Prepare Your Leadership: Speak Up And Ask Questions

Hello. Happy Monday here. Now in August. Crazy to think. Hopefully gonna cool off, though. It's been pretty warm, so give it a minute here. Let some people join. Okay, so title again is prepare your leadership. It's all about preparing you for leadership situations, whether it's, hi, Jules, welcome. Happy Monday. Nice to see you again. So, yeah, title today. Speak up and ask questions again. Prepare your leadership is about preparing you for leadership situations that might come so when you face them, you won't get swept away by the river.

You can be able to flow with it. You'll be able to swim and not sink. Whether it's leading yourself, your family, your colleagues, your team, or an entire organization, prepare for any situation that might come. So speak up and ask questions. I just finished the book. It's called Originals by Adam Grant. He's an organizational psychologist, now works at Wharton College, I believe, doing research there. But in this book, they talked about groupthink in organizations. And groupthink often occurs when everyone's thinking the same way, or maybe they're not thinking, but they're acting and behaving in the same way.

And it might seem like, well, this organization has alignment and has shared values, all things that people praise for companies, but it often hinders this innovation and decreases creativity and leads to addresses issues with, like, safety or avoiding issues because people don't like to go against what everybody else is thinking. So if you have the right culture with that, maybe it works out. But a lot of times it can lead to some issues. How many of you in your work feel that you ask for solutions and not problems, or you yourself?

You feel like, whether it's anything that's going on, you feel like you have to give solutions and not raise any questions or raise concerns about problems. You just have to find the solutions for that. Well, in the book, they highlight some work by the psychologist David Hoffman, who helped change the culture at NASA right after the 2003 Challenger explained at the time, NASA had a culture of don't bring me problems, bring me the solution. So this led to, a lot of times, employees discovering problems and then finding the solution on their own and then just bringing that solution to meetings.

But then that lacks discussion about the problem itself. And it doesn't. It could lead to issues because people aren't double checking work. They're just seeing, oh, this person did that job. They're not seeing what was the problem aligned with the work that I'm doing. So it can really lead to problems. And it showed with that, the challenger explosion. So Google does. They try to avoid this by having a group they call canaries, which is basically just a group that gets new policy changes, or they see anything that's going to change the organization.

They get told first, and they can give feedback on it. And they're kind of the advocates for all the employees. So then it's not just one thing changing and then having everybody think the same way. They can give feedback. Hi, speak. Welcome. We're talking about the idea of only bringing solutions and not addressing problems or talking about the problems. At Bridgewater Associates, one of the biggest financial companies in the world, Ray Dalio, who is the chief investment officer, he encourages his employees to speak their minds.

One of the times he sent a poll that asked these questions, they asked of the people that you work with regularly, what percentage would you rely on to speak up and make sense of things during a difficult situation? And he asked, are you that person? And then he asked of the people that you work with who is not doing their part to fight for what is right? And then he asked them to list those employees. Exactly. Now, a lot of people came back at him and said that naming names and others found it.

Naming names is harsh. You can't call people out. They really went against it. Well, and probably the other half, about half of the other ones said that it led to really good discussions because employees would say, hey, I put you down as one of the people on my list for not sticking up for what's right, and I really value your voice. So I think you should speak up more and say more things and give more feedback. And led to really good discussions. Well, by the end of it, by the time Dalio spoke about it and the whole company kind of heard the reason behind it, 97% agreed with it.

They liked to call people out, give each other feedback that peer to peer feedback, telling each other to speak up more. So Dalio expects these employees to reconcile their differences. And that agrees with research by Birisma and de Dreux in 2007 that shows that people working together and having productive dialogue can reach unanimous decisions. You know, even when they started off differing, they work together. They can oftentimes find unanimous decisions, and those decisions are best because they're compromised.

So I'm not suggesting you to do what kind of Dalio did and call each other out, but think to yourself if, whether you're trying to always give solutions, or are you asking for second opinions or some feedback on things, or asking the person about the problem before jumping to finding the solution. Maybe you're the leader yourself and are you asking only for solutions from the people below you or are you okay with getting these questions, getting the problems? Do you feel safe in those environment to give that feedback to?

Is your leader allowing questions, allowing you to figure out solutions, maybe as a team rather than individually bringing solutions to the table. So, and I feel I new to companies a lot of times and I feel like being younger, I need to provide solutions upfront to show that I know something. But it's about having that conversation more so and productive dialogue around it and coming to a consensus solution rather than making something up on the spot. And often we jump to making something up on the spot to show that we know something when really we don't know if that's the right answer.

So I challenge you to be aware of that. Are you finding solutions or really addressing the core problem? So that's what I got for this week. Again, it's from the book originals by Adam Grant. He talks about a lot of different ideas. It's all about kind of being innovative and how original people have changed the world. So I hope you have a good rest of your week and I'll see you next week. Bye.