8

The Courage to Question and Listen

A strong community helps people develop a sense of true self, for only in community can the self exercise and fulfill its nature: giving and taking, listening and speaking, being and doing.

—Parker J. Palmer

Greg Sunter is used to being at the front of the room in control of delivering content—first as a classroom teacher, then in school leadership, and now as an education consultant in Brisbane, Australia. Greg no longer thinks of controlling presentations. Rather than showing up as an expert, Greg now asks, “How do I invite other people into a conversation rather than me leading it?” He does it with questions.

This was Greg’s mindset when he was hired to address a toxic staff culture at a primary school. Morale was at an all-time low, and relationships were frayed after a complete turnover in the school’s leadership chain within two years. The administrators told Greg that they didn’t expect him to fix all the problems in a day and a half, but they needed to start the detoxification process.

Greg met the whole staff—teachers and support staff—at a conference venue for two days of live-in professional learning. All professional learning of the last few years had been conducted on-site, so the opportunity to spend time together in a nice location was much appreciated. The room was set up with circular banquet tables.

After the group spent time in individual and group reflection exploring their current sense of vocation and purpose, Greg posed three questions to the staff: What is it that as a staff community you want to stop doing? What do you want to continue doing? What do you want to start doing? Greg had no idea what the staff would say, nor were the questions merely a technique to open the door to his own already formulated solutions or programs. He genuinely wanted to know what these negative, disgruntled people would say about their lives together.

The staff began by reflecting and writing individually about the questions for about thirty minutes, then took turns sharing insights with their table group for another half hour. Greg then asked people from each table to share aloud with the entire group.

At the first table, someone said, “We need to stop back-stabbing each other and all the negative talk that goes on in the group.” The next group reported nearly the same: “Like the first table, we really need to stop all the bitching and all the complaining that goes on.”

By the time half the groups had reported, they were overdue for lunch, and the venue manager was standing in the doorway expectantly. Greg acknowledged the man, but wasn’t going to interrupt what was happening. The group was hanging attentively on the words of each person who shared the group responses.

“It wasn’t my agenda to get instant consensus,” Greg said, “but I think they were waiting for somebody to ask the question, ‘What do you want to stop happening in the staff?’ Every group named it. That was significant. There was something of a collective sigh that went through the group; they’d finally said it out loud to one another. The deputy principal came up to me as we broke for lunch, and he said, ‘You’ve just earned your money.’”

That day’s conversation was simply the start. The toxicity wouldn’t improve overnight, but having everyone answer the same questions created a shared self-awareness that opened the door to listening and thus to the possibility of trust. Estranged and negative colleagues began to listen to one another and to focus on questions that were vital to everyone.

In his consulting practice, Greg is often asked to facilitate a day focused on community building. What he tells his clients now is, “The biggest thing you can do to improve community is to build trust. The number one way to do that is to listen to each other, to actually talk to each other, share something of yourself, hear other people share something of themselves. Let’s work first on trust so you can actually then have conversations about other things that need to change.”

Greg told me, “Courage practices build leaders who can pause and reflect before charging into something, who can realize that they don’t necessarily have all the answers. They can ask open, honest questions to elicit what others are thinking and then value their responses as genuine contributions. That’s pretty powerful in leadership and not valued in the world. You’re supposed to be decisive. You’re supposed to be out front leading, not asking what others think, but that’s what good leadership looks like.”

The process of asking open, honest questions and listening to another person reflect aloud—whether in a retreat, in the workplace, or in daily life—is a powerful form of companionship and transformation. As people are heard in a nonjudgmental way, then affirmed and accepted as they realize their shortcomings and successes, they become more comfortable. The reciprocity of conversation creates relational trust and fortifies people to risk showing up and speaking up. It also elicits the best from them, which benefits the organization and everyone in it. Higher-quality questions and listening make for better organizations and positive impacts on results.

“Good listening”—like “trust” or “wholeness” or “authenticity”—are things that emerge because we are disciplined stewards of the structure that we’re creating.

—Judy Brown, from an interview with the author

What Is an Open, Honest Question?

Most of us would acknowledge the value of asking questions as part of a trustworthy and productive conversation, but asking open, honest questions is an art. It requires the listener to set aside preconceptions and instead tap into a deep and generous care for the other person. In fact, the primary characteristic of a well-crafted open, honest question is that you couldn’t possibly predict the answer. You ask because you genuinely want to know and because you are trying to engage others in order to gain understanding and demonstrate real listening.

These additional guidelines help ensure that questions are truly open and honest:

• Avoid questions with yes-no or right-wrong answers.

• Make questions brief, straightforward, and to the point. Avoid preludes or rationales that would allow you to insert your own opinions or advice.

• Use the other person’s language to frame questions and avoid injecting your own interpretations or projections. What did you mean when you said you felt sad? is an open, honest question. “Didn’t you also feel angry?” is not.

• Ask questions aimed at helping the person explore his or her concern rather than satisfying your own curiosity.

The purpose of open, honest questions is to take us beyond the typical patterns of conversation to a place of inquiry and discernment. They promote exploration and authenticity, rather than jumping to conclusions or defaulting to our own assumptions. Open, honest questions help other people gain self-awareness and clarity to inform their course of action.

The best questions come out of deep listening. When you’re in a conversation with somebody who’s struggling with something, try to think of it like this: What’s a question I could ask right now that is, to the best of my ability, in service of this other person and what he or she is struggling with?

Ideally, a good question incorporates language that speakers have used, which demonstrates listening but also often encourages deeper exploration of a theme or image they used. Try to pay attention more to the moment, rather than starting to predict the next thing you expect might come up.

I asked leaders to tell me the best open, honest question they ever received. One answer especially stayed with me. Marcy Jackson, cofounder and senior fellow of the Center for Courage & Renewal, said: “One of the questions I have loved and that has stopped me in my tracks is this one: What makes your heart sing? It’s a very simple question. It has pulled me back from my sometimes overserious nature or trying to think everything through, rather than paying attention to what brings me joy.”

When we learn how to listen more deeply to others, we can listen more deeply to ourselves.

—Parker J. Palmer

The Gift of Listening Without Fixing

A senior management leader we’ll call Bob had tension with another person on staff, which made him feel as though his value to the organization was being questioned. He went to the CEO, Mike, for advice—and to vent a bit, too. He paced around the corner office, unsettled. Rather than give Bob instructions about what to do next, Mike consciously opted to ask open, honest questions. That meant asking questions Mike couldn’t possibly know the answer to but that would help Bob listen to his own inner wisdom.

In their conversation that day, Mike posed these questions in response to Bob’s unfolding story: What does that mean to you: feeling your value is being questioned? How does that feel to you? Do you recall a time when you had a similar feeling? How did that turn out? What are some things that occur to you as a next step?

The questions helped Bob connect the current situation with some other times in his current life and in his past. He was able to look at the workplace episode differently, and he gained a new perspective on how to approach his colleague for further conversation.

Mike’s internal stance as a leader was the foundation of this curiosity-driven yet nonjudgmental conversation that led to Bob’s insights. What Bob couldn’t see was that Mike was also embodying a few other touchstones to create safe and trustworthy space: allowing silence, turning to wonder, and no fixing, saving, advising, or correcting. This approach empowers others to make wise decisions based on their own genuine inner knowing, rather than just accepting a superior’s advice (or seeming to but without a sense of ownership). Mike said, “I’m fascinated every time in these interchanges how much more satisfying the result seems to be when I don’t jump in with the first advice that comes to mind. My conversation with Bob had so much more texture to it. My impression was that Bob appreciated the fact that I didn’t dive in and tell him what to do and that I was interested enough in the situation to help him talk through it.”

Mike knew that his approach was atypical. “Allowing silence is challenging, especially in the workplace. People are taught to fill the silence. If you engage in conversation with open, honest questions and you give people time to ponder, that means you have to be patient with the silence.”

Mike sees how this form of conversation supports a work-place culture of compassion and empathy. “It’s harder to stop and think of asking an open, honest question. But it is a form of caring for someone, and it comes across that way—as caring.” It also communicates a charged expectation that Bob will address the situation responsibly and will be accountable for maintaining professional relationships with colleagues. This is paradox in action, to hold the tension between caring and accountability.

Mike told me that learning to ask open, honest questions is both a challenge and benefit of Courage Way practice because it’s made him a much better listener. “I’ve realized there is no greater gift you can give someone than deeply listening to them.” Open, honest questions are a form of humility in leadership, too. It’s easier but can be a form of arrogance to ask questions that try to manipulate people into the answer you want them to find.

An open question leads us to what Einstein referred to as a “holy curiosity.”

—Dawna Markova

Open, Honest Questions and the Möbius Strip

“An open question is a choice point, the twist in the Möbius strip,” writes Dawna Markova, in an essay for the book Living the Questions.¹ She has us imagine ourselves on the Möbius strip to experience the interplay of the inner and outer life (see chapter 2). “To achieve mastery we are taught to answer questions that are asked. This leads us to the outside of the strip.”

She alludes to the advice of Rilke to the young poet that some questions cannot be answered on the spot but must be lived into over time. She continues: “An open question takes us to the mystery of our inner world, where patterns and meaning unfold like petals. An open question leads us to what Einstein referred to as a ‘holy curiosity’: a curiosity that is nourishment itself without the pressure of having to constantly fulfill our appetite for explanations and solutions.” In the story of Bob and Mike, we see Mike’s capacity to realize in the moment that he could choose to ask open, honest questions. By making that choice, Mike is aligning with his own values, remembering the kind of culture he wants to create, one where people feel valued. Mike knows it may appear inefficient and ineffective to spend time listening when he could quickly give advice and move on to the next thing on his list. But by listening carefully and offering questions, he’s making it safe for Bob to be vulnerable and to find his own direction. With patient listening and wholehearted inquiry, Mike models how to have a generative conversation, and it’s possible that the kind of questions he posed will inspire Bob to consider asking such questions with his colleagues in the future.

In the process of being listened to and prompted with good questions, Bob was fortified in these ways: he was able to remain calm while he reviewed past experiences that were similar, and to reimagine possible ways to respond; he found the courage to have a difficult conversation, despite not knowing how he might be received; he then resolved to repair the tension with the other employee in a follow-up conversation. This whole-hearted process helped Bob become more resilient because he found his own resourcefulness.

All of this happened because Mike decided it was important for him as a leader to make time to listen; to ask open, honest questions; and to refrain from giving quick advice, even though this is not the course leaders are usually supposed to follow: “We’re all taught to be problem solvers, especially if your title is CEO or manager or VP. We condition people to come to us for answers. Sometimes there are easy, concise answers; usually the things that aren’t very important. We’re conditioned to believe that we’re doing our best work when we’re solving things for people. But things that are most important to people don’t have clear, easy answers—or else they would have already acted on them.”

Mike had an interesting insight about other benefits of taking a more open-ended approach, especially because it is outside of the expectations for leaders: “I’ve tried to swim against that current and force myself, especially in dicier personal issues, to ask open, honest questions. I’ve noticed that first, people really appreciate that you don’t think you’re smarter than they are, as if you can fix their problems and they can’t. Second, people appreciate that you’re willing to take the time to let them talk through an issue and even, in a sense, create the context for themselves by having to explain it.

“It’s a luminous experience when it rolls out, but it takes fighting through that initial crust of ‘How do I fix this for this person and move on to the next thing?’”

Open, Honest Questions in Daily Life

Mike has found the practice of listening with open, honest questions to be invaluable at home, too. As a husband and also a late baby boomer, Mike describes himself as “a protector” who is inclined to give advice. A few years ago, his wife retired and took a part-time leadership job with a nonprofit, but within a few months realized that it wasn’t a good fit. The organization seemed to desire a bookkeeper and office manager more than a strategic visioner to lead growth. She loved the mission and the people, but she was limited to administrative duties. She didn’t need the job for the income, but she naturally felt some misgivings about leaving so soon after starting.

Mike’s wife shared her feelings over coffee at their kitchen counter, their conversation unfolding over many weekend mornings. Because her expressions of frustration were interspersed with asking his advice on functional management questions about accounting or record keeping or by-laws, Mike was in tricky territory. He wanted to be helpful to her inner executive but also empowering to her inner leader to discover her truth.

“My inclination would have been to say ‘You don’t owe them anything, here’s a date to tell them you’re quitting,” Mike said, adding that he would have offered an advice-filled program of what to do, when to do it, and how not to feel bad about it. It would have been easy to get it over with a quick decision. He said, “It was giving me grief because it bothered her!”

Instead, Mike asked his wife, Why do you feel the way you do? What would it look like if it were working better for you and for them than it does now? How would you know when it was time to make a decision about whether to stay or not stay in the job?

He concluded, “The questions honored that what she was going through was complicated, evoking emotions and issues of integrity that needed some space and needed to be recognized. None of which would have happened if I’d said ‘Can that thing!’”

Mike and even the biggest fans of the open, honest question approach know that such questions are not appropriate in every situation. They are best employed when it’s important to create safe space for the other person’s inner wisdom to flourish. Sometimes people just want feedback and information. Family members have been reported to say, “Can you ask me those open, honest questions to help me figure this out?” Yet sometimes they get impatient and say, “No, I’m really asking for your input right now.”

At the end of six months, Mike’s wife did resign from her position as executive director. But because she had taken time to reflect, rather than bail out in frustration leaving the agency in a lurch, she created a congenial, understanding transition. She helped the nonprofit find a replacement. “She left under good circumstances, with no remaining bad feelings,” Mike said. “It was as positive an experience as you could make it.”

It’s hard to transcend a combative question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking better questions.

—Krista Tippett

A Practical Application—Performance Reviews

For many people, performance reviews seem like rather soulless exercises driven by organizational imperatives. Designed to measure performance in order to determine whether employees have met their goals and thus have contributed to the organization’s results, they are usually highly structured, formulaic, and data oriented. Unless a leader or manager consciously sets out to make the performance review process about more than numbers, it’s not likely to help employees grow or gain greater insight into themselves and their work. Being rated on accomplishments is necessary, of course, but it is only part of the picture. If you want to invite people to bring their full and best selves to work, you must engage in a different sort of conversation.

Greg Eaton decided he wanted to change the way performance evaluations were held in his company, a thriving business that organized corporate meetings and incentive trips. The company was known for providing exceptional customer service.

“Whether in universities or business, in all my years I saw the same thing. If the manager said good things, people just humbly hung their heads or maybe smiled. And if there was a growing edge, you could literally feel the tension in the room because of who was speaking. Whether the evaluation was good or bad, it just shut down engagement and conversation.”

So instead of rating employees on specific competencies at his company, Greg invited his managers to list each employee’s strengths and potential for growth. Before the performance discussion, they also asked employees to reflect on two questions: What is it that you’re most proud of? What was a challenge or a struggle?

The new process changed the relationship between manager and employee. Hard topics still had to be addressed, but giving employees time to reflect in advance and to start the conversation with what they were proud of made a big difference.

Greg said, “Most people had never been asked what they were proud of before, and it made a few people get teary eyed. Those were moments to celebrate. I saw people make huge gains in their work competence and performance and pride because they were taking more ownership.”

At the Center for Courage & Renewal, annual reviews are similarly structured with open, honest questions that each employee receives a few weeks ahead of time. The supervisor and the employee reflect in advance, then go out to lunch to chat, taking turns sharing “lauds, learnings, and looking forward.”

The manager then writes up their joint discussion and gives the employee a chance to make changes before they finalize it and put the document into the files to use as a baseline for next time. The process builds trust that is fostered with almost weekly check-ins that create a sense of ongoing conversation. It’s a give-and-take of openness, of being invited to say what’s really true.

Building Trust with Open, Honest Questions

Open, honest questions build trust in groups and teams by encouraging listening for the sake of understanding the perspectives and stories of others. Such questions can lead to shared insights and generate a sense of cohesion even when there are individual differences. That’s what Greg Sunter was doing when he asked the school staff what they wanted to stop doing, continue doing, and start doing. The group stood together on common ground as they envisioned a new way forward out of the negativity that had been plaguing them. Open, honest questions are also an excellent way to fully include and reflect the interests of all stakeholders in organizational outcomes, objectives, and plans. They make dialogue more productive and help group members suspend their tendency to analyze, critique, and give advice.

Open, honest questions can also be used more informally to start building trust in regular staff meetings. For instance, a team could be invited to respond to this question: What is one thing that was really great last week, or didn’t work last week? Or you can ask questions that get people talking about their lives in ways they normally wouldn’t at work, such as How did your family celebrate birthdays?

More organizations are turning to human resource processes that explicitly focus on the professional growth of employees. Some are known as deliberately developmental organizations (DDOs), as featured in Kegan and Lahey’s An Everyone Culture.² Frederic Laloux writes of similar organizations (including the Center for Courage & Renewal) in his book Reinventing Organizations.³ The process of asking open, honest questions cultivates a learning culture, and that is good business. In his book Curious, Ian Leslie contends that curiosity may be society’s most valuable asset.⁴ A society that values order above all else will seek to suppress curiosity, but one that values progress and innovation will cultivate it. Healthy curiosity is important not just for problem solving but also for cultivating empathy. In Courage Work, the curiosity of open, honest questions goes further to cultivate self-knowledge and access to inner resourcefulness.

As you do the outer work of a leader, it’s necessary to do your inner work, too. Open, honest questions get to the heart of what matters by inviting true self to speak up with real answers. People you trust who are able to pose good questions and truly listen can fortify you—and others—in hard times. Just as you can cultivate the capacity to ask good questions and be an empathetic listener, you can also cultivate the types of relationships (especially in community) where this quality of interaction is welcome and practiced. Asking such questions— combined with the other practices around listening—is integral to making wise decisions in any aspect of life.