Art Petty was once a senior executive at a software company, and part of his job was top-line revenue. You might expect the deals to be what kept him up at night.
They weren’t.
“The thing that kept me awake at night wasn’t the idea of the deals we didn’t know about. It was my worry about all the important conversations that were not taking place.”
Art shared this with me when we sat down to talk about his new book, Wake-Up Calls for Managers. I had asked him what gets in the way of people raising the hard issues at work – the ones everyone can see and no one names.
Then he told me why those missing conversations worried him so much. “Because that’s where the real problems are, the real ideas for innovation are, the things that may change the game for the better, or highlight the risks that nobody’s talking about.”
Who isn’t talking
Think about the last meeting you led. Who did most of the talking? Who said nothing at all?
I’ve seen it too many times. Sometimes the person who speaks the least has the most to contribute. It isn’t that they have nothing to say. They just don’t want to fight for the floor. So after a while they stop trying.
When being heard turns into a contest, you can lose some of the most astute observers in your organization without noticing. They still show up. They still do the work. They have just stopped telling you what they see.
(If you have ever been the one who spoke up and still wasn’t heard, I wrote about why that happens in Why Speaking Up Doesn’t Always Make You More Visible.)
Art sees this as a problem of power distance. People hold back their ideas when the title across the table feels too far away. He isn’t arguing for getting rid of the hierarchy. Most of his clients, he told me, are still pretty hierarchical. His aim is to “shrink that power distance as much as possible.”
Listening to him, I shared the way I’ve come to put it: level the playing field of contribution. The hierarchy can stay. The leader’s job is to make sure everyone has a real chance to contribute, whatever their level or title, because that is how an organization sees what it needs to see to get better.
Seventy people, thirty minutes, three questions
Art told me a story about what it looks like when a leader gives everyone that chance.
He had taken over a larger part of that software company, another 70 people, and he had a sense they had been underserved by leadership. So he committed to meeting with each of them, up to 30 minutes each, over the following month. He sent the agenda ahead of time. Three questions:
- What’s working here that we should do more of?
- What’s not?
- And what do you need me to do to help us and you succeed?
He made it clear these were not career discussions. He promised to keep what each person said confidential, with one caveat. He would pull together the themes he heard across everyone, share them back with the whole group, and they would choose the most important ones together.
Do the math and that is 35 hours of conversation. He spread it over a few weeks and kept every one.
As Art tells it, what he heard was some version of this: “Nobody ever listened to me before. Nobody ever asked my opinion before.” Several people even cried.
When the themes came back, the team chose what needed fixing, and Art stepped into the role of executive sponsor. His message to the people who took each one on: “I’m going to get you the resources, the budget, and the help. You’re responsible for bringing this to life and executing.”
What he found, he said, was that people were “hungry to contribute.”
It wasn’t only the questions
Art told me the way people responded had nothing to do with him. That is the one thing he said that I disagreed with.
The questions are simple, and they work because they open a conversation that wasn’t happening. But a hundred leaders could send the same memo, sit down and ask the same three questions, and still not get the honesty and engagement Art got.
What people respond to is the person asking: whether that person is actually listening and whether it is safe to tell them what isn’t working, especially when the person who is listening may actually be part of what isn’t working.
People don’t say what needs to be said because a question was well written. They say it because they believe someone is truly listening and wants to hear them.
When I said this to Art, his answer was simple. “I cared about them. And I still do.”
That is what made the questions work. So if there are important conversations not taking place on your team, better questions will help. But when you’re ready to ask them, remember that what you get back depends on whether the people on your team believe you want to hear the answers.
Start with one conversation
You don’t need to schedule 70 meetings to begin. This isn’t about doing more. It’s about leading differently, one conversation at a time.
Think of one person on your team you haven’t really heard from lately. Sit down with them and ask Art’s three questions. Then listen to the whole answer, including the part about what they need from you.
And pay attention to what happens to the next conversation, and the one after that.
About Art’s book
Art’s three questions are one of many practical ideas you’ll find in his new book.
Wake-Up Calls for Managers: Insights to Sharpen Focus and Elevate Results is Art’s third book, and his clients are the reason it exists. They wanted to know, in his words, “how can we get you when we’re not in coaching or workshops.”
It is built for the moment you are in. A tough conversation with your boss. A difficult situation with someone on your team. A presentation to the board. You go to the topic you need, get ideas for what you can do, and get to work. Every approach in it is one Art used himself over 25 years in management. He calls it a desktop manual. “It’s meant to be used.”
The morning we spoke, a client wrote to tell him they had bought the book for their whole team, and people were already working on the ideas.
If you lead people, this is a book to keep within reach. Get Wake-Up Calls for Managers on Amazon, and find more of Art’s work, including his weekly Leadership Caffeine newsletter, at artpetty.com.
Now I want to hear from you
Think of one important conversation that needs to happen where you work. What will you do to bring it to light?
I invite you to share what you see to do now in the comments, or send me a note through my contact page. I read and respond to every one.
And if this made you think of someone who leads a team, send it to them. The conversations that aren’t happening are hard to see from where you sit.