Communication Mastery for Leaders: Decoding the Four Conversations | Chuck Wisner | Episode 354

Scott McCarthy:
Shak, sir, welcome to the show. So good to have you here today.

Chuck:
Thank you, Scott, for inviting me.

Scott McCarthy:
So we’re talking about communication today in so many different ways. I always love starting off with this question with experts in that lane, and that is human beings. We communicate is the thing we do the most. Probably outside of breathing, we communicate the most, yet we’re terrible at it. Why? Please, can someone tell me why?

Chuck:
I think. Yeah. And I like to say conversations are the one universal human tool that we have. And yet, you know, no matter where we are, we have a lot of trouble with our conversations. So I think there’s a couple pieces that create this dilemma. One is we grow up learning to communicate through our culture and our families and our education, and then our experience. And we adopt patterns. We don’t do it consciously, but we adopt the patterns of our parents, of our family, of our teachers, of our classmates, of our.

Chuck:
Our places work, and the patterns become unconscious, more or less. So we often are on autopilot, not really knowing what we’re doing in conversations. I like to say we’re like fish in water. We’re humans in conversation. We don’t know the waters we’re swimming in. So that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, is after studying for many years and studying language and leadership, I realized that there weren’t any books that sort of compiled a little different ideas that gave us sort of a blueprint of like, oh, here’s how conversations work, and here’s how we can do them better.

Scott McCarthy:
Ooh, now you get me interested. So, like, how do conversations actually. How are they supposed to work? Because right Now, I think 99.9% of us are flying by the seat of our pants here because we’re just doing it because, you know, we. We have conversations all day, every day, all day long. So of course we know what we’re doing, but apparently not. So please educate me, sir.

Chuck:
Yeah. So just a little backstory. I had a client, a long term client of, you know, five or seven years, and we were having a cocktail five years ago, and after we did some work, and he said, you know, I love all this work, but there’s all these pieces. There’s emotional intelligence, and there’s, you know, awareness and medit meditation and promises and all these pieces, but I don’t know how to connect the dots. So that stuck with me. And then I realized one day walking on the beach that, ah, there’s a glue here that I learned when I was studying linguistics that really is about different kinds of conversations that we’re in every day, in and out of every day, but we don’t know them. And one of my teachers said, you know, if I took you from New England to Alaska and we learned the 30 names for snow that Inuits have, when you came back to New England, you would never see snow the same way. And the point of that is, if we have some new distinctions about what makes conversations and how they work and why they don’t work and the different types of conversations, we can’t be in them innocently anymore.

Chuck:
We have to take some responsibility and say, oh, I can do it this way, or there’s a different conversation I can have. So the distinctions around the four types of conversations, which are laid out in my book, really are the beginning of that process of having a new set of tools and ideas to understand them.

Scott McCarthy:
That is super interesting. I am like, yeah, I’m frothing at the mouth now. So let’s dive in. Because I’m thinking real time here. I’ve had a bad conversation. And, uh. And obviously. Sorry, let me rephrase.

Scott McCarthy:
Not bad. Just conversation didn’t go the way I expected. Right.

Chuck:
Yeah, yeah.

Scott McCarthy:
And obviously, I probably could use some tools that you’re about to educate me on here. So let’s. Let’s dive deeper into what some of these tools are and how, you know, leaders out there can employ them. Because no matter what, no matter who you talk to, no matter which company you go to, organization you go to, when you ask them, hey, what’s one of your main problems? I guarantee it. Nine chances out of 10, 99 times out of 100, someone’s going to mention communication. So obviously, leaders need more tools in their toolbox for this. So I’d love to hear what you got to say now.

Chuck:
Yeah. Okay, so why don’t I do this? Why don’t I just really quickly lay out the four types of conversations and then we can do a deep dive into them.

Scott McCarthy:
Love it.

Chuck:
Yeah, let’s do it as it intrigues you. Or not.

Scott McCarthy:
Yeah, no, I’m intrigued. So let’s go.

Chuck:
So the first conversation is storytelling, and that is really. Hold on, my wife. I’m being delivered a cup of coffee.

Scott McCarthy:
And we can edit that. Lucky man.

Chuck:
Yeah, really? Really. I would. I meant to do this before I got on online, and then I forgot. So she just delivered it.

Scott McCarthy:
Does she deliver here?

Chuck:
All right, thank you. Sorry about that. So the storytelling conversation is the primary conversation, and that is because we as individuals and we as cultures and societies live through stories. I mean, there’s stories of fiction and that we enjoy and we get entertained by movies, but in fact, our laws, our money, the rules we have to live by, those are all stories that we’ve adopted as cultures. So there’s that part. And then the other part is we as individuals have unconsciously adopted stories about ourselves and about other people, some of which serve us really well, and some of us really don’t serve us well. And so, for instance, I grew up with a grandfather who was pretty much a redneck and kept telling me when I didn’t want to skin the deer or I didn’t want to do certain things, or if I showed my emotions that I wasn’t a big enough man, well, guess what? I adopted that story unconsciously because he was the adult and I was a kid, and what the hell did I know, right? But I lived with that story until I did my studies in language and was able to bust it, which meant I was constantly having this internal dialogue. Oh, not good enough.

Chuck:
Not a big enough man. All those things. So storytelling is really powerful because every time we go into a meeting as a leader, everybody that comes into that meeting is coming with a story. And what happens is our egos get involved, and then we get attached to our story, and then we have an identification with our story. And that’s why we sort of get defensive and why we end up in the battles that we end up in. So that’s a really short hit on storytelling. However, if you do your work around storytelling and you recognize that your stories aren’t the only story, your stories aren’t the truth. Your stories are made up of your emotions, facts, and opinions.

Chuck:
But if you go into a meeting with a closed fist, we go into a meeting, which should be a collaborative conversation, which is number two, if you go in with a closed fist and I go in with a closed fist, we’re just trying to prove each other, prove ourselves right, and prove the other person wrong, right? And there’s very little listening, because instead of listening, we’re reloading our next response. So if we can. What I say is, instead of having a closed fist, this is what I think, and it has to be this way, and I’m right and you’re wrong. If we can open our hand and reveal the thinking under our position. So in other words, we say, I have concerns, I have some desires. Are there power issues? I have standards that I’m making this judgment based on that. That is a different way of. That opens up a conversation, which I call the collaborative conversation, where I can learn from you and you can learn from me, and we really can listen.

Chuck:
Because what listening means is I’m able to. I’m able to absorb your position and your perspective. And if I really do that, I may say, oh, God, Scott, what you just said made me think differently. I never thought of it that way. And now we’re in a mutual learning conversation. So those are the first two conversations. Maybe I should stop there and you might have a question or two.

Scott McCarthy:
I got multiple things. First. I got. I got. I got a story about collaborative conversations.

Chuck:
Yeah, okay.

Scott McCarthy:
Which. Which will, you know, for the audience, you know, drive the point home. I don’t know if you know much about my background, but I’m actually Canadian army by day, and I do this in the evenings. I’m getting too much detail just because, one, I can’t. And two, I just. People, you know, I know military people listen. I don’t want to people connect the dots, but I had one supervisor once, and we were having a meeting about something relatively high, higher stakes, and we were discussing, of course, emotions are high and stuff like this, but it doesn’t matter with this guy. It didn’t matter if it was high stakes or not.

Scott McCarthy:
He always would cut you off. And he always had that approach of, yeah, but. Yeah, but, yes, yes, however. And he’d just constantly be like, you couldn’t even spit out, like, three words. And he would be there trying to interject. One day, I was just. I’ll call it Spade. Spade.

Scott McCarthy:
I was pissed off with it. Yeah, I had enough, and I just let him go. I stopped. I stopped talking. I sat back and kind of crossed my arms. And I often cross my arms because I just find it comfortable. Not because I was closed off, but this time I was actually closed off. And I just hear.

Scott McCarthy:
I listen to him ramble on. And then he finally stopped, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and he looked at me and he’s like, well. So I said, well, sir, if I could have finished what I was saying, I would have said this, that, and the other thing. And he just went, oh, you’re right. But I don’t think he ever clued into what he was doing or what the effect he was having. But I say this to the audience for you to listen, for you to check yourself to see if you’re acting that way, because maybe you are. And I don’t think he actually knew he was doing it, didn’t actively know that he was doing it. It’s probably tied into your earlier point.

Scott McCarthy:
There’s some kind of story there for him that’s causing him to act that way. But at one point you just, you know, enough’s enough. Like, I’m done. You don’t know what you’re talking about here because I’m expert in this domain. You’re not. So, yeah, just, you know.

Chuck:
Yeah, so he, he, he, he, I would say, you know, his pattern. And I love to talk about our communication style as patterns because it’s a little less judgmental than saying I have a habit. You know, if we can look at it as a pattern, we can go, oh, I have that I probably unconsciously adopted from my dad or my, you know, my, a teacher or my, you know, leader. So if we can look at our pattern and go, wow, that’s serving me or not serving me. So his ego is attached to his having the answers. You’re the leader that you were talking to. So he’s identified with being the smart guy, with being the leader. And know what that means to him is he should have the answers.

Chuck:
Totally unaware of the conscious of the consequence for you because he wasn’t reading the signals. But at some point when you just went silent, all of a sudden that was a wake up call for him. Right. So you actually did him a really great favor. You sort of woke, you woke him up out of sleep talking.

Scott McCarthy:
Well, maybe for about 32 seconds. I still worked with him for a bit longer. Nothing changed, let me tell you.

Chuck:
That’s right.

Scott McCarthy:
I think he just realized I just didn’t have enough time, that much time for him.

Chuck:
Yeah, no, well, that’s a great point, Scott. Because when people do want to change their pattern and do want to try having a different style of communication or leadership communication, it takes some work because I don’t know how old this guy was. Let’s say he’s 40. Just make up a number. He’s had that pattern probably for 20 years or 30. Thirty years, right. And so all of a sudden I knock him over the head with a two by four and say, dude, you know, you’re really shutting everybody down and good luck having a great collaboration with them or getting ideas out of them because you’re shutting them down. So knock them over the head.

Chuck:
And then it takes him to go, oh my God, I don’t want to do that anymore. But there’s no magical switch. I can’t just go, okay, you pay me $10,000 and I’ll push the magical switch. I’d be rich if there was a switch. So it takes a practice. He would have to say, I want to change this, and he has to practice. So it’s a good story that’s really illustrative of how our egos sort of. Our egos sort of put us in a fog or identify with our being smart or our position.

Chuck:
And then when we get like, you gave him a little moment of awareness by your reaction, and reaction is sort of like, brings us out of the fog. But guess what? As soon as you weren’t in the room, the fog set back in for him.

Scott McCarthy:
Man, you just nailed that out of the park. Like, as soon as you said his ego was tied to knowing and having the answers, I’m like, how the hell did I not figure that one out? But being in it at that moment. But this is a few years ago now, so I’ve had time, and this is not the first time I’ve told that particular story, But I’ve never actually clued into that his ego was tied to having all the answers. And maybe now that’s part of the fog of. That’s. Obviously, there’s some emotional charge in there. Like, still, I get. I get frustrated just because it was such.

Scott McCarthy:
It was just such a. I don’t know. Painful is the right word, but it was. It was like a painful experience of just constantly being cut off when you’re trying to just simply talk.

Chuck:
Yeah, yeah. And it’s disrespectful, you know, not that they aren’t even aware they’re being disrespectful. They think, you know, they’re. They’re. They’re taking charge and they have the answers and. And it’s disrespectful. So your emotional trigger is totally normal and relevant. The question is, what do we do with it? But you had a moment there where you said, you know what? I’m just not going to play this game the same way.

Scott McCarthy:
Yeah, true story.

Chuck:
And you changed the dance and it woke him up for a millisecond.

Scott McCarthy:
Yeah. For sure. Now we’ve sprinkled in storytelling. I use the story there. I’ll talk about collaborative, but I want to go back to storytelling because I thought that was super interesting, you know, the stories that we tell ourselves.

Chuck:
Yeah.

Scott McCarthy:
What I want to do is change the script a little bit because you’re focused super on ourselves, which, don’t get me wrong, uber important. But my question to you is what, you know, how can we leverage when we figure out when what the story that one of our team members is telling themselves Mm, Yeah. You know, if that becomes. If we suddenly we aware, like, wait, now, like, they have this reaction. I was not expecting that. In this scenario, new scenario pops up. Similar. Similar type of reaction, which was unexpected.

Scott McCarthy:
Then you realize more and more like, okay, this is what they’re telling themselves in these situations. Now, how can we, as leaders, leverage that to obviously make the situation, you know, get the best positive possible, slash, positive outcome out of it?

Chuck:
Yeah. Yeah. So in my book, there are the four conversations. But there’s another key, really important trick in my book, and it’s called four archetypal questions that help us. Like, if you have a judgment that’s really negative and it’s not serving you well, these four questions, you can deconstruct your story and say, okay, use these questions to really understand what’s under your. Inside your fist, basically. But we can also use them to. When someone is coming at us with a fist, instead of meeting them with a fist, we open them up by asking them honest, open questions to really, sincerely understand their thinking under their stuck position.

Chuck:
And the four things are very simple. And if people don’t take anything else out of this podcast, write this down on a sticky note and keep it nearby, because it’s a really useful trick. The four are every judgment we have. Most conversations we’re going into with a strong position, we have some desire that we haven’t expressed or some goal that we haven’t expressed. Like, I want this conversation to go my way, or I want this to be the end result, right? So sometimes those are good, sometimes they’re not. Because our desires, while they can inspire us to do things, they can also have us in a battle with reality, which means I want this to happen. Like, a client of mine wanted to have that next VP spot that he thinks he’s so well deserved. But the reality was that no one saw him as a vp, right? But it drove him crazy because he said by his ego, he said, I should have that job.

Chuck:
When he didn’t get it, he was crushed. So desires is number one. Number two is what are concerns we have through every judgment you have and every conversation you’re in, Every person has a concern about tomorrow. I don’t want next week to feel like today, or I don’t want to make the same mistake tomorrow that I made today. Or I don’t want us to make the same blunder with the project that we did last week. The third one is power. So every conversation you’re in, there are power issues, authority issues. In the military, there’s a very strict rules hierarchy of power.

Chuck:
Right. You don’t mess with that. And same is true in hierarchies in business. We all give the boss’s voice more authority than, say, our colleague. There’s goodness about that. And there’s a trap in that, because authority with leaders with authority in their voice, unawares, like your buddy that you were talking to or your leader you were talking to, he was unaware that the power of his voice was as strong as it was right, that he was shutting down you and other people. And the last one is standards. Every judgment we have are based on some moral, some values, some standards we hold that make sense to us might be true, might not be true, but they make sense to us of what’s good, bad, right, wrong, you know, gritty, ugly, whatever it is.

Chuck:
These judgments are all those values that we hold. And so if we take an example of, oh, let’s say you had a reaction to your, your boss or your, Your leader, that your reaction was, this guy is really a jerk. And you know what? He’s, he’s. He’s. I don’t want to work with him anymore. He’s a. He’s impossible. Blah, blah, blah.

Chuck:
Well, I could work with you individually and I could say, okay, let’s take that apart a little bit. What, what do you. What are your desires hidden inside your judgment? What would you say your desire was that was giving you that trigger?

Scott McCarthy:
You asked me, like, in, in that particular instant. Yeah, it was, you know, we’re prepping for a mission, so it was basically.

Chuck:
Let’S get it right, let’s get it right. Let’s get the job done. I know where I, you know, I have standards that I, you know, standards. You had the expertise. You have standards about what good look like or what success would look like. Right. What was your concern in the face of the conversation?

Scott McCarthy:
My concern was that we were going to screw it up and something bad would happen for sure.

Chuck:
You’d pay the price. Right? Right. Tomorrow would be bad. Yeah. And this was in the military, right? Right. So there was an authority issue where your ability to speak up. He didn’t make it safe for you to disagree with him because of his power issue.

Scott McCarthy:
100%.

Chuck:
Is that fair? Okay. Now, I propose that had you done that little bit of work before the conversation, not that you knew it was coming, but in the future, you can do it. You can surface. Each one of those things had a little golden nugget in it that you can bring into the conversation. For instance, desires. Sir, I really want Us to succeed. And I have some standards, what that looks like based on my experience. Can I share them with you?

Scott McCarthy:
I hear you. I 100% hear you. I don’t want to say the word yet. I’m going to say it. And that word is. But. But. So, you know, once you’re done sipping your coffee, we’re going to replay that, and I will give you a first taste of the experience that I had.

Chuck:
Yeah.

Scott McCarthy:
Go ahead. Say what you just said, and then I’ll show you what the experience I had.

Chuck:
Okay. Sir, I really want us to succeed in this mission.

Scott McCarthy:
Yeah, so do I, Scott. Absolutely. You’re 100% right here. We got to go. We got to do this right.

Chuck:
Okay, good. So, sir, can I just tell you, based on my experience, what I think?

Scott McCarthy:
So this is what I’m thinking should be.

Chuck:
Approach this.

Scott McCarthy:
This is what I’m thinking here. This is where we need to go. So I think you’re getting the picture of that particular experience I would offer. That was probably an extreme case.

Chuck:
Yeah.

Scott McCarthy:
But that is literally the experience I had. So you could probably now even more so appreciate my reaction at the end.

Chuck:
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you’re right. There are extreme cases where no matter what we do, they aren’t going to change. They aren’t going to move. Right. But you do your best, and if they don’t want to open their hand and have a collaboration with you, well, you know, you couldn’t walk away in that situation, but you went silent and that changed it. Right. But there are people that are going to be more open to you saying, hey, let me share my expertise, because I really care about the end of the mission.

Chuck:
And my concern is that if we don’t do steps A, B and C, we might fail.

Scott McCarthy:
No, no, no. Don’t get me wrong. Those four things are absolute golden. I just wanted to give you a better appreciation of what I went through.

Chuck:
Who you were dealing with.

Scott McCarthy:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But, like, that’s golden. Like, if you think about it, like, if we approach conversations in that way of like, hey, this is my concern and this is what I’m looking for and just kind of outline that, you know, I think conversations could definitely move forward in a more positive way. Vice all these undertones and nuances people are trying to figure out and, you know, it’s just so difficult some days.

Chuck:
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the. The closed fist idea when we want to share those four things, like, here are my concerns, my standards, power. We want to share this. That takes a little. That Takes some humility. And it also takes some vulnerability. Because you have to say, I might not be right, but here’s how I’m thinking.

Chuck:
Prove me wrong now. Prove me wrong. Or let’s share ideas and see what we can learn from each other. That takes humility and some vulnerability. Now, your original question was, how do we do with someone that’s really not wanting to play? Right?

Scott McCarthy:
Well, no, it wasn’t that. It was what I had asked earlier was about how do we maybe leverage. I can’t think of a better word. But when we realize we’ve figured out the story that what someone is telling themselves in your head.

Chuck:
Yes.

Scott McCarthy:
And you know that, and you want to use that to your. I know it’s coming across really wrong, but use it to your advantage, obviously. Not to manipulate them, but for good. Right?

Chuck:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott McCarthy:
You hear what I’m saying?

Chuck:
Yeah, definitely. So I went off on a tangent with your example, but to illustrate the four questions. Right, but with other people that are like stuck or they have a story that you want to sort of help them, help them bust it or deconstruct it or understand it, Right. You use those same four things in the form of questions to them. Help me understand your thinking. What are you concerned about? Help me understand when you say it’ll never work, what standards are you basing that on? What experience do you have that makes you think that those are questions? What you’re really doing is you’re taking their open fist and you’re asking a question. You’re prying their. You’re prying their fingers open.

Chuck:
Like, what are your concerns? What are your standards? What do you want the outcome to be? And if you do that sincerely, not to prove them right or wrong, but to really understand their position, a lot of people will all of a sudden go, oh, yeah, well, I’m happy to tell you how I’m thinking. And then the more we model, a humble thing about opening our hand, there’s a little contagion in it. They go, oh, he’s making it safe for me to bear my soul too. Right.

Scott McCarthy:
So, yeah, absolutely.

Chuck:
That’s.

Scott McCarthy:
Sorry to cut you off there, but.

Chuck:
No, no, you go ahead.

Scott McCarthy:
You know, and then that leads to establishing that sense of psychological safety where people feel ability to contribute, they feel the ability to challenge. And as I’ve learned through doing this podcast, that’s one of the three core components of a high performing team. Is that psychological safety.

Chuck:
That’s right. Yeah. Right. And the best a leader can do is purposefully, purposefully Thinking everyone comes into the meeting with a story, purposefully have a very conscious collaborative conversation and say, okay, let’s hear all the different perspectives in the room because that’s how we’re going to get smart together versus here’s what I think. I’m really passionate about, what I think, here’s what I think. And everyone shuts down because, well, if Joe the boss thinks that, then I’m not going to chime in because I’m not going to disagree with the boss.

Scott McCarthy:
Yeah, you know, I hear 100% what you’re saying. I agree with it fully almost because I literally had this conversation today with my team, I literally had this conversation today with my team because I, you know, I put the leadership style spectrum up. I explained, you know, the different styles to them from, you know, laissez faire to authoritarian. And in the middle, you know, and everything in between. I said, hey, right here is where I’m generally at. My comfy zone is right around here, you know, collaborative. Hey, you guys are experts in your domain, go forth, do good things, come back, provide me the input I need and stuff like this. If I explain to them, depending on the situation, I will adjust where I land on that spectrum.

Scott McCarthy:
And there’s two things which are going to push me left. As in more authoritarian, more authoritarian. One is risk. So we talked in terms of risk to mission and risk to people. And the other thing which I find is time availability.

Chuck:
Right.

Scott McCarthy:
When I feel like I don’t have a lot of time for that collaborative approach. I’m sorry, I’m going to make the call how I see it the best I see it, at that time we’re going to go forth. Yet if new information shows up later down the line, that will contradict that decision. Well, I got a new decision to make and depending on the time availability there, I’ll adjust or we’ll deal with it at that time. So that’s kind of how I see it. But 1 million percent agree with everything you’ve said thus far.

Chuck:
Yeah, so just a minor tweak to what you said because I get a response often like, and then the next conversation is a creative conversation and then commitment conversations which we might get to and might not get to. But the minor tweak is people tell me we don’t have time. And I’m not talking about a four hour off site or a two hour meeting to do collaboration. I’m saying in order to me make the best decision, we’re time constrained here and there’s risk factors. I’d love to hear different perspectives so that I can make the better decision. Let’s take five minutes to go around, and anybody’s welcome to say, what might I be missing? How might we be thinking differently so that I can make a better decision? Again, that’s creating in a short period of time that psychological safety, like speak now, forever hold your peace.

Scott McCarthy:
You know, but. But what it would offer is. And again, my approach. And don’t get me wrong, like, I. I really do appreciate that. Fortunately, I just was not in a situation where it’s like, all right, everyone around the table. Okay, let’s take five minutes and.

Chuck:
Yeah, right.

Scott McCarthy:
Just. Just the scenario in front of us. But what I did say to them afterwards was, hey, if you don’t dis. If you don’t agree, or if you need more clarification, come see me and we’ll just talk. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Excuse me. You know, just. And I.

Scott McCarthy:
I left that door open, and now, like, it’s there, it’s waiting to see if anyone wants to, you know, make that walk through it. And I don’t mean that as in, like, come forth me in front of me and let’s talk about this. I’m going to tell you how it is. But no, let’s, you know, let’s. Let’s have a conversation here and I’ll let you know what I was thinking and how I saw it. And this is. And I would still love your input at that time. Because now, as I said earlier, if, you know, we end up down the road and new information comes out and I find myself in a different decision space.

Scott McCarthy:
Well, now I’ll take that in consideration. One million percent. It’s still valid. It’s just not valid at that moment.

Chuck:
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the decision process that you’re talking about, having to make a decision, that’s really about the commitment conversation. Because the commitment conversation is the action conversation. Who’s going to do what, who’s going to do what by when and how, you know, and we love storytelling and we love the commitment conversation, which is the action conversation. Right. And the trouble with the commitment conversation are twofold. One generally inside of hierarchies and in culture in general, we tend to be addicted to. Yes.

Chuck:
Like the boss says, can you get me some slides for Monday morning? Or can you get me a report for Monday morning? And the person’s probably thinking, oh, my God, I have to spend the weekend working, and blah, blah. But they say, sure, no problem. Okay. Now a promise is made. Promises have consequences. Monday morning comes I deliver the report. You, Scott, take the report. You look at it.

Chuck:
My 10 page report. You rip off the last pages. Oh, this summary is perfect. And I’m thinking crime. And Eddie, if I had known that, I wouldn’t have spent 10 hours over the weekend. I would have given you a summary and spent three hours on it. But the person that you received my thing thought, oh, God, I gave him this assignment, he did all this work, he wasted his time, and I don’t know if I can trust him, blah, blah, blah. And I’m thinking, good Lord, I spent all this time.

Chuck:
There’s no appreciation. But you know what really happened? We made a sloppy promise. We made a sloppy handshake. That’s what really happened. And so in my book, I sort of take apart this conversation and say, here’s how it works. It starts with request. We can make a yes, a no, a counteroffer. We can clarify.

Chuck:
All for the purpose of making a better promise. Because guess what? A promise fulfilled builds trust. A promise broken breaks trust.

Scott McCarthy:
I loved how you stated yes comes with consequences.

Chuck:
Yeah, yeah. And we just do it sort of automatically. Like I say, we sleep talk our yes because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings or because of the power issues, or we don’t feel safe, or we don’t want to admit that we don’t know how to do it. A million reasons, but a clarifying question. Help me understand what you want. Who’s it for? Do you want bullet points? You want prose? You want a poem? You want pictures? Help me understand so that I can fulfill this promise.

Scott McCarthy:
Takes five minutes, 1 million percent. And what I would add to that is I think we could still keep the consequence bit that you mentioned, but just reframe it. Of like, yeah, I could do that. But here’s the things that I won’t be able to do instead of that.

Chuck:
Yeah, well, you know, and I thank you for that because the one part of that commitment dance conversation that we forget that we don’t do well, we know, we get addicted to yes. We avoid no. But no has to be part of our vocabulary. Maybe I’m not competent to do it. Maybe, you know, whatever. But the third option is a counter offer.

Scott McCarthy:
Yes.

Chuck:
So if you make a request to me and I ask you some clarifying questions, do you need it Monday morning? What’s the format? You know, who’s it for? What are you trying to accomplish? I get all those answers and I go, oh, okay, that makes sense. But I can’t get you to Monday morning. I Can get it to you by 1 o’ clock Monday. Does that work for you? That’s a counter offer.

Scott McCarthy:
Yeah, for sure.

Chuck:
Or in your situation with your lovely leader, you might say, I can get it to you Monday. But by my experience, I think that format doesn’t make sense. Maybe we should have it in a format that our guys can understand and it would look like this. That’d be a pretty powerful counteroffer that he might shoot you for. But.

Scott McCarthy:
If I could get it out.

Chuck:
If there’d be space in the conversation, right?

Scott McCarthy:
If there would be space in the conversation, Correct. Oh, this is awesome, Chuck. I would love it. So, you know, we’ve hit on storytelling, we’ve hit on collaboration, collaborative. We’ve hit on commitment. We talked about your four questions. We’ve not touched creative. Part of me wants to dive into creative, but the other part of me wants to leave a taste in the mouth of the audience to get more.

Scott McCarthy:
So I’m going to leave that up to you as the author, as the speaker. You know, are we going to dive in creative or are we going to leave that taste of them wanting?

Chuck:
Well, I’d be happy to come back and talk more as questions might arise or people might give you questions. You know, timing wise, I think, what, are we in 35 minutes or something?

Scott McCarthy:
No, timing’s fine. It’s just a matter of let’s dive in. I feel like we’re diving in. So let’s dive in. Let’s talk creative quick. So, so, you know, let’s, let’s, let’s talk, you know, because I will admit creativity I think is one of my weak points. So, you know, January, baby, Capricorn. Not that I’m big into astrological stuff, but I’m highly analytical, process driven.

Scott McCarthy:
Shocker. I know for a guy who’s a senior army officer, but, you know, creativity, like this cat ain’t drawing anything. Let me tell you, if you want a stick man, I got you covered. Anything beyond that? Yeah, no, not happening.

Chuck:
Okay. Yeah.

Scott McCarthy:
So. Well, there’s, let’s hear these conversations.

Chuck:
So, so there’s a couple components here. There’s the individual piece that you’re talking about, whether you, you naturally have or lean or prefer your left brain, which is linear and rational and, and all that other people. My wife’s an artist, I’m an, I’m formally an art. I was trained as an architect. So we have a right brain, I’d say in architecture I have a right brain balance. Because you have to have both. You have to make sure a Building makes sense. And then you have to.

Chuck:
If you want to create and make something beautiful, you have to have both. So there’s that personal thing, but then there’s the idea in conversations that if you and I have. Or you and your team have a really good collaborative conversation where you’re hearing different perspectives and you’re learning from each other and you have a few aha moments, like, oh, I never thought of it that way. Way, Scott. Like that. What happens in a good collaborative conversation is ideas. What we’re doing is we’re making space in the conversation for ideas to bubble up. And we’ve all had this experience where you’re in a conversation with a friend or someone that you, you know, you have a good relationship with, and you’re just.

Chuck:
You’re just talking, say, wow, and this and that, and all of a sudden it’s like, oh, I never thought of it that way, Scott. And, oh, you know what? Now that you said that, maybe we could do this. And there’s an idea that bubbles up that wasn’t yours and wasn’t mine, but came out of our conversation. That is a creative conversation, but it stems from our ability to be collaborative and be open and be learning from each other. So that’s one piece. And what that is fundamentally, is about are we willing to slow down enough in a conversation that we can explore possibilities? In other words, you have a position. They have a position. You have a collaboration.

Chuck:
We want to get to that action. We want to get to who’s going to do what. But I say slow down. So you can say, before you choose or before you take action, say, can we just take five minutes, brainstorm. What are five possibilities that we might be missing? And that, for me, is a willingness to wonder, a willingness to go, is there something we might be missing? Is there something, a curiosity that we might be missing? Something that, for me, is about possibilities, right? And we all have that capacity. It’s just whether we give ourselves permission to open that door, you know.

Scott McCarthy:
So.

Chuck:
The creative conversation is a little more complex than the others. It’s not as straightforward. It’s about our intuition. It’s about our left brain, right brain. It’s about possibilities, about wonder. So it’s a good one. And then if you. Here’s.

Chuck:
Let me just finish with this. If we love our stories, we love our commitments and our action, but what we do is, because we love those two, we do a conversational bypass, and we bypass the middle two. We bypass collaboration, and we bypass possibilities. And so your decisions are missing that that juicy, productive back and forth that might, might, might bring up new ideas.

Scott McCarthy:
I think if I was to summarize that, go back to something you said earlier, and that’s ego. If we let our ego go, then we’re going to be more willing to ask those questions because. Because we’ll think that we don’t necessarily have all the right things covered. We haven’t looked at all the angles. So it’s actually interesting how you talk about creativity because I always. If someone says creativity to me, I automatically go to art and drawing, art, architecture, those things. But I will often ask that question, like, what are we missing? What are we not considering?

Chuck:
Yes.

Scott McCarthy:
Who you know and, you know, in my career. And we talked about psychological safety here. And I interviewed Dr. Tim Clark a long time ago on the show, and I talked about. I talk about his work all the time. The four stages. Psychological safety. It took me a while to clue in, to make these connections, but stage four, he reversed to his challenger safety.

Scott McCarthy:
And that is where the team has the ability to challenge. Challenge. You challenge the plan. Challenge what? You know, whatever. It took me a long time, but as I reflected on my career, my work, and I was never in. But I have worked with Special Forces in the past, and in talking with them and when I work with them, I’ve come to realization that that’s how they operate. You know, they will go and they’ll sit. You know, obviously the leader is in charge of.

Scott McCarthy:
The commander is in charge of the plan and their mission, but they’ll sit and everybody will go through the. They’ll go through that plan and everyone has the space to poke holes into it and, you know, challenge.

Chuck:
What about this? What about that?

Scott McCarthy:
What about that? What about this? What about that? I’m not too sure about this. Can we walk through this part? And the goal is to get the best possible outcome, the best possible plan, and make sure everyone’s ready and everyone knows everyone’s heart. Because talk about time and space. They don’t have time to do redos or anything like that. That’s how they operate. And this is exactly the same type of thing. It’s that creative. Like, what are we missing here? Why have I not considered.

Chuck:
Yeah. And, you know, the plan might hold together, but there might be one element that says if we do X, there’s a risk of Y. Can we eliminate that risk in a way that we haven’t thought of before? That’s the wonder part. I wonder what else is possible. And I don’t mean wonder in a fuzzy way. I mean, I wonder what else might be possible.

Scott McCarthy:
Along those lines. And actually, we’re going to tie this conversation beautifully as we wrap up here. Back to that, the guy that was cutting me off when I drafted the plan for that operation, that mission, to support it, because I’m a logistics guy, I do to support this. I got my team together in our little conference room and I had them around. I walked in, I dropped it on the table, said, you got 45 minutes. Tear it apart, I’ll be back. And I just walked out.

Chuck:
Perfect. You know what you did there? Of the four questions, you removed your authority, you removed your voice. So they had say they could, they could. And you know, I was tough leaders sometimes I’m working with their team and I see the dynamics. I tell the leader, you know, you’re excused for two hours.

Scott McCarthy:
Go away, get out. Yeah, yeah.

Chuck:
Because I want to talk to these.

Scott McCarthy:
Folks, you know, well, people act differently when the boss is around, right?

Chuck:
That’s the authority piece. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Scott McCarthy:
You know, it could be something like that or it could be something small. Like today we had a little retirement luncheon. So me and my right hand man, we showed up, had some certificates, said some good words, and then I said, you know what, guys? See you later. Enjoy yourselves. Because no one, you know, you know, no one wants the boss around. Like, I’m sure, you know, a number of them would have been perfectly fine and happy that we stuck around, probably would have enjoyed it. But overall, I was like, no, it will not be the same if I’m here. And I want you guys to have this moment together before this one person says, far Realm retires.

Scott McCarthy:
So go forth. Go ahead.

Chuck:
Good for you.

Scott McCarthy:
Yeah, good for you, Chuck. This conversation has exceeded 1 million fold expectations. And not to say expectations were low, but it’s been fantastic and we covered a lot of ground. And I guess one last question before we wrap up here is like, is there anything we didn’t cover that you think would be important for the listener to take away from or maybe one last piece that they can walk away with today?

Chuck:
Yeah, I’d say as far as learning to do these conversations differently, I’d say track your patterns like you’re tracking a wild animal, but without judgment. Oh, like, I used to have an anger issue with my kids when my kids are grown now, when they were young, and I had to track that and say, you know what that comes from? I adopted that from my father unconsciously. So I had a pattern of losing my temper, but that’s not how I wanted the father. But I tracked that and I said, you know what? That was my dad. I don’t have to be my dad. I can be my own man. So track your patterns, the ones that aren’t serving you well, investigate them and go, wow, can I change that? How would I change that? What that does is it increases our awareness. So if ego is the fog, awareness is the light.

Chuck:
We want to increase our awareness. If we do that, we enter conversations with more curiosity, with more humility, and so we can ask questions to really understand and really open up a conversation. We are trained to be advocates, and I think we need to balance that with a new appreciation of questions because that can open up a conversation. It can even open up a closed fist.

Scott McCarthy:
Love it. And I always say here on the podcast, leadership is all about asking the right questions, not knowing all the answers. So beautifully said, sir. Final thing of the show. How can people find you, follow you, be part of your journey. Shameless plug. Have at it all about you.

Chuck:
Yeah, my website is chuckwisner.com c h u c K W I S N E R and they can get a free PDF of the introduction of my book. Just scroll down a little bit and you put in your email. Believe me, I won’t email you back. If you just give me your email, you can also get in touch with me at the bottom of my website. There’s a place to contact Chuck, ask me questions. I do take personal. I do work with people individually as well as with leaders and teams. I’m light on social media.

Chuck:
I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Instagram, but I’m not a heavy user. But when I publish, like I just had to publish an article in fast company published two days ago. So like, I’ll put that on my social media, let people know I have a new article and that was on leadership, actually, that are.

Scott McCarthy:
That’s awesome. And for you, to listeners, always it’s easy. Just go to lead. Don’t boss.comforward/the episode number and digits and those things and everything else that we talked about will be in the show notes there for you again, Chuck. Sir, thank you. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for your amazing wisdom. This has been fantastic.

Scott McCarthy:
I need to really, I’ve skimmed through the book. I need to dive deep into the book is what I’ve learned today. So thank you and thank you for copy of it.

Chuck:
I really appreciate it and thank you for having me and reach out anytime. Question, curiosity, reach out.

Scott McCarthy:
Awesome. Will do.

Chuck:
Thank you.