can serve you in achieving that goal that you have and becoming the person that you aspire to be.
Thank you again for joining me. I'll see you next week. Bye
