August 11, 2025 • 49 mins
Every leader knows the rush of validation when someone brings you a problem and you solve it on the spot. But Gary Cohen, founder of CO2 Coaching and author of Just Ask Leadership, learned that this habit can limit your team’s potential and make you the organizational bottleneck. While growing his company from a $4,000 investment to 2,200 employees, he and his business partner became overwhelmed by constant questions. The solution wasn’t giving faster answers—it was becoming question-askers instead of answer-givers.
In interviews with over 100 exceptional leaders – from Fortune 500 executives to four-star generals – Cohen discovered they all had a moment where they shifted from being “the answer person” to “the question person.” For General Jack Chain, a promotion made him realize his role had fundamentally changed. For ConAgra’s Mike Harper, moving from engineering to R&D forced him to lead experts whose knowledge far exceeded his own. These shifts inspired frameworks like the GPS model (Goal-Position-Strategy) for focused conversations and the PEAK model, which guides leaders through four questioning styles – Professor, Innovator, Judge, and Director – to spark breakthroughs.
Cohen’s most powerful insight is that most team members already know the answers. They don’t need you to solve their problems—they need you to help them uncover solutions themselves. When they do, ownership skyrockets, and so does performance. The path to multiplying your leadership impact starts with changing your identity from “the teller” to “the asker.” Everything else follows from that transformation.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Mick Spiers (00:01):
Have you ever noticed how, as leaders, we
often fall into the trap ofthinking our job is to have all
the answers?
It feels good, doesn't it?
That quick hit of validationwhen someone comes to you with a
problem and we solve it on thespot.
But here's the catch the moreanswers we give, the more
dependent our teams become.
(00:22):
Before we know it, we're thebottleneck.
Today's guest, gary Cohen,knows this story all too well.
He's the founder of CO2Coaching and author of Just Ask
Leadership why Great ManagersAlways Ask the Right Questions.
In this episode, gary takes usinside his research with more
(00:43):
than 100 top leaders, fromFortune 500 executives to
four-star generals, to revealhow they transformed from answer
people into leaders whomultiply the capability of those
around them.
If you've ever wondered how tostop being the bottleneck and to
empower your team to solvetheir own challenges, this
(01:04):
episode is for you.
Hey, everyone, and welcome backto The Leadership Project.
I'm greatly honored today to bejoined by Gary Cohen.
Gary is the founder of CO2Coaching and the author of a
book called Just Ask Leadershipwhy great managers always ask
the right questions, and that'swhat we're going to be focusing
(01:25):
on today.
What does it mean to ask betterquestions and ask better
questions at the right time.
What do better questions looklike and how might you start
doing that, building that intoyour leadership practice?
So I'm dying to hear Gary'sviews here.
So, without any further ado,gary, please say hello to the
audience and give us a littleflavor of your background and
(01:47):
tell us what inspired you to dothe work you do today and this
book about asking betterquestions?
Gary Cohen (01:55):
Hello Mick, hello audience, it's good to be here
on your program.
A little about my background Istarted a business with a
business partner, rick Diamond,and we started it many years ago
and in doing so we started with$4,000.
We both wrote a check for$2,000 and we grew it to 2,200
(02:17):
people and took it public, andthat got me very interested in
the topic asking questions.
I know that Rick and I startedout by asking questions that
were really related to us makingdecisions and understandings
(02:38):
and knowledge, and what I cameto understand over time, as did
Rick, is that our questionscould move people and if we only
asked them to gatherinformation, it was a disservice
because what was happening waspeople would come to us with
their questions and then waitfor our answer, and sometimes we
(03:02):
had them, sometimes we didn't.
We'd hire consultants, we'd godo research and we'd come back
to them.
And we became the bottleneckbecause when you're going from
two of us to 2,200 people andfor a number of those years we
were growing at a compoundedrate of about 50% a year, so
(03:24):
doubling every two years in sizeand so you quickly become a
bottleneck and you realize thatthe questions are the way to
move forward because it shiftsthe responsibility from you as
the bottleneck to the personthat you're asking them to.
(03:47):
And so when I Gary the business,I left on sabbatical and never
went back.
But I decided I wanted to writea book on leadership and most
of the topics are really wellpicked over and everybody keeps
trying but rewriting similarthings.
And at that time I think theremight have been one or two books
out there on asking questions,but none that quite had it the
(04:12):
way I was thinking about it.
So I went out and interviewedabout 100, 120 different leaders
.
This is from people like JeffChain, who was a four-star
general he ran the Air Force andall nuclear armaments and Mike
(04:37):
Harper, who grew ConAgra from500 million to 20 billion, and I
asked all of them what theythought of asking questions and
what I learned was that all ofthem started off, you know,
using it kind of in the same wayRick and I did, which was
(04:59):
simply to gather information.
But then there was a pivotalmoment For, like Mike Harper, it
was when he moved fromproduction.
He was an engineer by trainingand he was in charge of a plant
and he knew what to do there,but then he was in charge of
Pillsbury, he moved to R&D forfood and on the R&D side he
(05:24):
really struggled becauseeverybody there had a PhD in
food science and he knew nothingabout it.
And that's when Gary he said hereally started to learn
questions as a leadership skill,which was to ask questions to
get people to move forward in amanner that would be helpful to
(05:45):
them and demonstrate leadershipand vulnerability.
And Jack Chain said that oneday when he was promoted he
realized he went from the answerguy to the question guy because
his daughter had once asked himwhat do you do for a living?
And he thought about it and hesaid I answer questions.
(06:07):
And then when he changed jobs,he came home that day and he
realized he was now the asker ofquestions and so many, many
lessons in that.
And you multiply that by ahundred plus interviews, I
became quite knowledgeable waymore knowledgeable than I was
(06:28):
going into it, even though Irealized it was the difference.
Mick Spiers (06:36):
I want to unpack each one of them, but I'll start
Mick with a bit of a summary.
I'm going to say that a lot ofleaders fall into a trap that
you were talking about early onthere, which is, as leaders, we
feel like we need to have theanswers and that our job is to
unlock our team by answeringtheir questions.
Right, so it's a common trap.
(06:57):
Sometimes it can be almost aneed, a validation need For me
to add value here.
I need to be able to answerpeople's questions.
But to stop and pause and gowell, is that really serving
your people?
Well?
Which leads me to chapter two,which is in a 22,000 people
organization, if the two of youare answering the question, you
(07:18):
are the bottleneck.
So how do you flip that scriptto become a multiplier instead
of the person that's putting acap on the productivity of these
22,000 people?
And the third one's reallyinteresting.
And we 2200 people that's a lotof productive hours in a day,
and you're the one that's I'mgoing to exaggerate here.
(07:38):
They're coming to ask me ohGary, I don't know what sandwich
I should have today.
What sandwich should I have?
Imagine that, right, so I'mexaggerating, but on a business
point of view it gets a littlebit like that.
And then the third one isreally interesting and we do
need to get to that as we gothrough this process is it's not
just asking the questions.
The purpose is not to gain moreinformation, and there's a good
(08:01):
chance.
If you've been in your industryfor a long time, you already
know the answer.
But you're still asking thequestion, but for a different
purpose.
So let's come back to thatfirst part, what Ariel O'Farrell
calls the manager's dilemma.
People are coming to ask youquestions and your thought, your
instant thought, is oh, I knowthe answer to that and I'm going
(08:21):
to reflectively give the answerto the team's questions.
How do you stop yourself, gary?
Gary Cohen (08:28):
Yeah, it's kind of interesting.
First was you know I couldstart with my own story, which
was you're just burdened, okay.
And now that I've coached wellover probably 400 CEOs is you
get to see the pattern right?
And the pattern is that peopleare feeling overwhelmed, they
(08:49):
really do feel like a bottleneck, that they come to me as a
coach exhausted from this, andso they're telling their story.
And when they tell their story,it just goes on and on in a
pleasant way, not in anunpleasant way, about what
interchange they had with aparticular employee.
(09:10):
And I'm always asking and whatdid they say?
Right, and they focus on whatthey said as the leader versus
what is the employee saying back.
And that's very telling to me.
And so I'm like, okay, Iunderstand what you said and it
seems like all makes sense.
(09:32):
What is it you might have askedthat would have communicated
the same thing, but had theemployee communicate to you what
they needed to do, or what theywere going to do, or how they
were going to do or how theywere going to do it, because I
have found the straightestdistance between two points is
not a straight line, it'sactually the other person's way,
(09:55):
and I remind folks of this allthe time, which is that what
they think is efficient istelling them how they have done
it.
But so many things change whenpeople are doing things.
The personnel has changed, theresources available to the
company have changed, and so thecontext really does matter
(10:17):
who's on your team, who's not onyour team, and when you're
asking a question where youassume you know the answer,
you're asking leading questions.
So I relate this to Socrates,and Socrates was a scholar in
Athens and he was offered ahemlock to put himself to death
(23:40):
Y so Z suicide, but his friendswere happy to give it to him.
I don't know if that's true,but it really adds to the story
because he asked questions thathe already knew the answer to,
and it really you could tellwhen you read the dialogues that
it's frustrating to the otherperson that you're playing that
game with.
It's a bit of cat and mouse.
And so, as a leader, to move tothe idea that, even if you know
I'm going to let go of that,knowing to hold it in a
different way, I'm going to holdit lightly and ask questions of
wonder and look at what thatwonder will conjure up in the
other person.
So I think the best way is togive you an example of this.
So I'm sitting across from aclient I met many years ago,
very talented executive, and hehad just been promoted into a
general manager role at abusiness unit of a Fortune 500
company.
And the sales manager, the VPof sales, calls while we're at
lunch.
He answers he knows I'm sittingacross from him, so he's
particularly trying to ask theright questions.
And he hung up the phone and hesaid so how did I do?
And he said so, how did I do?
I said you know how long haveyou been responsible for sales?
He goes I'm not, I'mresponsible for the whole
business.
He said how long is your vicepresident of sales?
Well, in this role?
About 15 years, and before thathe was in another company for
seven, and before that eight.
So he's been at it a long time.
And I said you presume to knowsales with somebody who actually
knows it.
Well, he says how would youexpect me to deal with that?
I said assume that you don'tneed to know his answer and that
he already has it.
He just needs to be remindedthat he has it.
He goes well, okay, let's try.
So he picks up the phone, hecalls him back hey, when you
have been faced with situationslike in .
the do?
And it was so funny.
The guy says got it, thank you,bye.
And so I always am reminded ofthis, which is the sales leader
was feeling stuck at the moment.
He needed to be unstuck and hedidn't need an answer that his
general manager was going togive him.
He needed an answer that hecould give himself and he
actually had it.
He'd been, he had too manyyears at it to not have it.
I think you said that earlier,mick, in our conversation how
sometimes we have that historyand we just know.
So for folks out there, I thinkthat the answer is let go of
your knowing.
It's the first thing, and it'sso hard because we are so
addicted Our ego, we're addictedto knowing.
It's like every time we get togive an answer it feels so good
that we want to do that.
And so how would you reframethe thing you're going to share
with somebody into a question?
And into a question you mightnot know the answer to so
remembering it's not necessarilya straight line for them like
it is for you.
You know it's so fun whenyou're writing a book, because
you come across stories thatjust carry the message so loudly
that you wouldn't necessarilypay attention to earlier.
(25:24):
Yeah, very good point.
So there's this story of theLiberty Ship, and the Liberty
Ship was the turning point ofWorld War II.
What was happening is Yeah,very good.
the U-boats were attacking themerchant marines that were
sending cargo to the lines inEurope and it went from like in
1940, u-boats well, I'm sorry,before that it went in 39, 200
ships were sank to by 42, 1600ships were being sunk, and
that's a lot of ships being sunk.
And if you consider at the timeit took eight months to build
on one of these ships that theycalled the Liberty Ship, and
they built them in England.
They knew how to build them.
They had been building shipsfor over a century, well, over a
century, in England and the US.
Very few ships were ever builtin the US by that time, and so
they're trying to figure out howthey're going to keep up
getting supplies to the frontline with ships when they were
running out of ships because theU-boats were sinking so fast.
Yeah you might know the nameKaiser, like Kaiser Permanente,
he was quite an innovativeindustrialist at the time and he
said send me the plans to buildone of these ships, and I think
Cargill did the same thing.
But this story revolves aroundKaiser, because Kaiser gets the
plans and they ask can we sendpeople who know how to build
this ship to you?
So boat builders, no, no, no,we'll figure it out on our own.
And it was quite clever of himbecause he did not want to be
held back by the constraints ofshipbuilding in England, and so
this redesign that he did waslike prefabricated parts,
introducing assembly linetechniques, using these settling
torches and replaced rivetswith welding and all the answer
(26:18):
she looking for.
sorts of things.
And you know, the ships ofEngland were built to last.
And Kaiser goes you know theaverage length of a ship is only
going to be out there.
You know months, not years, sowe really don't need to build a
ship that lasts for decades or acentury, because the likely
road of this ship will be to betaken down.
And so it took eight months inEngland to build one of these
ships.
For a publicity stunt, kaisergot it down to four and a half
days.
So imagine going from the wayin which we do things today is
eight months to four and a halfdays.
The average was two weeks forthe Kaiser organization to build
these ships, but it all changedbecause of the questions.
They were not locked into howthings were, they were locked
into the opportunity and wonderof how they could change those
things.
And I think it's such a I wantto say riveting story about boat
building.
But you know, you can applythat to just about anything and
we did it in our business At thetime.
We were in the Gary centerbusiness and there were these
things called least cost routing.
This is when you had AT&T, mci,sprint, gte and the like and
they all had different pricingbased upon what you called.
So you would buy a switch whichwas about a million dollars to
route these calls to the lowestcost network and that's great,
except if you remember the story, we started with $4,000.
We did not have a milliondollars at the time put in lease
cost routing.
So when we were getting a tourof somebody's facility we asked
them to explain lease costrouting to us Gary and they did.
And so we came up with a patchpanel which was to plug our
phone stations into a particularnetwork focus all of our calls
from, say, minnesota to Michigan, and we'd use MCI and then that
night we were going to callCalifornia where Sprint might
have been the cheaper carrierand we would switch it to that.
But it was all about asking andcontinuing to ask and driving
out what is behind the thingthat we need to accomplish, and
we did that through questions.
Mick Spiers (18:59):
Really good, gary.
So the thing that I'm takingaway there if you do find
yourself like listening to Garyand what he's saying here, if
you find yourself being thatbottleneck where you are just
giving people answers and you'vegot a queue of people at the
door, you are the bottleneck inthe business and by flipping
over to a more question-askingscenario, you're going to become
(19:22):
the multiplier in the business.
You're going to unlock a lot ofpeople far more in that way.
The second part there is thatopen-mindedness that you might
have a preconceived idea of whatthe answer is as you ask the
question.
But if you have that stuff inyour head, confirmation bias
might kick in and you might onlyhear what you want to hear.
You might only hear whatconfirms what you believed
(19:44):
before the conversation started,whereas if you keep an open
mind I'm hearing two dimensionshere, gary From the
non-directive coaching point ofview, there's a good chance that
the person already had theanswer locked away somewhere in
the brain.
They just needed someone tobounce ideas off so that they
could decode their brain to ohyeah, now I know what to do.
(20:06):
And when they have that momentof realization when they go oh,
now I know what to do.
They'll take great ownership ofthat, because now it's come
from them instead of from you,right?
So they're not dependent on youanymore.
They're now off and they'retaking ownership of the answer,
because they came up with theanswer themselves.
You didn't give them the answer.
They come up with the answerand they take great ownership.
(20:28):
Yeah then I'm hearing thisco-creation element that by
keeping that open mind, you'regoing to discover something new
by making sure that you'reasking the right questions that
uncover.
Well, actually, we're nottrying to build a ship in eight
months, we're trying to build aship in two weeks.
So I need to ask the questionsthat lead us to that purpose.
(20:50):
So I'm thinking it's anon-directed coaching, that the
purpose of the coaching is tohelp the person declutter their
own mind, to remove their owninterference.
The answer is there and youjust need to help them dust away
the interference so that theycan get on with it.
And then the second part is, ifwe're asking very purposeful
questions, Gary going to get to.
(21:12):
What is the real challenge here?
Because someone might come toyou and ask you a question that
the answer is really obvious,but they didn't tell you that
what they were really trying todo was over here, and you would
have asked a completelydifferent question if you knew
what the purpose was.
So how does that sit with you,this non-directive coaching and
the ownership of declutteringtheir mind but then also making
(21:34):
sure that there's a purposebehind the question mind?
Gary Cohen (21:37):
but then also making sure that there's a purpose
behind the question.
Yeah, so I can't help but dothis to you, mick, in your
career, where you've gotten to apoint where you kind of knew
the answer and you didn't wantto go to the question, what was
holding you back from asking?
Because we all were there atsome point.
Do you remember facing that?
Mick Spiers (21:59):
Yeah, I do.
I used to think and I hope I'vereframed this, gary there is an
exception.
I'll tell you about theexception in a second.
So I found myself in thesituation where I thought in my
own mind that by giving theinstant answer, that I was the
productivity machine, because ifsomeone came to me with a
question I could give them ananswer in 30 seconds and then
(22:20):
off they go.
Their day is sorted.
But what I didn't realize isall I taught them was dependence
.
And the next day they came andasked me the question again,
whereas once I flipped thescript and once I started to ask
better questions, guess what?
They became self-sufficient.
They didn't have to come andask me that same question again
27 times.
(22:40):
They found it themselves.
They developed their ownproblem-solving skill.
They discovered they actuallyknew the answer the whole time,
and then off they go and theywent.
But I was stuck and the mindsetI was stuck on is I thought
that was the answer toproductivity was to be the quick
answer, and then I realized itwas actually a limiting belief.
Gary Cohen (23:01):
What did it feel like, though?
Like when you gave the answer?
What was the feeling inside,this sensation that you felt
like I've got this answer foryou.
Here it is.
Mick Spiers (23:13):
Yeah, that's a great question and it was a
validation because I know myindustry very well.
So there was this feeling ofpride that you know.
Person X came to me with aquestion and I answered it in 15
milliseconds.
There was an element ofpersonal validation of I added
value today until later that Irealized that I got more pride
(23:36):
when I switched it the other wayand when they came to me and
said X, y, z and I flipped itback to them as a question when
they found the answer themselves.
It gave me this much bigger joythan the personal validation of
proving that I was smart.
Does?
make sense?
Gary Cohen (23:52):
It does make sense, and we find it all the time with
people because they're like Ilove coaching, because I get a
bit of that hit, right, I'm nothere to lead somebody, I am
there to coach somebody, and soif I know something, I'll share
it.
They can use it not use it,right, but when you lead it's
different.
You are totally trying to helpthat person be self-sufficient
(24:18):
and independent, right, andletting go of that, just, it
feels so good, I feel so smart,I feel so valid that you've had
all these many successfulepisodes with all these thought
leaders, right?
I kind of have in my mind it'sthe Oprah effect, right, which
(24:42):
is, after a while, you becomesmarter than your guests because
you've interviewed so manypeople.
How can you not be, oh, that'sGary so-and-so or that's like
this, and so there's a cravingwe have as human to feel
validated, and so that's whatwe're fighting with in ourselves
(25:03):
and why it takes a while tomove from the no word to the
asker.
And let's face it, schools,like they, teach us to know they
want Gary the answer, they wantthe right answer, right, and
the right answer doesn'tactually mean the right answer.
It means the right answeraccording to that teacher yeah,
(25:23):
very good point.
Mick Spiers (25:24):
Different is not wrong, different is not wrong.
So if we, if we think thatthere's only one answer, we're
keeping kidding ourselves.
Gary Cohen (25:30):
Yeah, very good yeah , my daughter was taking a test
many, many years ago and she wasstudying Mandarin and we were
reviewing the questions shemight get and it said what you
can see from outer space inChina and what they want is the
(25:51):
wall right, you can't see thewall.
I've actually called a friendof mine who's an astronaut and
said can you see the wall?
No, you can't see the wall.
It's too thin.
You could see, like thehighways in LA because they're
so wide, but you can't see thewall Right.
But so she goes to school,takes the test, and I said so
would you put down?
I said the wall.
(26:12):
I said why did you do that?
She goes, that was yeah.
So people often ask questionsthat are leading that they want
you to get to and they teach usthis in school.
And so we come out of school,we get our first job, you raise
your hand or you stand up or youspeak up in a meeting and
(26:36):
they're happy that you have areally good answer, a really
good answer right.
And so you start moving yourcareer along and at first it
really does help you.
It moves you forward, but at acertain point there is always a
point, and it's different atdifferent organizations.
You need to switch, becausethat thing that got you there
(26:57):
won't get you to the next place,and what they have found is,
statistically, that people whomove to the question style as
they move into more senior leveljobs do much better, they
perform better, they're paidbetter, and so it becomes the
question rather than the answer.
Mick Spiers (27:15):
Yeah, very Gary, gary.
So how do we make sure that weare asking the right question,
right?
So there's going to be peoplelistening to the show going yeah
, sounds interesting.
But if they are in thesituation where they feel like
they're asking a question thatthey already know the answer to,
how do they check themselves atthe door and go?
Well, hang on a second.
Let's keep open-minded, firstof all, but secondly, how do we
(27:39):
make sure we're asking the rightquestions, and can you give us
some examples of what a good setof questions might look like,
gary?
Gary Cohen (27:46):
Well, I'll give you an easy .
acronym to use, but it's not thebest model.
And then I'll give you theco2coaching.
com best model, which is alittle harder to use GPS, just
like the GPS device in the car,on your phone.
It's goal position strategy.
So you ask goal questions tobegin with, which is even to
(28:09):
yourself, before theconversation started.
What's my goal here, you know,am I trying to teach, coach,
educate, move the person forward?
What is my goal?
Who's the decision maker inthis situation?
Next is what's the kindposition, because often people
forget what the position is, andif you know from where you
(28:32):
start, then where are you goingto go?
And so then, what strategy am Igoing to use to get there?
So then the questions arestrategy questions.
So GPS is a really good toolthat I have found in a pinch
where you might go.
The one I Gary have spent yearsdeveloping is called PEAK, and
(28:54):
it stands for Perspective,evaluation, action and Knowledge
, and so if you think ofperspective at the top and
evaluation at the bottom, andthen knowledge over to the left
and action to the right, okay, Ithought those were going to be
the questions that people asked.
(29:14):
They were perspective questions, evaluative questions,
knowledge questions and actionquestions.
And I was dead wrong because Icreated the model thinking that
they were going to fall intothose four categories.
And so I went out to all thosehundred plus leaders that I
interviewed and I said what arethe best questions you ask
(29:35):
during a one-on-one meeting,during an ops meeting, a
strategy meeting?
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it came back and all butone or two questions fit neatly
into the quadrants.
And the quadrants are theprofessor, and the professor is
one who gathers information.
It's kind of current,historical and it's divergent
(29:56):
thinking.
The innovator is the one whomoves to action.
Right, and they do it.
It's future-oriented and it'salso divergent.
Then we go to the bottomquadrant of judge, and judge is
trying to form a conclusion,trying to be convergent with
current or past knowledgethrough the questions they ask,
(30:19):
and the last one is the director.
So I always think of thisperson like the COO, and they're
asking to move to action andthey're being convergent and
future-oriented, like what arethe top three things we need to
do to accomplish this?
Be an example of that.
So you're going okay, that'skind of complicated.
(30:40):
How do I get to see this if I'ma listener, because just
hearing it probably is a littlebit overwhelming and I okay,
that's kind of complicated.
How do how do I get to see thisif I'm a listener, because just
hearing it probably is a littlebit overwhelming, and I
understand that is.
You can log on to our websiteunder resources and there's the
absolutely free self-assessment.
You can do self-assessment at360.
I decided I wasn't in thebusiness of selling this as a
(31:03):
service, so we just give it away, and I hired people from
Stephen Covey's organization andsomebody who helped build the
Wilson Learning model to help mebuild this and it takes seven
minutes and you can find outwhat style you are.
Now here's the reallyinteresting thing and I didn't
(31:24):
realize this until one day I wasgiving a speech and it's true
which is we're all one of thesestyles predominantly, we can
change.
So it's not like Myers-Briggsor Enneagram or any of those
disks where they say it wouldtake a life-changing incident to
have you change.
(31:44):
What it is is.
It's a style that you havepreference for and because you
have a preference for it, youuse it all the time.
My natural tendency is to bethe innovator, so I ask
action-oriented questions withgreat perspective, like how can
we go do this, you know, andpeople are used to that.
(32:07):
However, over time I've trainedmyself
Mick Spiers (32:10):
to try to become more The the Project, mickspiers
(48:51):
.
com if I can move to the judge,Sedek then I wind up getting
professor and director for freebecause of how we think of these
things.
So Joan you Gozon from GeraldCalibo to ask 25% of Sei Spiers
questions, because you're stuckinto this style, to having 100%.
And what's so The fun?
This is just.
You know, it's a little bit ofan ego thing for me.
I admit it that when I'mreading books and they're always
like the questions, the answer,and then they go proceed to
tell you everything right.
So I find that funny.
But what's more interesting isif you start
Gary Cohen (32:46):
lining up the questions they ask throughout
the book, they're usually stuckinto a style and they're not
even aware of that stuckness.
Mick Spiers (32:57):
I can definitely see how that would happen, and
it's a good one that I like whatyou're saying there about
intentionally stepping out ofyour natural style to enrich the
way that you might go so youdon't get stuck.
That's really interesting, gary, so let me share with you what
was bouncing around my head asyou were talking.
So GPS caught my attention.
So goal position, strategy, andI was thinking here of.
(33:19):
People are going to come to youwith questions and quite often
they might either come to youwith word salad, a five-minute
problem statement of blah, blah,blah, or they might come to you
with one specific question.
How do I do this If you don'tstop and ask a GPS-style
question?
Actually, what are you tryingto achieve here?
You might answer the questionstraight away, but you didn't
(33:40):
actually help them achieve theirgoal.
So a goal-oriented question ofwhat are you really trying to
achieve, a position-basedquestions on where are you today
and where do you want to be,and a strategy-based question on
how do you think you might getthere.
I think that is powerful.
And then this peak model askingquestions about perspectives so
(34:00):
that you can get differentperspectives so we have a richer
understanding of the currentsituation.
Evaluative questions as to whatis that telling us about the
problem that we're facing today?
The knowledge-based questionson how is it enriching our
knowledge?
What did we know before today?
What do we know after thisconversation?
So our knowledge base is, it'sexpanding, but it's also I like
(34:23):
that converging thing that yousaid you're also filtering as
well in that knowledge.
And then the action-oriented.
So what are our priorities andwhat are our options?
I think if you think about thatand I like what you said about
you know think about thequestions that you find yourself
asking Do you always gravitateto only one of those four
dimensions?
Asking do you always gravitateto only one of those four
(34:44):
dimensions?
And you've got me thinkingabout it, by the way, gary.
I'm going to think about thatfor the rest of today and to
make sure that you youexperiment with some of the
other styles to get a richerunderstanding.
How does that sit with you,gary?
Gary Cohen (34:55):
yeah, there, there's a couple things that come to
mind is one is we have found,when somebody is stuck so say,
you're in a board meeting, ateam meeting, and the team is
stuck Usually one of these rolesisn't being filled.
So one of these styles, and sowhat I tend to do when I see the
(35:18):
stuckness is I start writingdown the questions people have
and I put them into the quadrant.
I'm not this nerdy all the time, but when I'm stuck I get nerdy
, and so I find often not alwaysoften that the question from
the quadrant that's not beingasked of is the thing that frees
(35:39):
us up.
So that's a pretty powerfulmove.
The other move that we'velearned over time one of our
coaches, Tom Schwick, who isjust an amazing operator, and he
said Gary, I really think the Zformat is the way to go, and I
have no idea what he's talkingabout he goes I've been playing
(36:02):
with this and you should askprofessor questions first, right
?
So what organizationalassumptions might need to be
challenged?
That might be a professorquestion.
It's open-ended, it'sexploratory and it's historical.
Then you ask an innovatorquestion what would you do if
(36:24):
time and funds were unlimited?
Okay, perspective and forwardlooking Okay.
So we're going from professorto innovator, then we move
diagonally to judge where it'sconvergent, and past or current.
What is the most importantconsideration here?
Okay, and then the final one isthe director question, which is
(36:48):
both action and convergent andfuture oriented.
How can we best leverage ourresources?
And so I'm just winging it onthe questions, but the idea is
that when you're working throughsomething with someone, going
in that order actually winds upunlocking them in a different
(37:10):
frame, and so by doing that, youget more potentiality of the
solution sets or directions thatthey're getting, and it covers
all the bases.
And so what we're teaching ourclients is do the zigzag or the
Z professor, innovator, judge,director and for those who are
(37:31):
still going, like, what is hetalking about?
You can find the peak model onthat resource page of our
website.
Mick Spiers (37:40):
All right, we'll put the link to that in the show
notes, gary, because I thinkthat is going to help people if
they've got a little bit of aguide as to how they can do that
.
A little cheat sheet, I guess,might be the best way to think
about that.
So I want to double down onsomething that we said earlier
is that if you follow thesemodels, first of all, you're
going to be surprised how smartyour team really are.
(38:03):
So if you think that you needto put the answer to every
question, you're not giving yourchance to your team for them to
show what they know right, andyou're going to be surprised
that they do know the answersand you're just helping them
declutter their library so thatthey can find the answer.
The answer is there, and whenthey find the answer themselves
I said this before they'll thentake greater ownership instead
(38:25):
of just doing what the boss toldthem to do.
It's an idea, and when it's youridea, you take great ownership
and you go for it.
And then what I'm hearing youin this boardroom situation is
we're now co-creating an answerthat none of us could have done
individually.
We're smarter together whenwe're listening to each other
and we co-create something thatis a far better answer than any
(38:45):
individual could have come upwith, and then we're off to the
races.
Gary Cohen (38:50):
You know it really made sense back in the day,
telling it really did.
Like the people at the top werejust super educated, they had
the resources.
You know, they knew where to go, or they knew somebody who knew
where to go for thatinformation.
Today, today, just today, 6 000new books were published and
(39:13):
yesterday 6 000 books werepublished.
That's new books, right.
So there, there is no end tothe amount of knowledge that is
being spread.
I have no idea what the Googlehit rate is anymore, but you
know trillions right of searchesand now it's not just that,
it's chat GPT.
So one's access to knowledgeand information has dramatically
(39:39):
change, like if you go back intime and you said, okay, you
know, in the 18th century aperson average lifetime okay, is
the equivalent of one week ofthe New York Times in knowledge.
So I mean you know it took300,000 years for humans raised
(40:01):
to accumulate 12 billion bytes.
This amount of information isdoubling every six months now.
Mick Spiers (40:08):
Yeah, wow, that's mind-blowing.
And you were just talking aboutChatGPT and you did make me
think of this as well.
I think I read yesterday thatChatGPT is now the third most
used website in the world,behind Google and YouTube.
But have a think about thisfrom a leadership point of view.
What's the most common thingpeople type into Google
(40:30):
Questions?
What's the most common thingpeople type into YouTube
Questions?
And for people that are going tomake the most out of ChatGPT,
the answer to get the most outof ChatGPT is the question you
ask.
It's being a prompt engineer.
The prompt that you giveChatGPT is whether you get
gobbledygook back or you getsomething useful back.
(40:51):
It's the same thing as a leader.
If you're asking betterquestions, you're going to get
better answers.
This is really good.
All right, gary, this has beena fascinating conversation.
I'm going to draw us to a closenow.
I'm going to re-emphasize a fewthings as we go to our
wrap-around.
So if you are the answer toevery question in your business,
you are the bottleneck, and ifyou can flip from being the
(41:13):
answer guy to the question guyor the answer girl to the
question girl, you're going tobecome the multiplier.
You're going to be the one thatcan unlock things for people.
Chances are they already knowthe answer and you're just
helping them find the answer.
And when they find the answer,they'll take great ownership and
off they go.
Make sure that they're cleverquestions, right.
So GPS goal position strategyor peak perspective, evaluative,
(41:39):
action-oriented orknowledge-based questions.
And if you find yourselftrapped in one quadrant, go to
Gary's resource so that you canhelp take this kind of zigzag
model to help you unstuck whereyour own questions are.
You get stuck too.
So help yourself get unstuck toask better questions and you're
going to be surprised just howmuch your team know, how much
(42:00):
pride they take in their workand what you can co-create
together when you're askingbetter questions.
And you're not presuming thatyou know the answer as you ask
the questions.
So you're keeping that openmind as to where all of this
might go.
So you've got some clearactions.
Have a think about that.
Gary Cohen (42:17):
I have one more, just a quick, because I was
hearing you play that back.
It was great, by the way, sothank you for that.
It's nice to be heard.
The idea is like when you're astudent in school, you have an
identity.
Right, your identity is I'm astudent.
And then you get into theprofessional world.
You no longer identify as astudent, do you?
(42:40):
What do you identify as?
Identify as a student, do you?
What do you identify?
As A worker, whatever theposition is, but it's not
student.
So you've changed your identity.
What we're asking for from yourlisteners is changing your
identity from the teller to theasker and making that move.
(43:00):
That mental move is the move.
Everything else is noise.
If you can change yourself fromthe teller to the asker.
Mick Spiers (43:10):
That's a great framing, Gary.
I really love it.
So that's your call to actiontoday.
So you find yourself tellingall the time reframe your
identity.
As you said it before, I wentfrom question guy to answer guy
or question girl to answer girl,right?
So reframe your identity.
I really like that and thatwill be the powerful unlocking
that you can make.
(43:30):
All right, Gary, I'd like totake us now to our wrap-up round
.
So these are the same fourquestions that we asked all of
our guests.
So what's the one thing youknow now, Gary Cohen, that you
wish you knew when you were 20.
Gary Cohen (43:43):
I was on a committee at Tulane to bring in speakers
and one of the speakers webrought in I'm forgetting his
name, but he was a person whostudied population growth and he
told us so this would have beenearly 1980s that the population
(44:03):
was going to 3 billion to 10billion.
And of course we all go, yeah,yeah, yes, and it was kind of so
what?
But the old me today, talkingto the young me then, would say
pay attention, Go where thetrend is, Go into a business
that leverages that growth.
(44:25):
And I knew that.
I had the knowledge, but I didnot have the intellectual
connectedness to that point thatI wish I would have known.
And there's, I'm sure, manyequivalents of that today.
For all of us, with what?
The next 30 years?
Mick Spiers (44:44):
Yeah, that's an interesting challenge for you,
gary, and you got me thinkingabout.
You know, what did I not payattention to 30 years ago?
That's an interesting question.
What's more interesting is whatam I not paying attention to
today that's going to beimpacting 30 years from now?
That's a great question.
Okay, what's your favorite book, gary?
Gary Cohen (45:04):
Oh my gosh, I am a reader so I just read, read,
read, read, read.
Favorite fictional book JeffreyArcher, cain and Abel.
Just, I loved it, I alwaysloved it, and I've read every
book in between.
So that would be on the fictionside, on the nonfiction side.
So that would be on the fictionside.
(45:26):
On the nonfiction side, oh gosh, I'm overwhelmed by.
The most consumable of herbooks is Mind Traps, and she
(45:52):
takes the adult developmenttheory, which for those of us
using it isn't so complicated,but those who don't need to use
it every day, it's complicated,and so she makes it quite simple
by saying here are sevenidentity traps that we have.
Okay, mind traps that get usstuck, and I find it very useful
for people.
Mick Spiers (46:12):
Yeah, I like it.
I don't know that one, so I'mgoing to look at it myself.
I'm going to read that onemyself.
Thank you, Gary.
What's your favorite quote?
Gary Cohen (46:19):
A word is dead when it is said.
Some say, I say it just beginsto live that day.
And who was that?
That was, I'm forgetting theauthor of it, that's a very
powerful one as well.
Mick Spiers (46:32):
And finally, gary, there's going to be people that
want to do this, they want to go.
Yeah, I have fallen into thesetraps that Gary's talking about.
How do people find you ifthey'd like to know more about
you, your services, the book,the model how do they find you?
Gary Cohen (46:46):
I'm pretty easy to find Gary B Cohen.
You could type that in to anybrowser.
You can also go toco2coachingcom and find us, find
me, find my team A whole bunchof nerdy.
We love learning, we just lovelearning.
(47:07):
And then we love applying thatlearning to people so that they
can outperform in building theirbusinesses.
Mick Spiers (47:15):
Yeah, brilliant, gary.
Well, thank you so much.
Thank you for your gift today,the gift of your time, your
knowledge, your wisdom, and forinspiring us into action to
rethink and reframe who we areas leaders, and to giving us
some very practical things thatwe can put in practice today to
become a better leader andunlock possibilities for our
teams.
Thank you so much.
Gary Cohen (47:36):
Thanks, mate, I really appreciate the time.
Mick Spiers (47:39):
What a powerful reminder from Gary Cohen that
leadership is less about knowingand more about asking.
When we let go of the ego hitthat comes from having the
answer and instead askpurposeful, open-minded
questions, we shift from beingthe bottleneck to being the
multiplier.
We build teams that think forthemselves, own their results
(48:01):
and discover capabilities theydidn't even know they had.
Gary's GPS and peak frameworksgive us practical tools to guide
any conversation, whetheryou're coaching a direct report,
running a strategy session orleading through uncertainty.
So here's your challenge forthis week the next time someone
(48:22):
comes to you for an answer,pause and turn it into a
question.
Watch how the dynamic changes.
In the next episode, we're goingto be joined by Scott Bergmeier
, founder and CEO of the BecomeMore group, and he's going to
talk to us about the multipliereffect and cultivating leaders
(48:43):
who create other leaders.
Thank you for listening to theLeadership Project at
mickspearscom.
A huge call out to Faris Sadekfor his video editing of all of
our video content, and to all ofthe team at TLP Joanne Goes On,
gerald Calabo and my amazingwife Say Spears.
(49:03):
I could not do this showwithout you.
Don't forget to subscribe tothe Leadership Project YouTube
channel, where we bring youinteresting videos each and
every week, and you can followus on social, particularly on
LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram.
Now, in the meantime, please dotake care, look out for each
other and join us on thisjourney, as we learn together
(49:29):
and lead together.
Have you ever noticed how, as leaders, we
often fall into the trap ofthinking our job is to have all
the answers?
It feels good, doesn't it?
That quick hit of validationwhen someone comes to you with a
problem and we solve it on thespot.
But here's the catch the moreanswers we give, the more
dependent our teams become.
(00:22):
Before we know it, we're thebottleneck.
Today's guest, gary Cohen,knows this story all too well.
He's the founder of CO2Coaching and author of Just Ask
Leadership why Great ManagersAlways Ask the Right Questions.
In this episode, gary takes usinside his research with more
(00:43):
than 100 top leaders, fromFortune 500 executives to
four-star generals, to revealhow they transformed from answer
people into leaders whomultiply the capability of those
around them.
If you've ever wondered how tostop being the bottleneck and to
empower your team to solvetheir own challenges, this
(01:04):
episode is for you.
Hey, everyone, and welcome backto The Leadership Project.
I'm greatly honored today to bejoined by Gary Cohen.
Gary is the founder of CO2Coaching and the author of a
book called Just Ask Leadershipwhy great managers always ask
the right questions, and that'swhat we're going to be focusing
(01:25):
on today.
What does it mean to ask betterquestions and ask better
questions at the right time.
What do better questions looklike and how might you start
doing that, building that intoyour leadership practice?
So I'm dying to hear Gary'sviews here.
So, without any further ado,gary, please say hello to the
audience and give us a littleflavor of your background and
(01:47):
tell us what inspired you to dothe work you do today and this
book about asking betterquestions?
Gary Cohen (01:55):
Hello Mick, hello audience, it's good to be here
on your program.
A little about my background Istarted a business with a
business partner, rick Diamond,and we started it many years ago
and in doing so we started with$4,000.
We both wrote a check for$2,000 and we grew it to 2,200
(02:17):
people and took it public, andthat got me very interested in
the topic asking questions.
I know that Rick and I startedout by asking questions that
were really related to us makingdecisions and understandings
(02:38):
and knowledge, and what I cameto understand over time, as did
Rick, is that our questionscould move people and if we only
asked them to gatherinformation, it was a disservice
because what was happening waspeople would come to us with
their questions and then waitfor our answer, and sometimes we
(03:02):
had them, sometimes we didn't.
We'd hire consultants, we'd godo research and we'd come back
to them.
And we became the bottleneckbecause when you're going from
two of us to 2,200 people andfor a number of those years we
were growing at a compoundedrate of about 50% a year, so
(03:24):
doubling every two years in sizeand so you quickly become a
bottleneck and you realize thatthe questions are the way to
move forward because it shiftsthe responsibility from you as
the bottleneck to the personthat you're asking them to.
(03:47):
And so when I Gary the business,I left on sabbatical and never
went back.
But I decided I wanted to writea book on leadership and most
of the topics are really wellpicked over and everybody keeps
trying but rewriting similarthings.
And at that time I think theremight have been one or two books
out there on asking questions,but none that quite had it the
(04:12):
way I was thinking about it.
So I went out and interviewedabout 100, 120 different leaders
.
This is from people like JeffChain, who was a four-star
general he ran the Air Force andall nuclear armaments and Mike
(04:37):
Harper, who grew ConAgra from500 million to 20 billion, and I
asked all of them what theythought of asking questions and
what I learned was that all ofthem started off, you know,
using it kind of in the same wayRick and I did, which was
(04:59):
simply to gather information.
But then there was a pivotalmoment For, like Mike Harper, it
was when he moved fromproduction.
He was an engineer by trainingand he was in charge of a plant
and he knew what to do there,but then he was in charge of
Pillsbury, he moved to R&D forfood and on the R&D side he
(05:24):
really struggled becauseeverybody there had a PhD in
food science and he knew nothingabout it.
And that's when Gary he said hereally started to learn
questions as a leadership skill,which was to ask questions to
get people to move forward in amanner that would be helpful to
(05:45):
them and demonstrate leadershipand vulnerability.
And Jack Chain said that oneday when he was promoted he
realized he went from the answerguy to the question guy because
his daughter had once asked himwhat do you do for a living?
And he thought about it and hesaid I answer questions.
(06:07):
And then when he changed jobs,he came home that day and he
realized he was now the asker ofquestions and so many, many
lessons in that.
And you multiply that by ahundred plus interviews, I
became quite knowledgeable waymore knowledgeable than I was
(06:28):
going into it, even though Irealized it was the difference.
Mick Spiers (06:36):
I want to unpack each one of them, but I'll start
Mick with a bit of a summary.
I'm going to say that a lot ofleaders fall into a trap that
you were talking about early onthere, which is, as leaders, we
feel like we need to have theanswers and that our job is to
unlock our team by answeringtheir questions.
Right, so it's a common trap.
(06:57):
Sometimes it can be almost aneed, a validation need For me
to add value here.
I need to be able to answerpeople's questions.
But to stop and pause and gowell, is that really serving
your people?
Well?
Which leads me to chapter two,which is in a 22,000 people
organization, if the two of youare answering the question, you
(07:18):
are the bottleneck.
So how do you flip that scriptto become a multiplier instead
of the person that's putting acap on the productivity of these
22,000 people?
And the third one's reallyinteresting.
And we 2200 people that's a lotof productive hours in a day,
and you're the one that's I'mgoing to exaggerate here.
(07:38):
They're coming to ask me ohGary, I don't know what sandwich
I should have today.
What sandwich should I have?
Imagine that, right, so I'mexaggerating, but on a business
point of view it gets a littlebit like that.
And then the third one isreally interesting and we do
need to get to that as we gothrough this process is it's not
just asking the questions.
The purpose is not to gain moreinformation, and there's a good
(08:01):
chance.
If you've been in your industryfor a long time, you already
know the answer.
But you're still asking thequestion, but for a different
purpose.
So let's come back to thatfirst part, what Ariel O'Farrell
calls the manager's dilemma.
People are coming to ask youquestions and your thought, your
instant thought, is oh, I knowthe answer to that and I'm going
(08:21):
to reflectively give the answerto the team's questions.
How do you stop yourself, gary?
Gary Cohen (08:28):
Yeah, it's kind of interesting.
First was you know I couldstart with my own story, which
was you're just burdened, okay.
And now that I've coached wellover probably 400 CEOs is you
get to see the pattern right?
And the pattern is that peopleare feeling overwhelmed, they
(08:49):
really do feel like a bottleneck, that they come to me as a
coach exhausted from this, andso they're telling their story.
And when they tell their story,it just goes on and on in a
pleasant way, not in anunpleasant way, about what
interchange they had with aparticular employee.
(09:10):
And I'm always asking and whatdid they say?
Right, and they focus on whatthey said as the leader versus
what is the employee saying back.
And that's very telling to me.
And so I'm like, okay, Iunderstand what you said and it
seems like all makes sense.
(09:32):
What is it you might have askedthat would have communicated
the same thing, but had theemployee communicate to you what
they needed to do, or what theywere going to do, or how they
were going to do or how theywere going to do it, because I
have found the straightestdistance between two points is
not a straight line, it'sactually the other person's way,
(09:55):
and I remind folks of this allthe time, which is that what
they think is efficient istelling them how they have done
it.
But so many things change whenpeople are doing things.
The personnel has changed, theresources available to the
company have changed, and so thecontext really does matter
(10:17):
who's on your team, who's not onyour team, and when you're
asking a question where youassume you know the answer,
you're asking leading questions.
So I relate this to Socrates,and Socrates was a scholar in
Athens and he was offered ahemlock to put himself to death
(23:40):
Y so Z suicide, but his friendswere happy to give it to him.
I don't know if that's true,but it really adds to the story
because he asked questions thathe already knew the answer to,
and it really you could tellwhen you read the dialogues that
it's frustrating to the otherperson that you're playing that
game with.
It's a bit of cat and mouse.
And so, as a leader, to move tothe idea that, even if you know
I'm going to let go of that,knowing to hold it in a
different way, I'm going to holdit lightly and ask questions of
wonder and look at what thatwonder will conjure up in the
other person.
So I think the best way is togive you an example of this.
So I'm sitting across from aclient I met many years ago,
very talented executive, and hehad just been promoted into a
general manager role at abusiness unit of a Fortune 500
company.
And the sales manager, the VPof sales, calls while we're at
lunch.
He answers he knows I'm sittingacross from him, so he's
particularly trying to ask theright questions.
And he hung up the phone and hesaid so how did I do?
And he said so, how did I do?
I said you know how long haveyou been responsible for sales?
He goes I'm not, I'mresponsible for the whole
business.
He said how long is your vicepresident of sales?
Well, in this role?
About 15 years, and before thathe was in another company for
seven, and before that eight.
So he's been at it a long time.
And I said you presume to knowsales with somebody who actually
knows it.
Well, he says how would youexpect me to deal with that?
I said assume that you don'tneed to know his answer and that
he already has it.
He just needs to be remindedthat he has it.
He goes well, okay, let's try.
So he picks up the phone, hecalls him back hey, when you
have been faced with situationslike in .
the do?
And it was so funny.
The guy says got it, thank you,bye.
And so I always am reminded ofthis, which is the sales leader
was feeling stuck at the moment.
He needed to be unstuck and hedidn't need an answer that his
general manager was going togive him.
He needed an answer that hecould give himself and he
actually had it.
He'd been, he had too manyyears at it to not have it.
I think you said that earlier,mick, in our conversation how
sometimes we have that historyand we just know.
So for folks out there, I thinkthat the answer is let go of
your knowing.
It's the first thing, and it'sso hard because we are so
addicted Our ego, we're addictedto knowing.
It's like every time we get togive an answer it feels so good
that we want to do that.
And so how would you reframethe thing you're going to share
with somebody into a question?
And into a question you mightnot know the answer to so
remembering it's not necessarilya straight line for them like
it is for you.
You know it's so fun whenyou're writing a book, because
you come across stories thatjust carry the message so loudly
that you wouldn't necessarilypay attention to earlier.
(25:24):
Yeah, very good point.
So there's this story of theLiberty Ship, and the Liberty
Ship was the turning point ofWorld War II.
What was happening is Yeah,very good.
the U-boats were attacking themerchant marines that were
sending cargo to the lines inEurope and it went from like in
1940, u-boats well, I'm sorry,before that it went in 39, 200
ships were sank to by 42, 1600ships were being sunk, and
that's a lot of ships being sunk.
And if you consider at the timeit took eight months to build
on one of these ships that theycalled the Liberty Ship, and
they built them in England.
They knew how to build them.
They had been building shipsfor over a century, well, over a
century, in England and the US.
Very few ships were ever builtin the US by that time, and so
they're trying to figure out howthey're going to keep up
getting supplies to the frontline with ships when they were
running out of ships because theU-boats were sinking so fast.
Yeah you might know the nameKaiser, like Kaiser Permanente,
he was quite an innovativeindustrialist at the time and he
said send me the plans to buildone of these ships, and I think
Cargill did the same thing.
But this story revolves aroundKaiser, because Kaiser gets the
plans and they ask can we sendpeople who know how to build
this ship to you?
So boat builders, no, no, no,we'll figure it out on our own.
And it was quite clever of himbecause he did not want to be
held back by the constraints ofshipbuilding in England, and so
this redesign that he did waslike prefabricated parts,
introducing assembly linetechniques, using these settling
torches and replaced rivetswith welding and all the answer
(26:18):
she looking for.
sorts of things.
And you know, the ships ofEngland were built to last.
And Kaiser goes you know theaverage length of a ship is only
going to be out there.
You know months, not years, sowe really don't need to build a
ship that lasts for decades or acentury, because the likely
road of this ship will be to betaken down.
And so it took eight months inEngland to build one of these
ships.
For a publicity stunt, kaisergot it down to four and a half
days.
So imagine going from the wayin which we do things today is
eight months to four and a halfdays.
The average was two weeks forthe Kaiser organization to build
these ships, but it all changedbecause of the questions.
They were not locked into howthings were, they were locked
into the opportunity and wonderof how they could change those
things.
And I think it's such a I wantto say riveting story about boat
building.
But you know, you can applythat to just about anything and
we did it in our business At thetime.
We were in the Gary centerbusiness and there were these
things called least cost routing.
This is when you had AT&T, mci,sprint, gte and the like and
they all had different pricingbased upon what you called.
So you would buy a switch whichwas about a million dollars to
route these calls to the lowestcost network and that's great,
except if you remember the story, we started with $4,000.
We did not have a milliondollars at the time put in lease
cost routing.
So when we were getting a tourof somebody's facility we asked
them to explain lease costrouting to us Gary and they did.
And so we came up with a patchpanel which was to plug our
phone stations into a particularnetwork focus all of our calls
from, say, minnesota to Michigan, and we'd use MCI and then that
night we were going to callCalifornia where Sprint might
have been the cheaper carrierand we would switch it to that.
But it was all about asking andcontinuing to ask and driving
out what is behind the thingthat we need to accomplish, and
we did that through questions.
Mick Spiers (18:59):
Really good, gary.
So the thing that I'm takingaway there if you do find
yourself like listening to Garyand what he's saying here, if
you find yourself being thatbottleneck where you are just
giving people answers and you'vegot a queue of people at the
door, you are the bottleneck inthe business and by flipping
over to a more question-askingscenario, you're going to become
(19:22):
the multiplier in the business.
You're going to unlock a lot ofpeople far more in that way.
The second part there is thatopen-mindedness that you might
have a preconceived idea of whatthe answer is as you ask the
question.
But if you have that stuff inyour head, confirmation bias
might kick in and you might onlyhear what you want to hear.
You might only hear whatconfirms what you believed
(19:44):
before the conversation started,whereas if you keep an open
mind I'm hearing two dimensionshere, gary From the
non-directive coaching point ofview, there's a good chance that
the person already had theanswer locked away somewhere in
the brain.
They just needed someone tobounce ideas off so that they
could decode their brain to ohyeah, now I know what to do.
(20:06):
And when they have that momentof realization when they go oh,
now I know what to do.
They'll take great ownership ofthat, because now it's come
from them instead of from you,right?
So they're not dependent on youanymore.
They're now off and they'retaking ownership of the answer,
because they came up with theanswer themselves.
You didn't give them the answer.
They come up with the answerand they take great ownership.
(20:28):
Yeah then I'm hearing thisco-creation element that by
keeping that open mind, you'regoing to discover something new
by making sure that you'reasking the right questions that
uncover.
Well, actually, we're nottrying to build a ship in eight
months, we're trying to build aship in two weeks.
So I need to ask the questionsthat lead us to that purpose.
(20:50):
So I'm thinking it's anon-directed coaching, that the
purpose of the coaching is tohelp the person declutter their
own mind, to remove their owninterference.
The answer is there and youjust need to help them dust away
the interference so that theycan get on with it.
And then the second part is, ifwe're asking very purposeful
questions, Gary going to get to.
(21:12):
What is the real challenge here?
Because someone might come toyou and ask you a question that
the answer is really obvious,but they didn't tell you that
what they were really trying todo was over here, and you would
have asked a completelydifferent question if you knew
what the purpose was.
So how does that sit with you,this non-directive coaching and
the ownership of declutteringtheir mind but then also making
(21:34):
sure that there's a purposebehind the question mind?
Gary Cohen (21:37):
but then also making sure that there's a purpose
behind the question.
Yeah, so I can't help but dothis to you, mick, in your
career, where you've gotten to apoint where you kind of knew
the answer and you didn't wantto go to the question, what was
holding you back from asking?
Because we all were there atsome point.
Do you remember facing that?
Mick Spiers (21:59):
Yeah, I do.
I used to think and I hope I'vereframed this, gary there is an
exception.
I'll tell you about theexception in a second.
So I found myself in thesituation where I thought in my
own mind that by giving theinstant answer, that I was the
productivity machine, because ifsomeone came to me with a
question I could give them ananswer in 30 seconds and then
(22:20):
off they go.
Their day is sorted.
But what I didn't realize isall I taught them was dependence
.
And the next day they came andasked me the question again,
whereas once I flipped thescript and once I started to ask
better questions, guess what?
They became self-sufficient.
They didn't have to come andask me that same question again
27 times.
(22:40):
They found it themselves.
They developed their ownproblem-solving skill.
They discovered they actuallyknew the answer the whole time,
and then off they go and theywent.
But I was stuck and the mindsetI was stuck on is I thought
that was the answer toproductivity was to be the quick
answer, and then I realized itwas actually a limiting belief.
Gary Cohen (23:01):
What did it feel like, though?
Like when you gave the answer?
What was the feeling inside,this sensation that you felt
like I've got this answer foryou.
Here it is.
Mick Spiers (23:13):
Yeah, that's a great question and it was a
validation because I know myindustry very well.
So there was this feeling ofpride that you know.
Person X came to me with aquestion and I answered it in 15
milliseconds.
There was an element ofpersonal validation of I added
value today until later that Irealized that I got more pride
(23:36):
when I switched it the other wayand when they came to me and
said X, y, z and I flipped itback to them as a question when
they found the answer themselves.
It gave me this much bigger joythan the personal validation of
proving that I was smart.
Does?
make sense?
Gary Cohen (23:52):
It does make sense, and we find it all the time with
people because they're like Ilove coaching, because I get a
bit of that hit, right, I'm nothere to lead somebody, I am
there to coach somebody, and soif I know something, I'll share
it.
They can use it not use it,right, but when you lead it's
different.
You are totally trying to helpthat person be self-sufficient
(24:18):
and independent, right, andletting go of that, just, it
feels so good, I feel so smart,I feel so valid that you've had
all these many successfulepisodes with all these thought
leaders, right?
I kind of have in my mind it'sthe Oprah effect, right, which
(24:42):
is, after a while, you becomesmarter than your guests because
you've interviewed so manypeople.
How can you not be, oh, that'sGary so-and-so or that's like
this, and so there's a cravingwe have as human to feel
validated, and so that's whatwe're fighting with in ourselves
(25:03):
and why it takes a while tomove from the no word to the
asker.
And let's face it, schools,like they, teach us to know they
want Gary the answer, they wantthe right answer, right, and
the right answer doesn'tactually mean the right answer.
It means the right answeraccording to that teacher yeah,
(25:23):
very good point.
Mick Spiers (25:24):
Different is not wrong, different is not wrong.
So if we, if we think thatthere's only one answer, we're
keeping kidding ourselves.
Gary Cohen (25:30):
Yeah, very good yeah , my daughter was taking a test
many, many years ago and she wasstudying Mandarin and we were
reviewing the questions shemight get and it said what you
can see from outer space inChina and what they want is the
(25:51):
wall right, you can't see thewall.
I've actually called a friendof mine who's an astronaut and
said can you see the wall?
No, you can't see the wall.
It's too thin.
You could see, like thehighways in LA because they're
so wide, but you can't see thewall Right.
But so she goes to school,takes the test, and I said so
would you put down?
I said the wall.
(26:12):
I said why did you do that?
She goes, that was yeah.
So people often ask questionsthat are leading that they want
you to get to and they teach usthis in school.
And so we come out of school,we get our first job, you raise
your hand or you stand up or youspeak up in a meeting and
(26:36):
they're happy that you have areally good answer, a really
good answer right.
And so you start moving yourcareer along and at first it
really does help you.
It moves you forward, but at acertain point there is always a
point, and it's different atdifferent organizations.
You need to switch, becausethat thing that got you there
(26:57):
won't get you to the next place,and what they have found is,
statistically, that people whomove to the question style as
they move into more senior leveljobs do much better, they
perform better, they're paidbetter, and so it becomes the
question rather than the answer.
Mick Spiers (27:15):
Yeah, very Gary, gary.
So how do we make sure that weare asking the right question,
right?
So there's going to be peoplelistening to the show going yeah
, sounds interesting.
But if they are in thesituation where they feel like
they're asking a question thatthey already know the answer to,
how do they check themselves atthe door and go?
Well, hang on a second.
Let's keep open-minded, firstof all, but secondly, how do we
(27:39):
make sure we're asking the rightquestions, and can you give us
some examples of what a good setof questions might look like,
gary?
Gary Cohen (27:46):
Well, I'll give you an easy .
acronym to use, but it's not thebest model.
And then I'll give you theco2coaching.
com best model, which is alittle harder to use GPS, just
like the GPS device in the car,on your phone.
It's goal position strategy.
So you ask goal questions tobegin with, which is even to
(28:09):
yourself, before theconversation started.
What's my goal here, you know,am I trying to teach, coach,
educate, move the person forward?
What is my goal?
Who's the decision maker inthis situation?
Next is what's the kindposition, because often people
forget what the position is, andif you know from where you
(28:32):
start, then where are you goingto go?
And so then, what strategy am Igoing to use to get there?
So then the questions arestrategy questions.
So GPS is a really good toolthat I have found in a pinch
where you might go.
The one I Gary have spent yearsdeveloping is called PEAK, and
(28:54):
it stands for Perspective,evaluation, action and Knowledge
, and so if you think ofperspective at the top and
evaluation at the bottom, andthen knowledge over to the left
and action to the right, okay, Ithought those were going to be
the questions that people asked.
(29:14):
They were perspective questions, evaluative questions,
knowledge questions and actionquestions.
And I was dead wrong because Icreated the model thinking that
they were going to fall intothose four categories.
And so I went out to all thosehundred plus leaders that I
interviewed and I said what arethe best questions you ask
(29:35):
during a one-on-one meeting,during an ops meeting, a
strategy meeting?
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it came back and all butone or two questions fit neatly
into the quadrants.
And the quadrants are theprofessor, and the professor is
one who gathers information.
It's kind of current,historical and it's divergent
(29:56):
thinking.
The innovator is the one whomoves to action.
Right, and they do it.
It's future-oriented and it'salso divergent.
Then we go to the bottomquadrant of judge, and judge is
trying to form a conclusion,trying to be convergent with
current or past knowledgethrough the questions they ask,
(30:19):
and the last one is the director.
So I always think of thisperson like the COO, and they're
asking to move to action andthey're being convergent and
future-oriented, like what arethe top three things we need to
do to accomplish this?
Be an example of that.
So you're going okay, that'skind of complicated.
(30:40):
How do I get to see this if I'ma listener, because just
hearing it probably is a littlebit overwhelming and I okay,
that's kind of complicated.
How do how do I get to see thisif I'm a listener, because just
hearing it probably is a littlebit overwhelming, and I
understand that is.
You can log on to our websiteunder resources and there's the
absolutely free self-assessment.
You can do self-assessment at360.
I decided I wasn't in thebusiness of selling this as a
(31:03):
service, so we just give it away, and I hired people from
Stephen Covey's organization andsomebody who helped build the
Wilson Learning model to help mebuild this and it takes seven
minutes and you can find outwhat style you are.
Now here's the reallyinteresting thing and I didn't
(31:24):
realize this until one day I wasgiving a speech and it's true
which is we're all one of thesestyles predominantly, we can
change.
So it's not like Myers-Briggsor Enneagram or any of those
disks where they say it wouldtake a life-changing incident to
have you change.
(31:44):
What it is is.
It's a style that you havepreference for and because you
have a preference for it, youuse it all the time.
My natural tendency is to bethe innovator, so I ask
action-oriented questions withgreat perspective, like how can
we go do this, you know, andpeople are used to that.
(32:07):
However, over time I've trainedmyself
Mick Spiers (32:10):
to try to become more The the Project, mickspiers
(48:51):
.
com if I can move to the judge,Sedek then I wind up getting
professor and director for freebecause of how we think of these
things.
So Joan you Gozon from GeraldCalibo to ask 25% of Sei Spiers
questions, because you're stuckinto this style, to having 100%.
And what's so The fun?
This is just.
You know, it's a little bit ofan ego thing for me.
I admit it that when I'mreading books and they're always
like the questions, the answer,and then they go proceed to
tell you everything right.
So I find that funny.
But what's more interesting isif you start
Gary Cohen (32:46):
lining up the questions they ask throughout
the book, they're usually stuckinto a style and they're not
even aware of that stuckness.
Mick Spiers (32:57):
I can definitely see how that would happen, and
it's a good one that I like whatyou're saying there about
intentionally stepping out ofyour natural style to enrich the
way that you might go so youdon't get stuck.
That's really interesting, gary, so let me share with you what
was bouncing around my head asyou were talking.
So GPS caught my attention.
So goal position, strategy, andI was thinking here of.
(33:19):
People are going to come to youwith questions and quite often
they might either come to youwith word salad, a five-minute
problem statement of blah, blah,blah, or they might come to you
with one specific question.
How do I do this If you don'tstop and ask a GPS-style
question?
Actually, what are you tryingto achieve here?
You might answer the questionstraight away, but you didn't
(33:40):
actually help them achieve theirgoal.
So a goal-oriented question ofwhat are you really trying to
achieve, a position-basedquestions on where are you today
and where do you want to be,and a strategy-based question on
how do you think you might getthere.
I think that is powerful.
And then this peak model askingquestions about perspectives so
(34:00):
that you can get differentperspectives so we have a richer
understanding of the currentsituation.
Evaluative questions as to whatis that telling us about the
problem that we're facing today?
The knowledge-based questionson how is it enriching our
knowledge?
What did we know before today?
What do we know after thisconversation?
So our knowledge base is, it'sexpanding, but it's also I like
(34:23):
that converging thing that yousaid you're also filtering as
well in that knowledge.
And then the action-oriented.
So what are our priorities andwhat are our options?
I think if you think about thatand I like what you said about
you know think about thequestions that you find yourself
asking Do you always gravitateto only one of those four
dimensions?
Asking do you always gravitateto only one of those four
(34:44):
dimensions?
And you've got me thinkingabout it, by the way, gary.
I'm going to think about thatfor the rest of today and to
make sure that you youexperiment with some of the
other styles to get a richerunderstanding.
How does that sit with you,gary?
Gary Cohen (34:55):
yeah, there, there's a couple things that come to
mind is one is we have found,when somebody is stuck so say,
you're in a board meeting, ateam meeting, and the team is
stuck Usually one of these rolesisn't being filled.
So one of these styles, and sowhat I tend to do when I see the
(35:18):
stuckness is I start writingdown the questions people have
and I put them into the quadrant.
I'm not this nerdy all the time, but when I'm stuck I get nerdy
, and so I find often not alwaysoften that the question from
the quadrant that's not beingasked of is the thing that frees
(35:39):
us up.
So that's a pretty powerfulmove.
The other move that we'velearned over time one of our
coaches, Tom Schwick, who isjust an amazing operator, and he
said Gary, I really think the Zformat is the way to go, and I
have no idea what he's talkingabout he goes I've been playing
(36:02):
with this and you should askprofessor questions first, right
?
So what organizationalassumptions might need to be
challenged?
That might be a professorquestion.
It's open-ended, it'sexploratory and it's historical.
Then you ask an innovatorquestion what would you do if
(36:24):
time and funds were unlimited?
Okay, perspective and forwardlooking Okay.
So we're going from professorto innovator, then we move
diagonally to judge where it'sconvergent, and past or current.
What is the most importantconsideration here?
Okay, and then the final one isthe director question, which is
(36:48):
both action and convergent andfuture oriented.
How can we best leverage ourresources?
And so I'm just winging it onthe questions, but the idea is
that when you're working throughsomething with someone, going
in that order actually winds upunlocking them in a different
(37:10):
frame, and so by doing that, youget more potentiality of the
solution sets or directions thatthey're getting, and it covers
all the bases.
And so what we're teaching ourclients is do the zigzag or the
Z professor, innovator, judge,director and for those who are
(37:31):
still going, like, what is hetalking about?
You can find the peak model onthat resource page of our
website.
Mick Spiers (37:40):
All right, we'll put the link to that in the show
notes, gary, because I thinkthat is going to help people if
they've got a little bit of aguide as to how they can do that
.
A little cheat sheet, I guess,might be the best way to think
about that.
So I want to double down onsomething that we said earlier
is that if you follow thesemodels, first of all, you're
going to be surprised how smartyour team really are.
(38:03):
So if you think that you needto put the answer to every
question, you're not giving yourchance to your team for them to
show what they know right, andyou're going to be surprised
that they do know the answersand you're just helping them
declutter their library so thatthey can find the answer.
The answer is there, and whenthey find the answer themselves
I said this before they'll thentake greater ownership instead
(38:25):
of just doing what the boss toldthem to do.
It's an idea, and when it's youridea, you take great ownership
and you go for it.
And then what I'm hearing youin this boardroom situation is
we're now co-creating an answerthat none of us could have done
individually.
We're smarter together whenwe're listening to each other
and we co-create something thatis a far better answer than any
(38:45):
individual could have come upwith, and then we're off to the
races.
Gary Cohen (38:50):
You know it really made sense back in the day,
telling it really did.
Like the people at the top werejust super educated, they had
the resources.
You know, they knew where to go, or they knew somebody who knew
where to go for thatinformation.
Today, today, just today, 6 000new books were published and
(39:13):
yesterday 6 000 books werepublished.
That's new books, right.
So there, there is no end tothe amount of knowledge that is
being spread.
I have no idea what the Googlehit rate is anymore, but you
know trillions right of searchesand now it's not just that,
it's chat GPT.
So one's access to knowledgeand information has dramatically
(39:39):
change, like if you go back intime and you said, okay, you
know, in the 18th century aperson average lifetime okay, is
the equivalent of one week ofthe New York Times in knowledge.
So I mean you know it took300,000 years for humans raised
(40:01):
to accumulate 12 billion bytes.
This amount of information isdoubling every six months now.
Mick Spiers (40:08):
Yeah, wow, that's mind-blowing.
And you were just talking aboutChatGPT and you did make me
think of this as well.
I think I read yesterday thatChatGPT is now the third most
used website in the world,behind Google and YouTube.
But have a think about thisfrom a leadership point of view.
What's the most common thingpeople type into Google
(40:30):
Questions?
What's the most common thingpeople type into YouTube
Questions?
And for people that are going tomake the most out of ChatGPT,
the answer to get the most outof ChatGPT is the question you
ask.
It's being a prompt engineer.
The prompt that you giveChatGPT is whether you get
gobbledygook back or you getsomething useful back.
(40:51):
It's the same thing as a leader.
If you're asking betterquestions, you're going to get
better answers.
This is really good.
All right, gary, this has beena fascinating conversation.
I'm going to draw us to a closenow.
I'm going to re-emphasize a fewthings as we go to our
wrap-around.
So if you are the answer toevery question in your business,
you are the bottleneck, and ifyou can flip from being the
(41:13):
answer guy to the question guyor the answer girl to the
question girl, you're going tobecome the multiplier.
You're going to be the one thatcan unlock things for people.
Chances are they already knowthe answer and you're just
helping them find the answer.
And when they find the answer,they'll take great ownership and
off they go.
Make sure that they're cleverquestions, right.
So GPS goal position strategyor peak perspective, evaluative,
(41:39):
action-oriented orknowledge-based questions.
And if you find yourselftrapped in one quadrant, go to
Gary's resource so that you canhelp take this kind of zigzag
model to help you unstuck whereyour own questions are.
You get stuck too.
So help yourself get unstuck toask better questions and you're
going to be surprised just howmuch your team know, how much
(42:00):
pride they take in their workand what you can co-create
together when you're askingbetter questions.
And you're not presuming thatyou know the answer as you ask
the questions.
So you're keeping that openmind as to where all of this
might go.
So you've got some clearactions.
Have a think about that.
Gary Cohen (42:17):
I have one more, just a quick, because I was
hearing you play that back.
It was great, by the way, sothank you for that.
It's nice to be heard.
The idea is like when you're astudent in school, you have an
identity.
Right, your identity is I'm astudent.
And then you get into theprofessional world.
You no longer identify as astudent, do you?
(42:40):
What do you identify as?
Identify as a student, do you?
What do you identify?
As A worker, whatever theposition is, but it's not
student.
So you've changed your identity.
What we're asking for from yourlisteners is changing your
identity from the teller to theasker and making that move.
(43:00):
That mental move is the move.
Everything else is noise.
If you can change yourself fromthe teller to the asker.
Mick Spiers (43:10):
That's a great framing, Gary.
I really love it.
So that's your call to actiontoday.
So you find yourself tellingall the time reframe your
identity.
As you said it before, I wentfrom question guy to answer guy
or question girl to answer girl,right?
So reframe your identity.
I really like that and thatwill be the powerful unlocking
that you can make.
(43:30):
All right, Gary, I'd like totake us now to our wrap-up round
.
So these are the same fourquestions that we asked all of
our guests.
So what's the one thing youknow now, Gary Cohen, that you
wish you knew when you were 20.
Gary Cohen (43:43):
I was on a committee at Tulane to bring in speakers
and one of the speakers webrought in I'm forgetting his
name, but he was a person whostudied population growth and he
told us so this would have beenearly 1980s that the population
(44:03):
was going to 3 billion to 10billion.
And of course we all go, yeah,yeah, yes, and it was kind of so
what?
But the old me today, talkingto the young me then, would say
pay attention, Go where thetrend is, Go into a business
that leverages that growth.
(44:25):
And I knew that.
I had the knowledge, but I didnot have the intellectual
connectedness to that point thatI wish I would have known.
And there's, I'm sure, manyequivalents of that today.
For all of us, with what?
The next 30 years?
Mick Spiers (44:44):
Yeah, that's an interesting challenge for you,
gary, and you got me thinkingabout.
You know, what did I not payattention to 30 years ago?
That's an interesting question.
What's more interesting is whatam I not paying attention to
today that's going to beimpacting 30 years from now?
That's a great question.
Okay, what's your favorite book, gary?
Gary Cohen (45:04):
Oh my gosh, I am a reader so I just read, read,
read, read, read.
Favorite fictional book JeffreyArcher, cain and Abel.
Just, I loved it, I alwaysloved it, and I've read every
book in between.
So that would be on the fictionside, on the nonfiction side.
So that would be on the fictionside.
(45:26):
On the nonfiction side, oh gosh, I'm overwhelmed by.
The most consumable of herbooks is Mind Traps, and she
(45:52):
takes the adult developmenttheory, which for those of us
using it isn't so complicated,but those who don't need to use
it every day, it's complicated,and so she makes it quite simple
by saying here are sevenidentity traps that we have.
Okay, mind traps that get usstuck, and I find it very useful
for people.
Mick Spiers (46:12):
Yeah, I like it.
I don't know that one, so I'mgoing to look at it myself.
I'm going to read that onemyself.
Thank you, Gary.
What's your favorite quote?
Gary Cohen (46:19):
A word is dead when it is said.
Some say, I say it just beginsto live that day.
And who was that?
That was, I'm forgetting theauthor of it, that's a very
powerful one as well.
Mick Spiers (46:32):
And finally, gary, there's going to be people that
want to do this, they want to go.
Yeah, I have fallen into thesetraps that Gary's talking about.
How do people find you ifthey'd like to know more about
you, your services, the book,the model how do they find you?
Gary Cohen (46:46):
I'm pretty easy to find Gary B Cohen.
You could type that in to anybrowser.
You can also go toco2coachingcom and find us, find
me, find my team A whole bunchof nerdy.
We love learning, we just lovelearning.
(47:07):
And then we love applying thatlearning to people so that they
can outperform in building theirbusinesses.
Mick Spiers (47:15):
Yeah, brilliant, gary.
Well, thank you so much.
Thank you for your gift today,the gift of your time, your
knowledge, your wisdom, and forinspiring us into action to
rethink and reframe who we areas leaders, and to giving us
some very practical things thatwe can put in practice today to
become a better leader andunlock possibilities for our
teams.
Thank you so much.
Gary Cohen (47:36):
Thanks, mate, I really appreciate the time.
Mick Spiers (47:39):
What a powerful reminder from Gary Cohen that
leadership is less about knowingand more about asking.
When we let go of the ego hitthat comes from having the
answer and instead askpurposeful, open-minded
questions, we shift from beingthe bottleneck to being the
multiplier.
We build teams that think forthemselves, own their results
(48:01):
and discover capabilities theydidn't even know they had.
Gary's GPS and peak frameworksgive us practical tools to guide
any conversation, whetheryou're coaching a direct report,
running a strategy session orleading through uncertainty.
So here's your challenge forthis week the next time someone
(48:22):
comes to you for an answer,pause and turn it into a
question.
Watch how the dynamic changes.
In the next episode, we're goingto be joined by Scott Bergmeier
, founder and CEO of the BecomeMore group, and he's going to
talk to us about the multipliereffect and cultivating leaders
(48:43):
who create other leaders.
Thank you for listening to theLeadership Project at
mickspearscom.
A huge call out to Faris Sadekfor his video editing of all of
our video content, and to all ofthe team at TLP Joanne Goes On,
gerald Calabo and my amazingwife Say Spears.
(49:03):
I could not do this showwithout you.
Don't forget to subscribe tothe Leadership Project YouTube
channel, where we bring youinteresting videos each and
every week, and you can followus on social, particularly on
LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram.
Now, in the meantime, please dotake care, look out for each
other and join us on thisjourney, as we learn together
(49:29):
and lead together.
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