Jeff Wetzler is looking to revolutionize how we learn. He is co-CEO of Transcend, a nationally recognized innovation organization, and an expert in learning and human potential. Before that, he worked as a management consultant to the world’s top corporations, a learning facilitator for leaders around the world, and as Chief Learning Officer at Teach For America. Jeff has a Doctorate from Columbia University and is a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. He is also the author of a new book Ask, which is now available wherever books are sold.
Jeff joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about how to ask great questions as a leader.
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Jeff Wetzler On Leading With Great Questions
Our quote is from Herbert Spencer, “The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action.” My guest, Jeff Wetzler, is looking to revolutionize how we learn. He’s the Co-CEO of Transcend, a nationally recognized innovation organization, and an expert in learning and human potential. Before Transcend, Jeff worked as a management consultant to the world’s top corporations, a learning facilitator for leaders around the world, and as the chief learning officer at Teach for America.
He has a Doctorate from Columbia University and is a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Jeff is also the author of a new book, Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life, which is now available wherever books are sold. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Thanks. It’s great to be with you.
Jeff Wetzler
I always find it interesting to start at the beginning. I’m curious a little bit. What was your childhood and upbringing like, particularly your educational experience? I assume that maybe it had a positive or negative influence on you in some way, giving you a passion for education.
A hundred percent. I was a very curious kid. I was constantly actually thinking about how teaching and learning could happen better, even when I was a young kid. Every grade that I was, when someone said, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wanted to be a teacher of that grade that I was in. I think a lot of it was that I was bored in class. Where my mind went to was, “What would I do differently than the teacher who’s standing in front of me to engage myself better than I was being engaged in other people?” I was constantly thinking about that.
That was one dimension of my childhood. A second one that I think is also relevant is that also, I was a magician as a kid. I used to spend all my weekends performing magic shows at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs and all this stuff. Being a magician forces you to think a lot about how other people learn. You’re essentially trying to get them to learn the wrong thing, and you’ve got to put yourself in their shoes. I spent a lot of that. I would also say that the last part of growing up that’s probably relevant to this is I grew up in communities where I didn’t always feel like I fit in based on my own identity, my religious identity specifically.
There were cues, both overt and subtle, that led me to think I really wasn’t safe. I kept my mouth shut a lot. Lots of the ideas and thoughts and stories that I had, I would not say out loud. It was safer to ask questions. The only time I would really share was either if I was on the stage when I knew that was my role as a magician or if someone asked me a question. After a while, I thought to myself, “I’m probably not the only one who’s got a bunch of stuff that he’s not actually sharing. What else might other people be thinking as well?”
It’s interesting how many people in education, I’ve had similar thoughts. I was an entrepreneurial, more ADD-oriented kid. It just doesn’t serve very well in the traditional system. You’re like, “What would have engaged me? What would have got me more involved?”
A hundred percent. For me, it was probably two things. One is actually doing stuff that mattered, real projects on real challenges. The second would be just a level of expectations for what I and other people could do, which was a lot higher than we were being asked to do at the time.
Psychology To Management Consultant
You studied Psychology in college before getting your Doctorate. You were a management consultant for several years. I don’t normally see the psychology-to-management-consultant route. What were some of the key learnings from that first professional part of your career?
I picked a management consulting company that was pretty unusual. It was called Monitor Group. The recruitment slogan at the time was “A place for optimists to change the world.” That appealed to me. What appealed to me even more was that they had an organizational psychologist on staff, as one of the directors of the firm. It connected directly to my interest in psychology and my interest in education.
By the way, back then, before the world of Adam Grant, there weren’t a lot of them like that, yeah?
The one that they had was literally one of the most world-renowned ones. His name was Chris Argyris, known as one of the pioneers of the field of organizational behavior and organizational learning. What he studied was why sometimes the smartest, most successful people are the worst at learning and get themselves in the most trouble when interacting with other people.
The smartest people are at worst at learning because they are rewarded for getting the answer right instead of embracing failure and asking the right questions.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that they have always been rewarded for getting the answer right and being successful, and not for failing and asking questions and not developing those muscles. I had the opportunity to go deep with Chris and many of the people who were his disciples to really deal with this question. That was probably the origin of the book because he had this incredible method where he would have people report a challenging interaction that they had.
He would basically say, “Draw a line down the center of the page. On the right-hand side of the page, I want you to just recount the interaction as if it was a play. I said this, and she said this. I said the script of a play. On the left-hand side of the page, I want you to share your unspoken thoughts and feelings. What were all the things that you were thinking and feeling during that interaction, particularly during the tough part of the interaction that you never actually said?” That was the window into helping people actually get better at working as a team, looking at what the unspoken thoughts and feelings were. I had a chance to really do this work with hundreds of people around the world.
I started to see patterns in the left-hand column. Once you strip out all the junk and the frustration and whatever else, there were tremendously important pieces of information and insight that never got across from the left-hand column to the right-hand column, meaning that the person that was being spoken to in that conversation never actually heard what the case writer was actually really thinking. It was like a treasure trove of information that was often like the most important stuff that never came across to the right-hand column. We spent a lot of time working with people on how to get it out there more constructively and how to ask questions so you can figure out what’s in other people’s unspoken left-hand columns.
I love the Johari window concept. I always joke that they were better psychologists than marketers with the name they came up with for that. There’s stuff that you need to understand about yourself. There’s stuff that you need to understand about other people in order to be able to have these conversations and make these connections.
In both of those cases, the things we need to understand about ourselves and the things we need to understand about other people, information is in the heads of the other people. The only way we can get that is by asking them and having the right conversation.
Transcend
We’ll get into that. We’ll talk about the book more specifically, because I know once we go down that route, I’m not going to come out. Let’s talk a little bit about, after you received your Doctorate, you launched Transcend. What is the goal of Transcend? What is it looking to transcend? What do you think needs to change about the educational approach?
The goal of Transcend is to help us move beyond what we refer to as the industrial model of education. Most of us went to schools, if they were mainstream schools in this country, where we moved along based on our age. After we turned another year, we moved to the next grade, regardless of whether we learned or not. The teacher was standing in the front of the room. They were the expert. We were largely there to follow directions, get the answer right. It was pretty boring. There were lots of questions about why we were even learning this. All of those are features of the industrial model of school.
That is all for a government job, ostensibly.
Government job, a factory job. It was actually a pretty brilliant model of school for the time that it was developed. It got lots and lots of kids educated, out of the fields, and lots of immigrants all got through, got socialized, and got the kinds of jobs that our economy at the time needed people to be trained to do. The problem is it’s the perfect design for a time that no longer exists. This is not what jobs require of people. Yet, we’re still educating kids in these same ways. Transcend works with communities all across the country.
We’ve got 125 full-time people and many more who work with us, who are basically working with superintendents, school leaders, PTAs, boards, and communities who basically say, “We’re done with this industrial model. We are ready to move to something that feels far more relevant, that’s not just thinking about our kids’ heads, but is thinking about their holistic development, where they’re actually doing real-world work, where they’re building connections and social capital and experiences, and where school is modern and works so much better for all kids.”
There are a few impediments. I don’t know the chicken and the egg, whether parents are getting the schools they deserve or schools are getting the parents they deserve. Maybe it’s mutually assured destruction in there. As a parent of kids in high school and college age, I think the two biggest travesties of our education system, and there’s a lot, where it goes against the real world is this never-ending sense of achievement that everyone is chasing, which is just taking over learning and leading to grades and grade inflation.
I had a conversation with my daughter. She’s probably not reading this. I might be safe on this, but she’s taking a really challenging class in college, and I think she’s probably learning the most from it, but it’s probably going to be the worst grade she’s ever got. She’s just programmed that those things don’t. I’m like, “The learning is amazing.” It’s like, “No, but the grade is going to be bad.” We’ve created that.
The other is this part of achievement, this no-failure thing, which I just don’t understand. When the stakes are ostensibly low, we are trying to remove all failure from life, education, or otherwise if you want to go. Why take any risks in your class in high school if you know if you get a B-plus on anything, some of the schools that you want to go to are off your list? This has always seemed super counterintuitive to me.
It’s just got more and more pressurized. I have two kids in high school, including a high school senior who’s going through the whole thing.
You’ve seen this madness firsthand.
I’ve seen this. I have a daughter in 10th grade who sounds a lot like your daughter. I think part of it is a function of the fact that it’s a very narrow set of aims that education is going after. It’s grades, mastery on tests, that kind of thing, as opposed to asking, “What do kids really need? What do we all really need?” We need to be leaders. We need to be working well with people. We need to be thinking creatively. Once you start to broaden the set of things that we value, we can start to recognize nobody’s going to spike on all of that. We all have jagged profiles.
Nobody’s going to be good at everything. In fact, you look at all the highest achievers in the world or those making the biggest impact, and I’m not talking about money. They’re really good at one thing and not at anything else. They specialize in that. We almost encourage the opposite, which is like, “Jeff, I know you’re a brilliant artist and all this stuff, but man, look at these bio scores. You just need to do better,” versus, “Jeff’s just not a bio kid.”
We’re trying to shove everybody into a very narrow thing, which is do well on these tests, get a high GPA, when people have a whole range of talents. By the way, those talents are actually really useful. Being good at test-taking is one tiny thing that matters.
Ten Leaps
I always told my daughter that I didn’t know anyone who takes tests for a living. That was always my lie to her. One of the shifts that Transcend pushes for is what you call leaps and student-driven learning. Can you explain what that looks like in practice?
Absolutely. We have a perspective that is grounded in the science of learning and development, grounded in an understanding of future trends, and grounded in what the communities across the country we’re working with tell us matters most in shifting the experiences of young people in this country in terms of their educational experiences. We call them the ten leaps, the ten shifts that most need to happen. They include things like shifting from passive compliance to active self-direction. Passive compliance is basically you’re sitting in your seat, the teacher’s telling you what to do, and you’re following directions. If you really think about the average kid in schools, they have almost no choice in what they do.
They’re told what to study, when to do it, when to be there, and all that kind of thing. Versus in life, there are all kinds of choices that we have, but we don’t give kids practice making those kinds of choices. That’s one example of a shift. Another example of a shift is from irrelevance to relevance. Irrelevance is like, why are we learning this? So much of school, I do think, is actually irrelevant to relevance, being like, I deeply care about this. I need to know this to solve something that I actually want to be working on. That would be an example of another shift. Just to give you one other example, a lot of schools force kids to kind of fit into a certain mold.
If they don’t, even socially, they feel like an outcast, as opposed to building a sense of community that says, to your point, everybody’s different. Everyone’s good at different things. Everyone’s got a different background, a different identity. We’re building a community where people actually all feel like they belong for who they actually are.
Where does the failure piece come into this? Where does, like Einstein, “I have not failed. I’ve tried 10,000 different ways?” It just seems to sort of wrangle the risk-taking and creativity out of the system when it’s not okay to get things wrong. When I think about what we try to teach people in our workplace and feedback, it’s like, it’s fine to make a mistake, just don’t repeat it. Show us that you learned it, fix the process or otherwise. I just see a whole generation of kids scared to death of failing. Mom and Dad or whoever can smooth out the path and do that for a while and “prepare the path for the child.” Inevitably, the real world is harder than they think it’s going to be. That’s never great from an expectations standpoint.
We have another leap called high expectations with unlimited opportunities for success, which means you don’t just have this one chance to take the test and either pass or fail. You can do it over again. You can fail, you can learn, you can grow. I think that’s so important because people learn different things at different rates. One of the things that I think we have to be careful about is in saying it’s okay to fail is that we don’t accidentally lower our expectations, or we don’t accidentally lower expectations for some kids and not for other kids. This idea of keeping the expectations high but allowing kids unlimited opportunities to meet those expectations is a way we’re trying to thread the needle of both of those.
I think that’s a great way to put the framework. I think we’ve seen a lot of cases of just lowering the bar. There are a lot of pushes in school systems in the name of equity to lower the bar. I don’t think that’s the right answer for anyone.
Equity is not lowering the bar. Equity is ensuring there’s a high bar for everyone, and everyone gets what they need to meet that bar.
Equity is not lowering the bar but instead ensuring a high bar for everyone. All must get what they need to meet that bar.
That’s your definition, but there are a lot of people who don’t share that, right?
In my view, yes.
Honest Feedback
Let’s talk about the new book Ask, which addresses one of my favorite topics, getting honest feedback. What drove you to write the book?
Part of it was what I was describing earlier when I was at Monitor and just seeing how much stuff was stuck in the thought bubble, stuck in the left-hand column that was never actually getting shared. Part of it, honestly, was my own experience as a leader. Also, often discovering too late that other people are thinking and feeling things I really needed to know and not telling me.
For example, one of my early experiences managing hundreds of people was that we had this massive high-stakes event nearly blow up in a very visible and problematic way because the team that was running it didn’t feel comfortable actually telling me the challenges that they were truly facing. Some of us, I got really curious, like, what’s going on here? Why aren’t people telling us these things?
Some of it is that I have been really fortunate to inherit from mentors like Chris Ardress and many others a set of tools, ideas, and resources to overcome this problem. It has been the foundation of my own leadership and also the foundation of my development of other people. After a while, I just felt like I wanted to move forward with this. I want to be able to share this with people more than just the people I directly work with.
This is also a generational problem. Again, not having had feedback, or having had this feedback, or people telling you that you did a bad job, or had a red pen early on in your life, it gets really hard to drop this in the corporation. I know a lot of people feel like they’re giving some new employees the first critical information that they have had their whole life. I had a moment when I was doing a review when I was 24 years old. One of the things was, look, people think you’re not friendly. I was like, what do you mean by that?
I’m super friendly. That’s not anything I’ve heard before. A couple of people mentioned they’ll walk by you in the hall, they’ll see you, or whatever. You don’t say hi to them, or you don’t look at them or otherwise. I was like, “That’s ADD.” I’m not even in the room. I’m walking down the hall, and I’m solving a problem in my head. I’m deep in thought. I never saw that. It was an easy thing to fix. It was a good piece of feedback to have. I can get really upset about that, or I can realize that I can help myself by being aware of that.
I think this problem of information, whether it’s feedback or any other information, including just ideas and whatever else, not getting from one person to the other person, is everywhere. In the research for the book, I found statistics like over 85% of people have said there’s been a really important issue in my own organization that I decided not to actually make a choice to not speak up about, not say something about to my manager. By the way, three-quarters of the people around me also saw that issue and also made that choice, even in our personal lives.
The emperor has no clothes.
There was a study about people and their relationship with their own doctors that said, depending on the demographic, somewhere between 60% and 80% of people have admitted to withholding an important piece of information from their own doctor because they didn’t want to waste the doctor’s time, they didn’t want to be embarrassed or judged by the doctor. It is truly everywhere. We can deal with that problem from both angles.
There’s lots of good training and research in books about how to encourage the person who’s got the feedback or got the idea to share it in a more direct way and bring candor. I’m coming at it from the other angle, which is to say, if the other person you’re talking to doesn’t do that, you don’t have to be a victim. You can actually do something about it. That’s what the ask approach is trying to help people do.
You said in an HBR article that 85% of employees admitted they didn’t share feedback that they thought their boss should know. I always have multiple perspectives on this. I think, one, maybe it’s a really psychologically unsafe environment where it’s been shown that there are negative consequences to doing that. That’s problem A.
Problem B might be it seems pretty open and safe, but I’ve never been taught how to do that before or I’m not comfortable. Which do you see more of? My premise is always like it’s the organization’s responsibility to create psychological safety first before they’re going to think that people are going to start saying these things. If they start saying these things and there are repercussions, there are going to be real problems.
I agree. I think both of them are extremely prevalent. I’m not saying that 85% of people who keep their mouth shut are making the wrong choice. They may be making exactly the right choice, and it may be a choice of self-preservation or job preservation or all kinds of different things. I also agree that they likely don’t have the words to say it. Those two are the biggest barriers that surface for me. I’m just saying if you’re the boss in that situation, you probably want to know what collective intelligence is in your organization, and let’s help you do that.
By the way, it goes in the other direction too. If you’re a junior, you often do not get your real thoughts from your boss too. What can you do to get that input and coaching and feedback as well?
I’ll play into the stereotypes here, but I’m sure there are some Gen X people reading, and they’re like, “I’ve tried to give any feedback to Gen Z, and they lose it and take a mental health week and they don’t come back and they quit. I can’t fix this. I don’t know.” What is your response to that?
My response and the orientation I’m taking to the book is this is why Gen Z needs to read the book.
They need to understand the consequences and become more resilient because you’re admitting that that is a problem.
Obviously, it’s a generalization, so it’s different, but I see it in my life and work. I will say to my team that I care a lot about feedback and learning, and I care about you and your growth and development. I promise you there are many times when we’re in a meeting and interaction, or I’m watching you in action, and I have a critique, feedback, or an observation for you, and I’m not going to give it to you because I’m running to my next meeting.
I don’t have time to stop and give it to you and think about it, even though I wish I would. If you want that kind of coaching from me, it’s on you to ask me for it. I promise you that if you ask me for it, I will give it to you. If in that very second, I will come back to you and give it to you, but you can’t rely on me that I’m going to always give it to you other than if you ask me, and then you can 100% rely on me.
I really like that because that shifts the burden. There are a lot of people in Kim Scott’s radical candor quadrant, who are actually obnoxiously aggressive, or whatever she calls it. They think they’re radically candid, but their delivery is just not good. They try to shove it down people’s throats. They’re like, why don’t they want it? I think that invitation that you have to do the work is interesting and then sets that threshold.
The other thing is the way that people give it that just seems about me. I said the best feedback you can give people. I always like the rule of give it to people in 72 hours or you can’t say it anymore because if it’s about getting better, when you save it for 3 to 6 months, it feels like targeting or ganging up at the review. I always say to someone when we’re talking about it, “How has this ever worked in your relationship where you’re like six months later, you bring up something?”
“Do you remember that time?”
You’re like, “You’ve been carrying this around for like three months to tell me. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
If there was someone who has been carrying something around that’s been sitting with him, I’d still rather them tell me 3 months later than have it fester for the next 3 years. It’s so much better, to your point, if it can be real-time.
I’m curious. I’ve developed a stronger opinion over this, particularly when I had an organization that was smaller. We used some technology. I thought that anonymous feedback was helpful for the organization. As the organization grew, I thought anonymous feedback was incredibly unhelpful. Those channels are important for whistleblowing safety, like things you really need to get out. A couple of things I noticed happened. One, you can have a really loud person or people that make their issue seem like a large-scale organizational issue when it’s really just a beef that one or two people have.
Two, it’s really hard to solve these problems when they’re anonymous. My leader is terrible, or my group has a lot of turnover. You’re like, okay, well, if I’m a good leader, I’m like, which group? Where? I want to dive in. We have actually tried to discourage anonymous feedback. I’m curious about your thoughts on that.
I largely agree. I think if you’re at a place where the option is the feedback, you’re only going to get it if it’s anonymous, or you’re not going to get it at all. I’d rather take the anonymous because then, at least, you can start somewhere if that’s the condition for you to get honest feedback.
If you are at a place where the only way to get honest feedback is anonymously, you do not have a safe space.
You don’t have a psychologically safe space.
You do not have a safe space. You’ve got a deeper problem. I would much rather be in a situation, just the same way with a performance review by the end of the year, where nothing should be a surprise. I would much rather be in a situation where the feedback on the survey is not a surprise because we have the culture and skills. We also have the routines, systems, and processes that enable all that stuff to come out on a regular, day-to-day basis, with people owning and taking responsibility for their thoughts so that you don’t have to wait for it to be anonymous on a survey.
Psychological Safety
We’ve danced around psychological safety. This word is often used but not often well-defined or understood. Tell me, what’s your definition of psychological safety? What does it look like? How does a leader create it?
My hero and guru in this is Amy Edmondson, who’s done the research on psychological safety. As I understand it, it basically comes down to people feeling like they’re going to be punished for speaking up and speaking their truth. Some of her seminal research was in hospitals, where she looked at the rates of reporting errors. What she realized is that initially, she was surprised because the error reporting rates were higher in the more effective teams.
She thought, “Why would the more effective teams have more errors?” What she realized is that, actually, no, the more effective teams have psychological safety, which enables people to report the errors so that they can then detect and correct them and do something different about it. She talks a lot about the role of the leader and the culture of the organization.
What I try to do is channel that as one of the five practices in the ASK approach. What does that look like at an interpersonal level? Do you want to go there and just kind of talk about? This is a practice that I just call make it safe. The definition of make it safe is making it as comfortable, easy, and appealing as possible for other people to tell you their truth, especially a hard truth.
It was interesting. I workshopped this definition with Amy, and she encouraged me. Initially, I said, making it comfortable, easy, and appealing. She’s like, it’s often never going to be comfortable and easy and appealing. That’s too high a bar. The bar is as comfortable and easy and appealing as possible, because there’s still going to be some level of courage and risk that’s going to be required.
There are a few things that, at the interpersonal level, can really contribute to this. I will say this is especially important if you’re working across a hierarchical situation with a power dynamic or other kinds of differences. The first one is about creating connection. One of the things I learned as I researched for the book is that so much of creating connection comes down to being intentional, even about the time, space, and place where you’re having that connection.
I talked to iconic CEOs, like Bill George of Medtronic and Irene Rosenfeld of Kraft, who said that if I want to get the truth from someone, I will never invite them into my CEO office, have them sit across the big CEO desk for me, and assume that they’re going to feel comfortable telling me the truth. No, we’re going to sit on a couch, we’re going to take a walk, I’m going to go to them, I’m going to have lunch where they want to have lunch, I’m going to go ride along on a sales trip in their car, on their turf.
A lot of it is really making sure that the place and space of connection is happening where they want it to happen. We were talking about our teenage kids. I see this in my own personal life, too. My teenage daughter, at fifteen, if I want to learn from her what happened in her day, it’s not happening when I want it to happen. It’s not going to happen when she gets home from school. It’s definitely not going to happen over dinner. It’s going to happen in her room at 11:00 PM after she’s done talking to her friends and done with her homework, and I’m exhausted. That’s when she’s comfortable engaging. If I want to learn it, that’s a choice that I can make. Part of it is how and where we create connection. A second piece of it is we’ve got to open up ourselves before we expect other people to open up.
In every exercise I’ve seen, the leader sets the tone.
It can be as simple, literally, as if I’ve got a question for somebody, I can just open up about why I’m asking that question. Often, we’ll ask the question, and the other people are guessing at our agenda. If I just said, “I’m asking this question, I’m truly stuck, or I’m truly unsure, I actually admire what you’re doing. I want to know,” that creates a completely different dynamic. Then, of course, opening up about other things that we’re vulnerable to can help. I’ll just say one more, which I think might be the most important one. I call it radiating resilience. That’s basically letting other people know we are resilient. We are not going to crumble at what they tell us. We’re not going to freak out. We’re not going to punish them for our reactions.
This is where Gen Z needs a little work.
This is where leaders can model it, too. It can be as simple as saying to people, like, look, if I were in your shoes, I might be incredibly frustrated. If you are, I would understand. I want to hear what you have to say. That shows them if that’s what they’re feeling, I can handle it. I had an investor in my organization make it safe for me. After making the investment, she said to me, “I have a feeling that I don’t believe anybody can predict the future. Whatever you pitched me was the investment. I’m pretty sure it’s not going the way that you pitched it to me. If you could predict the future, you would be betting on horses or whatever.”
She’s like, “So what I want to know is what are all the things that are not going the way you pitched it to me? By the way, if you tell me that it’s going the way you pitched it to me, I’m going to be suspicious of you.” All of a sudden, she told me she was completely, you know, not only resilient but also headed to me to tell all these things. She demanded that I tell her all the things that might have been hard for me to say otherwise.
Let’s say you create this. This is another thing. I think, again, leaders are not taught this. You and I were talking before we jumped on. Let’s say you create the psychological space. I’ve said, or I’m telling you, Jeff, the really uncomfortable thing that I wanted to tell you. What should you do or not do in the moment in terms of reacting, responding? What are the best practices?
You’re jumping to what I would call listen to learn. We’ve made it safe. There’s a whole another step around asking the right questions, which you can come back to if you want. It really comes down to how do I listen. I’ll say a few things. The first thing I would just say is, “Shut up.”
Don’t respond.
Partly, don’t respond not to be stonewalled and be insincere, but just to give them space to say more. Oftentimes, the most important thing doesn’t come out first. In fact, I also interviewed psychotherapists for the book. They have this thing that they call a doorknob moment, where a therapy session is 50 minutes, like minute 48, minute 49. Someone’s starting to get up, about to touch the doorknob.
That’s when they say the thing, like, “I’m thinking about leaving my wife,” or that’s when they say, “I just got investigated.” The psychologist is like, “Why didn’t they say this for them? We could have talked about this the whole time.” I think that’s true with other people, too. It may not be the real thing. Staying silent, I will say, asking follow-up questions like, “What else? Is there more? Can you say more about that?”
Sometimes, I literally say to people, “I’ve just asked you what else three times, and each time you’ve told me something more interesting. I’m going to keep asking you what else. When you’re done, you tell me I’m done.” The best ideas often come out that way, so that’s one whole bucket of stuff—giving space and then what I call pulling the thread to say more.
The other one, I’ll just say that I think is so powerful, but so underutilized, is just paraphrasing it back and testing. “This is what I think I heard you say. Is that what you meant? Is that right?” That does so many things. It slows the conversation down. It actually gets you better information. I would say at least 50% of the time, when I paraphrase it and test back, I have missed something, or at least the other person says, “Yeah, that’s right.” There’s another piece too. It also communicates to the other person how much I value them because I’m like, it’s important enough for me to really stop and make sure I got it.
Everyone loves hearing their own words. I’ve noticed that some good customer service organizations have gotten into this NLP thing where they repeat exactly what you said. I understand that you’re frustrated that this happened. They’re like, “They get me.” It’s like, it’s your words.
You can do it in a very formulaic way, which can sometimes not go off well. If you say, like, “This is what I took from you. This is what I think I’m hearing you say.” I think people really appreciate, like, “Did I get that right?” as well.
There’s one piece in the middle of those two things. I think there’s like maybe a shut up and listen. That’s also to what you say. To me, it’s also your brain. I think a lot of people are, I will say, like formulating their defense as someone’s talking to them. I think people can see that or read that. You can tell when someone’s trying to get in or interrupt you versus when they’re really just listening. Maybe it’s not just the stuff you say, but it’s your brain. I think it’s hard to listen if you’re a defense lawyer formulating your defense in real time.
We actually skipped right over the very first step of the ASK approach, which is choose curiosity. If you’re coming in there and you’re not curious, then you’re going to defend and push back. If you’re actually coming in there with the true intention of curiosity, and what I say about how to choose curiosity is to center one question in your mind, which is, “What can I learn from this person?” If you’ve got that question in your mind, and then they’re telling you something, and you’re sticking with that intention, you’re far more likely to give off the energy of like, “Yeah, this person actually does want to learn from me,” as opposed to just jump back in and push back.
One of my favorites, I want to say it was either Kim Scott or Patty McCord, said when I was interviewing them, “I thought this was brilliant. I think everyone should do this. If you want to know whether there’s psychological safety on your team in a group setting, give them something that is impossible for them to do and see who speaks up or who says something right there, because you know they’re leaving the room and basically having that conversation, but it’s actually impossible.”
That’s an interesting test. I never thought about that. It’s true.
Do you agree with that, or do you think there are unintended consequences of that?
I think that sounds a little bit like torture, depending on what the thing is that you’re asking them to do.
It could be a deadline that’s just not realistic. The whole point was, like, who’s going to speak truth to power? Do they feel comfortable in doing that? Be like, “Jeff, no matter how much we want to do that, it’s not getting done by tomorrow.”
I agree. I think that is a good test. I would also say if you want to know if there’s psychological safety, count up the number of times in the last week that someone has told you hard news, that someone has pushed back on you, that someone has given you critical feedback, or someone has given you that critical feedback publicly. If your answer is zero to all those things, chances are it’s not as safe as it needs to be.
Let’s assume you, a lot of times too, like I say, if you listen and you take it all, it doesn’t mean you have to agree with it. I’ve heard some stuff. As I’ve said before, I was criticized once for trying to calm the organization down when things were tense before the 2016 election by saying that whatever happens tomorrow, the sun’s going to come out tomorrow. This offended someone because, in their mind, the sun wouldn’t come out if their candidate lost the election. I heard that feedback. I took it. I didn’t agree with it or change anything I was going to do based on it.
This actually gets us to the very last step of the ASK approach, which is called reflect and reconnect. It’s interesting because Kim Scott helped me shape this step in some of the research I did for the book. I use this method that I call “sift it and turn it.” To reflect first, the first thing is to sift it, which is basically to say of all the stuff that I heard, what am I going to sift out and let go of? What am I going to keep? That’s your choice. You get to sift it and turn it. Sometimes the problem is we sift things inside the bubble of our own assumptions, and then we’re sifting out the wrong stuff.
It can be helpful. Kim told a story where she got a few of her friends also to think with her about this feedback they heard. They were all like, “Yeah, sift it out. That’s crap.” The first thing is to sift it. Chances are, if there are 100 things someone’s telling you, there are going to be like three golden nuggets. You can forget the other 97 points they tell you, but you’ve got to get to which are the most important three. You can sift it by looking back at your notes, listening to it if you’ve recorded it, thinking it through, by talking to some friends or colleagues.
Once you have those, then you say, “All right, what do I do with those important nuggets?” I talk about three turns. The first turn is basically to say, “What did I hear from this that might change my story about myself or the situation of the person?” The second is, “What steps do I want to take?” The third is, “Is there anything deeper in here that is about my deeper stuff, my assumptions, my biases that I want to sit with or think about?” Once you walk through those three turns, which I think can be very quick, you can do them on paper, you can do them in the shower, you can do them while taking a walk, then you’ve got the insight of like, “Okay, I know what I’m actually going to do with what I heard and what I’m going to let go of.” The final step is to reconnect. It’s to go back and say to the other person, “This is what I learned from you.”
This is what I’m going to do about it. Thank you. Did anything different you would have hoped that I would have learned? That really conveys to the other person the value that we have for them. I think it’s very rare that when we share something with people, they come back and say, “Here’s how it impacted me and how I grew from it and I’m appreciating it.” It also, I think, radically increases the chance people are going to continue to share with us over time as well.
I have a similar framework that I think we always did with what I would say is more organizational feedback. When we got feedback around things the company could do better or otherwise, it was always like, “We sat through it, and we went back to everyone and we said, we heard you, and it’s complicated. It’s going to take some time, but we’re going to dig into that. We heard you, and it’s just not going to change. It’s actually a core part of who we are.” One of the things was people were frustrated about the cost of, oh, they wanted us to provide cost-of-living increases.
We had promotion increases. We had merit increases. We had a whole bunch of performance-oriented stuff. Basically, feedback said, “Look, like the notion of just giving everyone a 1.6% increase as before inflation times, it’s just not that interesting to us. You can do better work than you’re doing. You can be promoted. You can move up your band. There’s a lot of other things. Like that just doesn’t jive with us.”
If that’s a real issue for you, you might need to do something. You should know that.
You should know that.
We’re not excited about cost-of-living raises. The other is like, “Yes, thank you for the feedback. We can address that.” I actually think a lot of organizations struggle with, “We heard you.” We were a remote organization. People were like, “We should have offices.” We’re just not going to have offices. We were super clear about this when we interviewed or otherwise, like 98% of your peers don’t want offices. This is a tricky thing. I always say this vocal minority, like sometimes they do a really good job at taking something that 1 or 2 people are really frustrated by and trying to make it seem like everyone else has the same problem.
I think there are two important things that I take from what you just said. One is in order to distinguish, is it a vocal minority or is it the totality of people? You got to ask them and whether that’s a survey or talking to people. You’ve got to be able to distinguish that. That’s a huge difference. The second thing is coming back and closing the loop, standing with your convictions, and saying, “This is going to change tomorrow. Thank you. This is what we’re thinking about, and this is not going to change.”
Here’s why this is not going to change. I just think that closing the loop makes a huge difference for people, because otherwise, they start to get cynical about your questions. Does it go anywhere? Do they ever listen? Do they read my surveys or whatever? Just the act of closing the loop. In the book, I talk about three very similar categories that I think can make a huge difference to people.
Reiteration And Rephrase
We also talked about this a little bit before the conversation. I was saying we do these scripts, and it’s so fascinating to me because people always say, “Yeah, I had that conversation with Jeff.” Jeff and Mary are not even remotely on the same page. You’re like, “I don’t understand what happened.” How important is the reiteration at the end of these conversations for both parties?
I think it’s critical because you’ve probably heard this quote. The greatest misconception about communication is that it has occurred.
I actually haven’t, but that’s good.
I think that’s what you’re saying, which is basically, person A thinks they said something to person B, but that’s not what person B received and vice versa. Obviously, if person B would do this paraphrase and test back and say, “I think you’re telling me I’m doing a good job. Is that what you’re saying?” Person A is thinking, “No, I’m telling you you’re not getting promoted,” or whatever. That would absolutely clear it up.
I also think that the other move that the person A who’s sharing this tough news can say to check is just, it’s a question strategy I call request reactions. I think it’s so underutilized that we say something, and then we can ask the other person, “What’s your reaction to that? How did that land with you? How does that strike you? What do you think about that?” Any number of these different things, that’s a way for us to check if the other person actually is getting our message or not.
We really couldn’t talk about feedback without covering, in my mind, the subject of the shi* sandwich, which seems to be, I don’t know whether people were taught it or where it came from, but it seems to be the preferred method of delivering hard news. I’ve seen everyone default to it in these practice sessions. Inevitably, it just masks that the person on the receiving end isn’t sure what the signal and the noise are on what they were supposed to hear.
In fact, having watched these sessions, I said the last time I had to have one of these conversations, which was thankfully years ago, I learned that you actually should start these conversations with things like, “Hey, this is going to be a little bit of a tough conversation,” or “We’re about to talk about this, and then it’s not going to be comfortable, but then we can” just to make sure that you’re even starting on the same page.
I think the crap sandwich is very common. I think part of the research.
Let’s reiterate it. For anyone who doesn’t know what it is, will you just explain it?
It’s basically a compliment, the critical feedback, often couched, and then another compliment.
The thing you really wanted to say is stuck in the middle. You finish on a high note.
One of the things I learned in the research for the book is that people register the pain from feedback in the same parts of their brain as they do a physical blow as well. It’s understandable why one would give the crap sandwich because we don’t want to cause that kind of pain to the other person. We also don’t want to cause that pain to ourselves from having to deal with their reaction. It’s a protective mechanism, both for the other person and for ourselves as well. It’s problematic because the core message can get lost in the bread, basically.
People register the pain from feedback in the same parts of their brain as they do a physical blow.
Not could. It usually does.
It usually does. In some ways, that’s the point of it. I’ve said my thing, but I didn’t have to deal with their reaction to the whole thing. To me, what’s interesting, and I think what I’m trying to cut out from the angle of this book, is what happens if we’re on the receiving end of a shi* sandwich when someone says something to us, and we’re not sure, did they?
Two positives, one negative. It’s all good.
I think I’m coming out ahead here or whatever. Those positives sounded really positive, and the negatives didn’t sound that bad. Maybe they’re trying to give me a positive.
“Jeff, everyone loves you here, and it’s great. This job may not work out for you, but keep up the great work and do that.” You’re like, “Yeah.”
There’s a perfect example. Exactly. When we are on the receiving end, this is why, first of all, the paraphrase and test, let me just check what I heard you say. Is this what I hear you saying? Also, let me sift it, turn it, think about the most important thing, and then go back to the person and say, “Here’s what I took from you. Is that the thing you would want me to take from you?” I think that gives us a much greater chance of distinguishing what the actual message that we’re trying to take is versus what the sandwich that we’re being fed is.
It is probably widely used, and it is wholly ineffective. I think everything I’ve seen, we developed some of this training in our organization because what happened time after time again was someone was basically like, “We need to make a move on Jeff.” Jeff is apoplectic and doesn’t understand what’s going on or otherwise. I go into the system and read the performance reviews.
I’m like, “I’m reading this, and it seems pretty clear to me that this is an ongoing issue or is discussed or otherwise. Why isn’t this landing? What’s being missed here?” It just happened so many times; it just laid the problem really bare to me. I don’t know whether people were delivering the news, softening what was on the paper, or something like that.
Two ways that we have tried to deal with it inside my own organization. One is that you may do this as well. We force people not just to give feedback at the end of the year but to literally answer the question, to what extent are you meeting expectations or not in this role? Before someone can give that information to the person that they’re managing, they have to go through that with their manager. They have to say, “Defend, like I’m telling them, yes, they’re meeting expectations.” The manager is like, “What about those seven times you were complaining that they didn’t get the thing in?” There has to be a calibration of that.
We also use this thing that we call two by twos, which is that every quarter, everybody who works together needs to sit down and basically say to the other person, “Here’s two things you’re doing well, here’s two things you could be doing better.” The same with self-reflection. It clears the cobwebs out of the closet because it normalizes like, of course, I have to tell you two things. I might not have wanted to tell you two things, but it’s part of this protocol. Here they are. What are yours for me as well? I think those two things have helped. We’re not all the way there yet, but I think they can make a difference.
We have a very similar thing that we developed. Again, it was a check and balance because people would be like, “Jeff’s a mess and Jeff’s a five.” We started putting descriptions on these things. You have to do one through five, and you have to defend that, and it has to match what you’re telling your manager. By the way, it has the person, so they have to know there are three and a three is in the 50th percentile. It’s basically meeting expectations, and it’s not great.
By the way, you can stay a three for a couple of turns, but if it doesn’t move up to a four, it’s probably not a good ending in the end. Also, they were held accountable for it. If you had everyone on your team as a five and then you were complaining about everyone on your team, you were rated a two by your manager as an ineffective manager because you’re like, “Look, your job is this, and your ratings don’t match. You’re not leading and managing giving people this feedback. If your ratings don’t match the things that you’re telling me.”
I think it can sound harsh and numeric or whatever, but I actually think it is one of the kindest things we can do for people is to actually give.
Make sure they know where they stand.
Too often, we don’t know where we stand with people, and if they don’t have these kinds of systems or are not in that culture, that’s what I’m trying to basically empower ourselves to do. How can we ask?
By the way, you want your ones and twos and maybe threes to be looking for new jobs because that’s kind because whatever they’re doing isn’t working, and it’s not that they’re bad people. It’s not the right role. It’s not the organization, but you’re at least being fair that these two things can’t go on forever. Ideally, you would want your ones and twos to turn over.
Of course, ideally, you also want it to be a two-way learning process where you’re saying to yourself, “Is there anything I did that could have helped this one or two be a three, or are there patterns that I’m seeing in terms of the kinds of people who are ones and twos versus threes and fours and fives?” It can also be a prompt for that kind of self-reflection, too.
Biggest Mistake
Jeff, last question for you, and this is singular or multivariate, but what’s a personal and professional mistake that you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from?
I would say that maybe this is a combined answer.
I was going to say you got a bonus if you discovered the mistake by asking for feedback. That’s what I meant to add to the question, too.
We started by talking about my organization, Transcend. When COVID first hit, I wasn’t sure whether we were going to stay in existence or not, but I just had no idea what people were going to be doing and thinking in schools, whatever. It turned out that it was a massive accelerant of demand for our organization. We started pre-COVID, we probably had 30 to 35 people in our organization, and post-COVID, we have 125. We really wanted to show up for schools.
We really wanted to help people do remote learning and distance and all that kind of thing. We grew quite quickly, which I don’t regret doing, but we grew quite quickly without putting all the systems and structures in place. We over-relied on culture and didn’t do all the other things that one would do. It caused pain. It caused a lot of pain on different teams.
I think I attribute some of that to my own blind spots and my own kind of over-optimism of like, “It’s going to be fine. We can do it.” Maybe my inattentiveness to some of the things that felt less, I don’t know, like interesting to me to go work on and figure it out. We ended up actually hearing a lot of that feedback from our team.
In our retreat at the end of one year, basically Alan and I, my co-CEO, and I sat on the stage and we did a pretty deep self-dissection, like not only what was the mistake we made, but why did we make that mistake, and what was going on in our own assumptions and our own histories and even our relationship with each other that was going to lead that to happen. It was not comfortable, but I think it was an important learning for all of us.
That sounds like a good moment of leading and demonstrating vulnerability.
I hope so.
Episode Wrap-up
Jeff, where can people learn more about your work and Transcend and find the book?
The best place is Transcend’s website, which is TranscendEducation.org. For the book, it’s www.AskApproach.com. For me personally, Jeff Wetzler, I’m on LinkedIn.
Great. Jeff, thanks for joining us and talking about all things about giving and receiving feedback.
Absolutely. Really appreciate the conversation.
To our listeners, thanks for tuning into The Elevate Podcast. We’ll include links to Jeff and his book, Ask, on the details episode page at RobertGlaser.com. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to follow the show to be notified about new episodes. Also, please just take a quick minute to leave a rating if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard. It’s the single best way for you readers to discover the show. Thanks again for your support, and until next time, keep elevating.
