Laura Ashley Timms and Dominic Ashley Timms: Episode 1116

Transcript

[0:00:34] HA: If you’re like many managers and leaders today, you’re struggling to stay on top. With ever-increasing workloads, demanding schedules and growing instability, it’s little wonder that our stress levels are rising while employee engagement everywhere is low. My next guests are here to offer up some award-winning solutions. Welcome to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host Hussein Al-Baiaty and my next guest is Laura and Dominic Ashley Timms today to talk about their new book titled, The Answer is a Question: The Missing Super Power That Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and Leader. Let’s get into it. Well, hello everyone, welcome back to the show. I’m here with Laura Ashley-Timms and Dominic Ashley Timms today to talk about their amazing new book called The Answer is a Question. I have a couple of questions up my sleeve but Laura and Dominic, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time and energy.

[0:01:38] DAT: Thanks, thanks for inviting us.

[0:01:40] HA: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s start by giving our listeners an idea, a little bit about who you two are perhaps. Maybe a little bit about your childhood, your upbringing, maybe some people that inspired you all to be on this path that you’re now on. I’d love to get our audience a little bit of human characteristics, right? Things that we could all relate to when we were younger and sort of getting on track with our careers. So Dominic, let’s start with you.

[0:02:06] DAT: That’s very kind of you, thank you. Yes, my name’s Dominic. I’ve had an interesting career, I began in the oil industry but very quickly moved into consulting and I was very lucky to move into an area of consulting, which was focused on the human side of change. Many people I’m sure have experienced change done badly in organizations, you certainly going to work and find out your department’s being dissolved and you were told by email. So the expertise I began to develop was, how do you properly engage with people and help them become a part of the change and that really was the inspiration for the start of our company back in 2000, Notion, where we set out to really provide support with helping organizations better engage their people through the change process, to make change easier to move through and that really has been a theme that has informed our work for the last 20 years.

[0:02:59] HA: Yeah. Laura, how about you?

[0:03:01] LAT: Well, I’m going to go back at the earlier than Dominic and my story really started when I was just nine years old and I was reading a kid’s comic and there’s something amazing, one of the stories in the comic really inspired me to set my first goal. There was this lady in the comic that wanted to represent our country in a sport. So I decided I was going to set that same goal and it led to a childhood in sport but supported by coaching and I learned very early on that you got to be careful what you wish for. If you set goals, you will achieve them and I went on to Oxford University and I had a really exciting early career in business, working for very fast-paced operational businesses in retail in London and New York and then other countries, while I was exposed to lots and lots of leaders and managers and if I’m honest, most had a pretty challenging command and control to tell culture and I knew how that made me feel. I moved out of retail into media entertainment and had a lot of fun working for organizations like the crease at the Teletubbies, where I was sliding and I’ve also learned a lot about the challenges of fast-growth family businesses and the issues that they faced again with very little management capability at the senior leadership level and that along with my own development in coaching and developing their coaching skills myself, I then cofounded Notion along with Dominic and obviously over the years, we’ve been developing the management consultancy practice that we now are on.

[0:04:28] HA: That is so powerful. I feel like the both of you had these unique experiences, right? Different industries but there’s a thread in leadership, there’s a thread in management and if it’s not done correctly, it tends to push people away and perhaps maybe attract the wrong people, right? And I love that you point to that but it kind of led both of you to an intersection of where you're working, really grow in the areas that you believed in, management and management and leadership, ideologies can really start moving towards, which is very valuable.

[0:05:01] DAT: Yeah, that’s an important point there, which is when you look at the whole area of management, there really hasn’t been anything new on the management horizon for the last hundred years. This goes back to 1911 when the first scientific principles of management were laid down by Frederick Winslow Taylor but really, we haven’t had a good long, hard look at the purpose and the intention behind management. I think that’s being thrown into stark relief since the pandemic, when so many people’s values have changed about what they want from their life, what they want from their work and from the workplace and the poor old manager is shouldering all of that responsibility for adapting and changing, yet they’re not being given anything new to help them to be able to cope with that and that really is the focus of our work and it’s the focus of this book.

[0:05:55] HA: Yeah, I love that so much. So let’s take a little bit of a deep dive and talk about the importance of learning how to use questions to empower one’s self and of course, impact others. Can you take us a little bit into sort of the coaching style and mentality that you all sit across from these amazing managers that you seem, that you know they need help, right? And they need the training and the ideas that you guys provide but where do you start?

[0:06:19] DAT: Yeah, that’s a great question. It really starts for us way back as we started to grow the company and we were engaged in helping organizations to manage their change process and engage people and we did that by working with project managers, helping them become more sensitive to the changes around them and how they would engage with their teams and over the years, we start to develop real insight into how organizations are trying to use coaching within their businesses. Actually, it was back in 2010 when we had a moment of clarity because we’ve been speaking to a number of our clients and many people who had been through quite long sometimes, training programs in coaching skills and we were hearing from our clients that there was no impact on their business as a result to doing that. So we undertook quite a long piece of research to really understand what’s going on here because so many people are talking about coaching yet it doesn’t seem to be having the impact in organizations they had hoped for and it was a really stunning finding. When we were looking at this, we found that businesses when they started waking up to the power of coaching turned to the training market and the only training that existed in the training market was the training to teach people to become executive coaches and businesses lifted that up and dropped it into their own business, gave it a different label, manager as coach and that’s how coaching skills has been taught ever since that time. The challenge is of course, you’re trying to teach managers to be a coach when they are first and foremost, a manager and so there’s a real conflict here with teaching them as a square peg to use coaching in a very round hole in their organization and the two don’t fit well together. So that took us down a very different path where we started to really look out then, what from of coaching can we adapt and help managers to utilize that would be of use to them on a day-to-day basis? We began doing a range of behavioral work with a different group and often, very large groups and managers are working with, which led us to codify a set of behaviors, which also led then to a model we call the STAR®model and when we were showing managers how to use this model very effectively, they were substantively changing their behavior in the workplace to the point where we were asked to give that a name, “What’s really happening here, what are these people doing now?” And so we coined the phrase, operational coaching, which is a descriptor for how managers are able to use coaching related behaviors and the important word there is to use, to use coaching-related behaviors as a part of their everyday management style not to be a coach and that is a very important distinction there.

[0:09:01] HA: That’s really powerful and Laura, what do you, you know, I know, you have an extensive amount of knowledge in not just operations but manage your real behavior. So where does the STAR®really come to life as far as how these managers start to operate at a day-to-day level? I love that aspect of it because it really simplifies the concept that you’re trying to share and it makes it more actionable. Laura, how did you, I guess in a way because you know, in order to change behavior, it takes a lot of shift but where’s the reduction of the friction that happens in this concept being overlayed?

[0:09:38] LAT: Yeah, that’s a really great question and you got to think about it, we talked about being a fast-paced operational business earlier, think about the current managers right now. I’m sure many of the people listening to this are managers or they work as manger, most people in this situation are stressed, they’re overworked, they’re expected to deliver more and more right now with less support and with even fewer resources than before. Many, many organizations are under resourced right now, there is so much pressure, it’s never been this challenging, hybrid management, all of the complexities we’re facing. So the one thing this has to be is simple and easy to use. So it takes a little bit of work but the minute you’ve mastered these skills, you can literally do things in a split second but the most important thing you’ve got to do as a manager is learning to stop. So the STAR®model stands for stop, think, ask, and get the result and that S for stop is absolutely critical. The minute you can learn to build the triggers to stop doing what you would normally do, which is to go and solve a problem and to tell somebody what to do, to have that command and control style and in an instant, to learn how to stop and think and ask a question, that takes a split second once you’ve learned how to do it, it can change everything. What’s really, really exciting is when you start to use these skills, don’t use the word “use” when you start to put these skills into action, the feedback we get, you see, you can get up to 20% of your time back, that’s one day a week. Just think about that, what would you do with one day a week back? The pressure that you feel under right now, will start to dissipate. You’ll feel less stressed, you’ll be… find it easier and everything gets better. So it is that S for the stop is that critical first step that you’re taking in this book and this program.

[0:11:37] DAT: Just building on that, you know as we go through our management career, that’s something we explore in the book a lot. You know, how have we got to where we are today and again, people listening to this will perhaps reflect on what’s brought into where they are today, how they gained the skills and the insights and typically, we pick up the tips and tricks once we’re thrown in the deep end as a manager. We may be going on a training course and we learn a bit here and a bite there and essentially, we ball those together to create the cocktail of who we are in our management style and so we develop these habitual behaviors so that perhaps, when somebody brings us a problem, we feel compelled to help them, compelled to solve that problem and actually, what Laura is talking about there, learning to stop as it really, really challenging thing. Because we have these overriding habits which compel us to fix, to solve, to help and actually the minute we can stop, everything changes because we’re going to potentially take a different course.

[0:12:32] LAT: And we have to recognize as well that what we’re currently doing collectively isn’t working because 80 to 89% of the work force is currently disengaged. The way we all collectively working as leaders and managers is not having to decide impacts that we really want to have. We’re all doing our best and yet, most people within the organizations we work in aren’t happy, so what we’re going to do that is different.

[0:13:00] HA: And really like sort of going in and getting people to think about how, not only to stop but really, the idea is to go from reacting to responding and by building a response system and slowly integrating into that habit makes you less reactive and now, like you said earlier, you’re eager to help because you have, you're equipped with a way to deal with X, Y or Z and that’s so powerful because it’s a shift in mindset as opposed to taking on more things, relearning new things, new technologies. It’s really a habit within you that you can start shifting and I love that. I think that’s so profound because t’s something very tangible, it’s something that creates the option within you. So where do you find the intersection between managers and leadership? Because you know sometimes, you look up to your manager and yes, they’re doing the operations, they’re working hard at doing, you know, several different types of things but where’s the leader starts to emerge in a manager? Can you talk a little bit about that?

[0:14:03] DAT: Yeah, that’s really great question. I think the first thing to say is we’re not trying to tell managers that everything they’ve been doing is wrong. That’s not it at all and we’re not suggesting that they should become, you know, go to the far end of the scale and become social workers, that’s not it. One of the things that you learn from the book is how to develop your own situational awareness, and how to tap into the different circumstances that you find yourself in every day. I’m going to give you a really short example. If we begin to think about it, we’ll recognize that quite often it’s the same people that come to us with the problems. And the minute we can stop and think, we can start to ask questions about, “Well, what does this person need from us? What’s really going on here, why are they coming to me?” and you know, if I keep telling them what to do and sending them away, what’s going to happen? They’re going to come back again and again. So actually, it’s only when we start to tune into those circumstances and ask ourselves questions that we can begin to determine those outcomes and I think that is a real indication then of thinking in the more leaderly way. I’m starting to proactively engage with the people around me and think about how I am going to be more purposeful in my management and when you start to make those shifts in your approach, then you are able to take a much more measured approach in the way that you’re interacting with the people that you work with.

[0:15:27] LAT: There’s been quite a lot of research around this. We’re involved in a major academic study for our government and it was the research evaluation partner was the London School of Economics, it’s a very thorough and robust academic study and what people found and what organizations found across all sectors, there were 62 organizations in 14 sectors in this study, was that over a six-month period putting STAR®into practice had a massive shift from spending time doing and managing to really spending significantly more time coaching and leading. In fact, 70% more time was spent in that coaching domain and more spent was leading. So one of the thing that STAR®is it helps elevate all people managers and to have more capacity for leading and coaching because they are spending less time doing other people’s jobs for them.

[0:16:18] DAT: I think to build on that, you know, our work is very satisfying and we’re in a very positive business because of the outcomes that we’re able to generate but people are very kind and take the time to actually tell us about the impact that learning how to use some of these behaviors has had on their own careers and we’ve had people completely transformed their own approach and their own style in the workplace. And become really magnificent leaders and magnificent team leaders because they are enabling the people in their teams to step up by challenging them with the questions and asking insightful questions that have those team members go away and think about what they can begin to do to themselves to solve the problem, handing back the responsibility and indicating the confidence you have in them to be able to do that, all supported by the question that you’re asking.

[0:17:08] LAT: Another thing that is quite exciting in terms of the feedback we’ve received is that many, many, many people have written to us and saying they haven’t just got value in the way they’re managing their teams differently, it’s their cross-collaboration in working groups, with their colleagues, with their peers. People have written to us about how much easier it is to manage or even the challenging boss have it improved that relationship. But for me, what is even more exciting is the stories we’ve heard about relationships with friends and family. The best conversation I’ve had with my teammate’s child in years and finally able to have really high quality conversations and just really charming stories we get about marriage relationships are so much better now because you’re stopping and listening to your partner instead of offering advice the whole time and how they now feel about that. So really lovely personal stories outside of the business as well.

[0:18:02] HA: Yeah, I love that so much and I am so glad you tied it into how this impact, that was really my next segue into the questioning was like how does all this impact, you know, the rest of our life? Where does it also start to sort of find itself and I know for me, the more I’ve really leaned into figuring out ways to empower our communication between my wife and I, the better I feel about really, it impacts everything else, right? But wherever it starts, it could start obviously at work in your managerial experience and to learn coaching skills and then you start to automatically almost, you know, as you built up this response system, you start to of course, start to apply it to other parts of your life, which there’s nothing healthier and more rewarding than I feel like your work, going in to help one avenue of someone’s life but it also infiltrates everything else. Maybe infiltrate isn’t the best word but it gets into everything else in the best way where those people will start to feel like a more rounded person that can really communicate and I think that is the key that I loved about all of your work is elevating our way of communication especially with our self and taking that time and that moment to breathe and sort of analyze and then coming up with the correct questions or set of questions that can really help analyze the situation in a way that can provoke us into moving into a positive direction as oppose to of course, we all know what negative feelings are like at work. They infiltrate as well and it makes us unhappy, so I love this work so much because it’s so important and I mean, name a place that doesn’t have a managerial staff? Name a place where leadership doesn’t matter and I think it impacts everyone and so I commend you for your work but can you share some ideas or some stories of helping a specific company. What’s something that you inspired them or you know, you help coach them through and they were able to make these transformation that even they were surprised that it happened?

[0:20:01] DAT: Yeah, we’ve been working with a large digital services organization who have taken this, our program that we explore within the book in absolute detail and they’ve driven it right across their organization. What was really interesting was that it brought us into work originally with their middle management tiers but actually shortly before they launched, the leadership woke up to the fact that, “Hey, if we’re serious about this then we as a leadership team should be seen to be going through this as well.” And so you have this remarkable initiative rolling out throughout the business but you also, at the same time, you were able to see within the organizations the shift and the demeanor of the leadership as what they were learning and what they were starting to use and how they were adapting their behavior became absolutely visible and the remarkable outcomes this organizations, they have certainly run by capacity. They are calmer, that less is being done by brute force, better questions are being asked in each meeting and in fact, you know, they have almost taken this away from us and run with it and we work very closely with our clients to really embed this skills but they’ve changed their language. They used to begin meetings with, “You know, what’s the purpose of the meeting?” very small changes. They start their meetings now with, “What question are we trying to answer here?” and they’ll spend the first few minutes honing that question and just in doing that, they saved so much time because they work to focus down on the thing that must change or the thing that we must focus on as a result of that short conversation. So really focusing on actually what are we trying to answer saved a huge amount of organizational effort. They have said now that that has given them absolute capacity to focus much more purposefully on their strategy and asking powerful questions really helps them to quickly chunk through work to accept or reject ideas much more rapidly because everyone understands where the questions are coming from and they’re working harder and harder to make those questions more deeply reflective. It gets them there faster and I think that’s a really powerful example of an organization that’s taken the inquiry to heart and remember, these aren’t skills that we are taught. You know, the best you ever going to get taught as we grow up is to ask open questions, which, you know, where, when, how, why and actually there’s so much more behind inquiry that actually again, there’s a chapter in the book where we go into some detailed questions. You’d be surprised to know there is very, very little scientifical academic research around how you structure questions to stimulate other people’s thinking and that is the work that we’ve done. We’ve really advanced the whole idea of inquiry as a missing superpower.

[0:22:50] HA: Yeah, that’s very powerful. Laura, would you like to add anything to that?

[0:22:54] LAT: Well, I think one of the things that I would want to add is what is quite a shocking statistic is that 71% of organizations openly admit they get no support whatsoever to first time line managers. So we are literally all doing our best and as Dominic said a little earlier, we’re also the Frankenstein managers. We are just made up of lots of different elements but having this one cohesive mindset and one approach of every meeting, every conversation, every interaction just thinking in that split second, “Is there a question I could ask here to really move things along more effectively?” like the example Dominic gave, who really had such huge ramifications and you know, other examples. We mentioned the academic study that was right across sectors in a space of six months, all of those organizations improve their retention by a factor of six. That was a different impact it had. We were not expecting at that scale those sorts of results. That was a real surprise, a lovely surprise. We knew engagement was significantly improved through the program. But when you saw it at scale across so many organizations and got statistics like that as well as the increase in the management behavior, the improvements and the shift in the type of work they were doing and the commercial results, they were all really, really strong but for me in the current market with the challenges people have recruiting and retaining their teams and that is a real win just this one shift can give and that was a big surprise. It wasn’t in one organization, it was in 62 organizations. So even more powerful.

[0:24:35] DAT: If I bring this back full circle to what Laura was saying earlier, you know, it had to be easy and I think why we wanted to publish the book now, we wrestled with how much of our IP we should put in the book and actually, you know after the pandemic we said, “Look, this is just simply too important not to put out there.” So anyone purchasing the book will learn all about the STAR®model in detail. We hold nothing back, we walk through the model. There are exercises in the book to really help you to begin to make new distinctions in how you go about your job as a manager and it is really important to recognize that you know, most of us take on our first management position because there is actually nowhere else to go in terms of our promotion and our career advancement. In the UK, we call that an accidental manager and it’s thought that both in the US and the UK, over 70% of all managers are these accidental managers. We’re sort of thrown into it not necessarily promoted because we’re great people-people and as Laura said, we’re all making our best fits of it but there is nothing really out there that can really help us to engage people more effectively. In fact, we probably run a mile because we’re so nervous about stepping on a social landmine or upsetting someone, we probably don’t, you know, we perhaps avoid some of those interactions. So inquiry is completely agnostic, it is completely respectful. You are simply asking questions, which naturally engages people. So those organizations that have low engagement scores, I would say this to them: Raising engagement is as simple as helping to show your managers how to engage people.

[0:26:14] HA: Very powerful. What would you say the most challenging or perhaps the most rewarding part of putting together this book and what lessons did you learn from that?

[0:26:23] DAT: That’s a really great question. Both Laura and I might get a sense, we’re incredibly passionate about this work and I think –

[0:26:29] HA: Oh yeah, I can tell. Trust me.

[0:26:31] DAT: The work within organizations now is more important than it’s ever been and again, Laura indicated that managers are being expected to shoulder all of these additional responsibility and again, none of us have been really shown the techniques to be able to do that. So one of the challenges in the book is that we want everything that we produce to be the best it can be. We operate in an environment that we call creative tension and we recognize how that works but you have to be comfortable with that level of creative tension because by strongly debating what we should be doing, we always drive out a better result for that. So you know, writing a book that has the soul of what we have been doing for the last 15 years and delivering that in a way, which is digestible and accessible to the widest possible audience, we certainly have creative tension. Laura is smiling.

[0:27:21] LAT: Yeah, Dominic is being very polite. It was a very big challenge and the greatest happiest moment I think was when we finally finish, not just the writing but then the design of the book, how to really help people to want to put this into action because we have just shared, you know, quite straightforward way the information. “Here is the model, here’s what you can do” but that isn’t how we really work. We are about a hopeful change, so we have obviously tried to structure the book in a way that you can literally take bite-sized elements as you are working through it and go have a go. Go and see what it’s like, you know, reflect on what you are doing well. It’s kind of almost playing through the same mindset we have put into the main program itself. So hopefully people will get some genuine value from it and that’s already exciting to get some of the feedback we’ve been getting on the book. It is already exciting and we have had people that start applying to join the company because it’s changed the way that they’ve been thinking. You know, it’s changed their relationships already just by reading the book. So we are already getting some really lovely feedback, just super exciting and I think as well for me, it’s the bigger ambition. So there’s a big hair-scary goal. We talked about goals at the beginning of this conversation. We have set a massive goal having written the book, is that we are really passionate about helping managers all over the world transform their capability and we have set a goal of having a million STAR®managers, and what we mean by that is a million people out there in workplaces who are engaging their teams completely differently, who are asking questions for the benefit of their teams not so that they can get clever and learn more or so they can ask questions for their benefit. But asking questions genuinely for the other person’s benefit and if we can achieve that, we believe we will create for them, we’re calling, epic workplace cultures everywhere and by epic, we mean engaging workplaces, productive workplaces, inclusive workplaces and collaborative workplaces and we’re super excited about that.

[0:29:19] HA: Yeah, it’s so powerful. I love that your work is truly very rewarding and I am so excited that you teamed up to bring your wisdom together and write this book because I know no matter how you look at writing a book is challenging but we all know that doing challenging things can be very rewarding and in your case, it’s rewarding not only to you two but it is really rewarding to the rest of the world. Because let’s be honest, better management, better leadership just helps our communities in ways that we can’t even measure and so I am very grateful and Laura and Dominic, I just want to say congratulations because the book is a feat and I know you did your absolute best putting it together and I know it’s going to start making amazing impact in our world and I want to say, you know, thank you for sharing your stories and your experiences with us today. The book is called, The Answer is a Question: The Missing Superpower that Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and a Leader, and besides checking out the book, where can people find you two to perhaps come work with you or you with them?

[0:30:21] LAT: Well, to find the book, the book is obviously on Amazon all over the world, so that’s the easiest place to get it and the easiest way to get a hold of us is go to starmanager.global.

[0:30:34] HA: Love it. Well, thank you so much you two for your time, your energy and your resources today. I really appreciate it.

[0:30:40] DAT: Thank you very much.

[0:30:41] LAT: Thank you so much.

[0:30:45] HA: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find, The Answer is a Question: The Missing Superpower that Changes Everything and Will Transform Your Impact as a Manager and a Leader, right now on Amazon. For more Author Hour episodes, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.