The Coaching Habit

The Coaching Habit with Michael Bungay Stanier

How to become an efficient coach and leader

I am excited that you are joining me because I have a great conversation for you with Michael Bungay Stanier. Michael is the founder of Box of Crayons, a company known for teaching 10-minute coaching to busy leaders and managers so they can build better teams and more effective organizational cultures. He left Australia years ago to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he says his only significant achievement was falling in love with a Canadian, which is why he now lives in Toronto.

Having spent time in London and Boston, Michael has written a number of books. His latest is the Wall Street Journal bestseller, The Coaching Habit, which has sold more than 600,000 copies. It has been praised as one of the few business books that make people laugh. I can agree with that. I've read it and did make me laugh as well.

Speaking of laughing, balancing out these moments of success, Michael was banned from his high school graduation for the balloon incident. He was sued by one of his law school lectures for defamation. His first published piece of writing was a Harlequin romance short story called The Male Delivery. I don't know if we're going to talk about that one. Michael, welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

I'm happy to be here. It's such a hot seat that I'm actually standing up this entire interview. That's how hot it is. Thank you. I live in Canada. I love my wife. I love Toronto. I love Canada in many ways, but I could do with better weather here.

I'm down in Florida where it's boiling hot. I'm a little jealous of you but I know come wintertime, you’d probably rather be here. We have so much to talk about. We've gotten a chance to chat a little bit before and get to know each other. I am excited. I have to start with the balloon incident. You got banned from high school graduation. What happened?

I'm not going to tell you because this story is tantalizing, it's the balloon incident in inverted commas. If I tell you, it was a thing involving balloons. It was a minor piece. It’s one of my first brushes with authority. One of the values I have, I found out, is a sense of fairness and fair treatment. There have been a few times I'm bumped up against authorities. I felt that it was a heavy-handed abuse of authority and power. It rubbed me the wrong way. This was one of those moments. It was a minor thing we were doing at my graduation. The over heavy-handed response was to ban me and a few other people from coming to our actual graduation. We've been loyal servants of the school and students for six years. We did this one silly thing that hurt nobody and did no harm. It's terrible. Same with being sued by a law school professor for defamation and so it goes.

When it comes to the work I do in organizations, here's the truth about organizational life. Its preference is to have people who follow the rules, do their job, do their work, don't make a ruckus, go to start the day and get to be. That's what they're there for. Much of the work I've done from an earlier book of mine called Do More Great Work to work around the coaching piece is about how do we bring ourselves to work? How do we bring our humanity to work? How do we follow the rules that matter and don't follow the rules that don't matter? How do we be a little bit rebellious in our own space? It's all entangled in there.

You mentioned fairness and equality, something that has been talked about for decades but has gaining more ground. It seems like we are getting closer to that than we ever have been before. That was also the reason behind the incident you had in law school where you were sued for defamation as well, right?

That's right. It was me and a group of people protesting about something that one of the lecturers was talking about. It was, in the big scheme of things, not that important. The act that we had, which was we went to the dean of the law school and went, “We'd like this guy to stop teaching this thing in this way because it's upsetting for people.” His response to that was suing me, particularly for defamation. The law school's response to that was to go, “Let’s bury our heads in the sand and pretend this isn't working.”

A principle of coaching is asking questions and touching on what’s beneath the surface. Click To Tweet

It felt a poor use of power. I am a tall, white, straight, over-educated middle-class dude. I've got the entire force of the patriarchy behind me making my life better than it might be. There are a lot of people who don't have the privileges that I get by just the way I was born. I'm like, “If this is happening to me, who's one of the lucky ones? How does it play out for other people who, for whatever reasons, don't quite have the same access to authority, power and influence? What do we need to do to shift that?” I don't want to make it sound like this is all I do is talk about it, but it’s one of those deep rhythms that run through the work and how I want to show up.

It's the foundation for everything that you've built.

It's depressing when you walk into a plane and you walk through the first-class section of the plane. They all look like me. They're all 50-year-old white men. I know they've worked hard and they're smart. They're talented people. They've got authority. That's why they're there and good for them, but there's got to be something systemically wrong that allows that to keep happening. We work with organizations and I like the work we do with organizations, it's important. The work that drives me is to allow people to have more impact on work that matters more to them. That enables them to, as one of my mentors Peter Block would say, “Give people responsibility for their own freedom, allow them to step into that place where they can be the best version of themselves.”

Coaching is a great way to make an impact with the people around you, whether you are officially a manager, a peer or anyone. How did you make that shift? You moved to the States after law school. How did you get into coaching? How did it all start?

There's a quote that I say often when I’m being interviewed, “Inspiration is when your past suddenly made sense.” For those people saying, “I don't know what I want to do when I grow up,” even when you're 30, 40, or 50. There's a way that where you've been so far is pointing to where you might go to. My journey towards being involved in coaching happened early on. When I was a teenager, I would end up spending hours in the car with my teenage friends and having them talk about their angsty teenage lives. What is a teenager if it's not about an angsty life?

I was good at listening. I was a sympathetic ear and shoulder. As I sat there, I do not know what I'm doing here. I'm sympathetic, but there's part of me going, “Could I be doing something that would be more effective?” There's part of me going, “Could I do something that would wrap this conversation up because it's 2am? I want to go home,” but this person is droning on about their lives. When I went to university in Australia, I got trained in a youth crisis telephone helpline. Kids my age and younger, feeling depressed or suicidal. That's what introduced me to some foundational therapeutic practices. It's called Rogerian therapy, which is effectively asking questions. Whatever's on the surface is more beneath the surface. That's a principle of coaching.

I carried that on when my scholarship from Australia took me to Oxford. I was involved there for a bit. When I got my first job in England, I noticed coaching arising in California. It hadn't hit England yet in the ‘90s. I was like, “That looks like some weird Californian cult thing,” but I was intrigued. I kept my eye out. When I moved from London to Boston to work in the late ‘90s, I actually hired a coach. I went, “I want to give this a go and see what it's like.” It became apparent that being a coach was something that was similar to how I wanted to show up with the people I work.

As a consultant, I renamed a bunch of things I did with my client’s coaching and then moved to Toronto in 2001. I trained to be a coach with a coaching school. I built a coaching practice, and then went, “This is not actually what I want to be doing,” which was a real surprise. I was like, “I'm sure that I've been trained all my life to be a coach and have a coaching practice. Thirty clients. I'm making a decent living and I'm bored. I feel like I'm not living up to my potential by having these conversations.” That's what took me into the world of teaching, training and learning and development. I'm a good coach but I wouldn't say that I was an extraordinary coach. I had my moments, but there are some people I know who just have a level of presence, mastery, empathy, sympathy, and insight that I don't have. It turns out that I am good at writing books, I am good at translating ideas and tools to make them simple, accessible, and practical. I'm a good speaker. I like being on stage. I'm entertaining.

That's why I'm excited to be part of the conference that you're putting on because when you come to this conference, it's going to be a practical, interactive, fun session. I love the performance and give a good talk or something. I think of Jim Collins, the Good to Great book and the other books that sound like Good to Great but slightly different. In one of those books, he shares a metaphor about how you figure out what you want to do with your life or what you want to do with the project. He calls it the bullets and cannonballs metaphor.

What he suggests is you should be firing bullets, then firing cannonballs. Bullets are the small, low-cost, low-risk experiments that allow you to test out hypotheses. The cannonball is when you find your target and you go, “I figured out where I want to go. Now, let me commit.” That's when you fire the cannonball. Jim Collins says, “Most people either fire their cannonball too soon. They go, ‘I've got this idea. I'm going to mortgage my house and sell my kids into white slavery and then see how it goes. Fingers crossed.’”

The Coaching Habit: Bullets are the small, low cost, low-risk experiments that allow you to test out hypotheses.

Your first idea is almost never the right idea. You always have to change, pivot, evolve and shift a little bit or he says, “People don't ever fire the cannonball. They hone in on the target and then they lose the nerve. They don't have the courage to commit.” That's what's awesome about the conference. Because we don't know each other that well, but it does feel to me reading your announcement of I'm going to do this conference is a bit of a cannonball moment. If I'm actually committed to talent development if I'm standing for this, what would it mean to fire a cannonball? It's like, “I'm going to put on a conference,” because it is an enormous thing to put on a conference.

You’ve got to deal with people like me, prima donnas. You’ve got to figure out the finances and go, “I don't want to lose money on this.” You’ve got to find out your audience and start marketing. You’ve got to build a brand because it's the first time it's been run. People who are reading are like, “It is cool to say I went to the first conference of X.” Can you imagine if you went to the first TED conference? How cool would that be? This is your moment, sign up for the first conference of X. It's the cannonball movement. That's cool to celebrate this.

The process of publishing a book 

If we don't sell enough tickets, I might have to sell my kids into slavery and mortgaged the house. It is a cannonball and I appreciate that. I'm big on taking big risks and trying things because we only get one shot. Pun intended. Why not? I know this is a need. There's an opportunity. If I don't take a chance, then I'll regret that more than I would regret failure. Going back to the book, this idea of writing books and you mentioned firing bullets and cannonballs. You had some books that were traditionally published, and then you self-published this last book. I know a lot of my followers. I've gotten to know a lot of people in talent development. There are a lot of people out there who do a lot of research. They have some points of view on things, they have jobs, but they think I'm testing some stuff on the side, I might have a book in me. I don't know if I could go out and get a traditional publisher, but you self-published your last book and you've sold over 600,000 copies. Can you tell me a little bit about what that process looks like and why that happened?

I self-published the first book I put out called Get Unstuck and Get Going. It was a cannonball moment for me. I'd been left $30,000 from my grandfather. I was like, “I'm prepared to spend this money and lose out on publishing this book because I think it's a good idea. I'm committing to it.” The book is probably the second to The Coaching Habit with about 100,000 copies sold, so is Do More Great Work. I self-published a version of that and then it got found by a New York publisher and got picked up. That was exciting.

I did spend the 3 years pitching The Coaching Habit back to Workman. I was like, “This is going to be a good book.” They did not get excited about it. It didn’t matter what I tried to do. I pitched different versions of the book. Eventually, I got to a point where I'm like, and this is a liberating moment, “I no longer care whether you say yes or no. I need you to say yes or no, not maybe and come back and have another go,” because that's what was killing me. They said no, which I was guided by at the time. It turns out that was a great answer. I was going, “I'm going to self-publish this book.”

It's easy to self-publish a book these days. If you can figure out how to do a PDF document, you can self-publish a book. It's less easy to self-publish a good book, one that is robust enough in design, feel, structure and distribution that people actually go, “I didn't know that was self-published.” My goal with this book was to say, “I'm going to do this as a professional, I'm going to invest money, invest time. I'm going to fully commit to this book. I'm going to cannonball. I'm going to go all in. I'm doing this book in a non-half-hearted way.” It was paying for an editor, paying for a designer, paying for distribution. Committing to do two years of podcasts, in terms of, “I'm going to market this book for 2 years.”

You’ve got to do all the marketing too. A lot of people think you just put a book up there, and then people are going to go buy it. It doesn't happen.

Here's the thing. Writing a book is excruciating, until you discover what it's like to market it and then you go, “Writing the book is the easy part.” In fact, I spend a fair amount of time when people go, “I want to write a book too.” I will often say, “Do you really?” Because I am all for people finding ways to get their ideas and point of view out into the world because we need people who've got thoughts, who've got originality, who help us collectively move forward in terms of how we show up. That is the right momentum. That's the right thing to be driven by.

A book is just one avenue you can choose to create through. There is an incredible number of books published a month. It's like 5,000 business books are published every month in the US or 5,000 every week. It might be 5,000 every hour. It wouldn't surprise me because everybody goes, “I'm going to publish a book. I could be famous.” The thing is you will not be famous. The Coaching Habit sold 600,000 copies. That is a freak outlier result. I wish I knew how I did that. I have some idea of how I did that. Part of it is it's my fifth book. I've spent 20 years building a brand. I spent 2 years marketing it like a crazy weasel. I had a clear idea of who my audience was. I've polished my way of thinking that I can produce stuff that has a hook to it, that has some substance to it. All of that and it's still a freaky outlier result.

If people are super keen about this, I wrote a long article called How I sold 180,000 copies of my book and doubled my business in a blog called GrowthLab. It's a 7,000-word article. People are like, “How did he market and how did he do this?” I've set it all out for you and how much it costs. Create because we need creators. We need you to get your thoughts and point of view and your small ding into the world out there.

Coaching is a core leadership behavior. Click To Tweet

A book, you write a first draft, it is miserable because it's not nearly as good as you thought it was going to be. You got this book in your head, and then your first draft is disappointing. You write a second draft, it's worse than your first draft. You're going backward. You write a third draft, and there's a minute improvement, but now you're beginning to loath yourself and the book. By the time you're in your fifth draft, you’re like “It’s better, but is there anything here at all? Am I just regurgitating blindingly obvious ideas that have not got a spark of interest to them?”

When you get to seven drafts, if you got the discipline, which you need to have to write several drafts because that's how your book gets better. You write a bad book and then you write a slightly less bad book and then you get towards a good book. You're like, “I can barely stand to reread my own writing.” You put it out there into the world and this is a statistic I heard years ago, so it's generous. Ninety-three percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. I'm going to guess now it is like 98% of books sell less than 1,000 copies. Almost nobody's going to read your book.

Is this the best use of your time? It might be because you feel like, “I want a book.” I would be able to point to my bookshelf and go, “There's my book. I wrote that book. That’s my book. I’m a legend,” then awesome, write a book. If you're like, “I'm going to do this, so I've got 50 people in this world who need to know that I have a book. They're going to see this book and they're going to go, ‘You are awesome, Andy,’” or whatever your reason is. Be clear why you've got a motivation to write your book. I knew for me, A) I had something to say, B) I had a business that was going to benefit from this book, whether or not I sold a single copy. Because if I sold a single copy, I would be selling my coach training programs.

You give it to clients and you put it out there at events and do work?

Exactly. I knew why I was writing this book and that helps.

Overnight success

This is an outlier. There may be some luck involved. I know you also put a lot of work into it. You knew what you were doing and you wrote that article. I appreciate you also mentioned the 20 years leading up to that. It reminds me of my revelations over the years is what I've learned about the “overnight success.” The formula for being an overnight success is to work for 20 years and then one day someone goes, “Who's that guy? Where did he come from? He's an overnight success.”

Like I reached out to you and went, “Andy, I'd love to come and speak at your conference.” Your reaction was, “Who are you? Why are you here?” I spent 20 years trying to build my name and reputation in the talent development space. You're literally building a conference, you’re in the space and you've never heard of me. I have one of the bestselling coaching books ever.

That's on me, but I have read the books.

This is not meant to be on you at all. It just meant to be that almost nobody knows who you are. It takes forever and all your overnight success is all exhausted working for twenty years. Liz Wiseman, brilliant, Multipliers was her first book and it was a big breakthrough for her, but she's my age. She's in her 50s and she's been working for 40 years to generate insight, reputation, connections and presence.

The connections and social proof are important because you're right, I didn't know who you were. I've since read your book, and I'm impressed with your work, but you also were connected with Liz. She spoke highly of you. I know the two of you were friends. That's instant social proof like, “Liz is amazing. If she says nice things about you and she's introduced me to some other great guests that I found on this podcast.” It doesn't matter if I didn't know who they were before, but I'm going to go check them out. Now, I know you have great work.

The Coaching Habit: Writing a book is excruciating until you discover what it's like to market it.

I've spent 10 years building a friendship with Liz Wiseman, not so that I could finally land the gig on this podcast, but because she's an awesome person. Partly, she's open to it because I've been writing and because I've been building a brand and the like. I reckon that if you write a good book, you work hard to market it and sell it. You're committed to it. You work your network, you build your network, you build an email list, you should be able to sell 20,000 copies. I reckon that's a year's hard work, you'll get 20,000 copies out there. If you think that you're probably going to make somewhere between $1 and $3 a book, that's about $60,000 in revenue.

You could buy a car, look at that.

Don't forget that it's taking you 60,000 hours to earn $60,000 gross, because then you're going to pay tax on that. If you're doing it for the money, it's actually cheaper to get a Starbucks gig. You're more likely to be successful.

The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap

Let's talk about the book and what you put, the impact it's making. I'd love to hear your perspective on why you wrote the book and what's in there. One of the things you said is this is about essentially helping managers work smarter and have a big impact by working even less than they thought they had to in terms of coaching for people.

We have three principles in our approach to coaching. Be lazy, be curious, be often. Be lazy is always provocative as people are like, “I'm a hard worker, I'm ambitious. I'm trying to do my best,” but how do we get you working less hard and actually being smarter about the impact that you're having in this world? If you peel that back a little further, part of what this is about is making coaching not an HR thing but a business thing. It's a leadership thing. It's a core leadership behavior. Coaching often comes with a bunch of baggage attached to it.

One of the things I sometimes say is I'm trying to unweird coaching because it does come with a bunch of baggage around touchy-feely. You’re a real-life coach, you're an executive coach and that means a certain thing. You're a sports coach and that means a certain thing. For me, what this is about is finding a way of showing up on a day-to-day basis with somebody. The definition we have of coaching is can you stay curious a little bit longer? Can you rush to action and advice-giving a little bit more slowly? Most people are terrible at staying curious. They are advice-giving maniacs. They're wired to give advice.

In the book, you talk about the advice monster and the biggest mistake most managers make is jumping to advice.

The new book is actually called The Advice Trap. It's going to feature the advice monster heavily. I thought about calling it the advice monster, but it's called The Advice Trap. It's about shifting your behavior so that you resist the temptation to leap in to give advice. Not that it's bad to give advice. There are many places to give advice. I've just spent 20 minutes rabbiting on advice about book publishing. There's a place for advice, but I'm just saying, can you slow down the rush to giving advice? Because when you do, you break the three vicious circles that managers and leaders face.

They face an overdependent team, a team that is too reliant on them, keeps coming to them going, “Can you solve this for me? Can you fix that for me? Can you do my work for me?” You have a sense of overwhelm, “I've put too much on my plate.” Almost everybody can relate to that. Sometimes there's a sense of disconnect which is, “I'm not sure why I'm doing the thing I'm doing anymore because am I just a small cog in a big machine.” What coaching does is it allows you to find focus, get clear on what the challenges that you're facing. It's about giving empowerment so you allow the people who should be doing the work to do the work. It's about getting better solutions. Once you know what the challenge is and you know what the solutions are, what your options are, you actually get the best chance to implement the smartest thing.

It's about finding that best solution. You talked about the risk. The downside of jumping to advice too soon and the importance of curiosity and asking a lot of questions, which is something that I have discovered is a strength of mine, which is why I enjoy doing this because I love asking questions. When I was reading your book, I was like, “I have given many people so much advice when I should have been asking questions.” You put in the book that there are five key questions. What are those big questions we need to think about asking?

You only need to ask enough questions to help people access the answer. Click To Tweet

In the book, I've got 7 questions. At the conference, I will be sharing 5 questions. The session I'm running in the conference is the five-question leader. I'm going to take people through these five questions and give them an experiential sense of why they're so powerful. This is me boasting because I got this email. I ran a workshop at ATD, the big association for talent development, the big conference. They sent me my numbers back and 600 people in the room, they rated it 4.98 for usefulness, and 4.95 for me being on stage. To say to people reading, it's great.

I'm going to give you the two questions out of the five questions that aren't in the workshop that I'll be running with Andy. One is the strategic question. It's a great question because what strategy is about, and strategy exists at an individual level, a team level, a unit level, or a company level. Strategy is having the courage to make choices. It's about deciding when you're firing bullets and when you're firing cannonballs. This particular question is if I'm going to say yes to this, what must I say no to? To circle all the way back to Jim Collins, the reason people don't fire the cannonball is they haven't got clear on they're saying yes to and therefore what they must say no to.

What that does is it makes clear the opportunity cost of you not committing and the cost of you committing. You want to know both of these things. One of the things that overwhelm us at work is out over-commitment. We're all too busy. We've all got too much stuff going on. That's because it's easy to give a lazy yes. It's less conflict. You look like you're keen, you're helpful. You look like you're doing your best and this is generally how most of us are trying to show up. It's meaningless because we're pouring water into a full glass at this stage. It’s not that helpful, you're just getting water over the floor. This is about making a choice. If I’m going to say yes to that, what will I say no to? That's the strategy question.

The other question is the lazy question. People are like this because most of the people reading have a tendency to jump in and try and fix, solve, save, be responsible for the people they manage, lead, work with and influence. One of the co-behaviors we're looking to try and create to help people be more coach-like is to stop that. Stop the rescuing, stop the leaping in. The lazy question is all about how do you ask the question that helps you stay a little lazier a little longer? When I tell you the question, it won't even sound like a lazy question. The question is, “How can I help?” or more bluntly, “What do you want from me?”

While that sounds like you're asking for more work, what it's actually doing is saying, “Tell me what you want from me because I'm otherwise making some assumptions. I'm just leaping in and I think I know what you want. I'm going to start doing it.” What this does is going, “Before I rush in and start fixing, solving and saving it for you, tell me what you want. I'll give you a yes, no or a maybe in response to that. I'll be more mindful and thoughtful about what I actually ended up doing.” Those are the two bonus questions.

I read those. That lazy question, I had such a breakthrough with that as you're talking about that because you think about this goes back to the danger of jumping to advice too soon. We talked about the advice monster. The risk there is when you jump to advise, there's a risk that you haven't even gotten to the true challenge yet.

It's a cold, dead certainty. Do you think you know what the problem is? You don't know what the real problem is. You might be solving the wrong problem.

You haven't asked enough questions to get to the underlying issue.

Your advice isn't even good. You're offering them slightly crappy advice to solve the wrong problem.

When we do, we often create work for ourselves. I'm thinking about a conversation I had with a friend, I was telling him about a challenge I had. He immediately referenced a podcast interview and said, “I'll go dig that up and send it to you.” He doesn't even know if that's something that's going to help me or not, because we didn't discuss it but he just created extra work for himself. Is that one of the dangers there too? If you don't ask this lazy question, you're creating extra work for yourself by offering things and then signing up to help with stuff you don't even know what's the right solution?

The Coaching Habit: The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever

There are 3 levels. One is you don't know what the right problem is. Let's say miraculously, you've had the discipline or good luck to figure out what the real challenge is. You're offering up what you think are good ideas, but they might not actually be the good ideas. Let's say you actually figured out what the real challenge is and you figured out a brilliant solution to that real challenge. The third level is more profound which is, “Is this the leadership that's required right now?” Because you offering the suggestion is a disempowering moment for the person receiving the suggestion.

Your standard question, “What's the book that's been influential for you?” I'm going to leap in and I'm going to tell you the answer to that. I'm going to reference Ed Schein’s work. He was an MIT professor and is now living out on the West Coast. He's been a great thinker for years. He's in his 70s or 80s. He originally did stuff around career anchors. Influential around the whole culture and culture change the world. His Corporate Culture Survival Guide is a classic on that topic. His last three books, the first one was called Helping. The second one is called Humble Inquiry. The most recent one is called Humble Leadership.

In Helping, he points to this paradoxical dynamic, which is the act of trying to help somebody creates resistance to the help that's being offered. When you're helping somebody, you are in what Schein would call a one-up position. You've got authority, control, resource, knowledge, and all of that. The person you're helping, the victim, they don't have any of that. The act of trying to force help in somebody disempowers them and creates resistance to that help. Even if you know what the challenge is, even if you know what the best answer is, it's a good question to ask yourself, and knowing all of that, should I still offer up the answer? Because it's an equation. Is my slightly better answer delivered by me a better long-term result, than coming up with a slightly worse answer generated and owned by them? There's no set answer. Sometimes your answer is the best answer, but much less than you think.

When I went through coaching certification or whatever, I learned one of the core tenants is most people have the answers within them. You just need to ask enough questions to get to that and help them access that answer.

Sometimes they don't. Sometimes you need to give advice. Sometimes they don't know what they don't know. It's amazing when you help somebody find what the real challenge is, as soon as people get that a-ha moment as to what the real challenge is, how quickly they figure out what they want to do as a result of that.

They may not even want anything from you. They may just want to vent and think it through and they go on their way. You've helped.

The act of trying to force help on somebody disempowers them and creates resistance to that help. Click To Tweet

They come into your office, email, phone or whatever, and they go, “Blah blah blah.” Your advice monster comes up out of the dark going, “There's so much going on here. I'm going to add value immediately to this conversation. It’s going to be amazing.” Instead, because you've read this conversation, you read the book or you came to the conference you go, “There’s a lot going on there. What do you want from me? How can I help here?” They go, “I don't want anything from you. I just wanted to moan for 5 minutes.” “Awesome.” I can get on with all the stuff that I actually have to do. They're like, “Thank you.” You're like, “No, thank you.” You’re done, rather than going, “There's another book, another stuff I picked up from carrying around with somebody else.”

More about Michael Bungay Stanier

You mentioned some of my standard questions. We don't have time to get into all of those. I do want to ask you what's been your biggest failure or mistake because I feel like you probably have a good story for that?

I have never failed. What are you talking about?

I've heard you talk about dealing with failure and how that's so important.

Honestly, the failure part is always the more interesting part of the story. It's when you read out the bio of me, I'm sued by this person. First piece of writing was a Harlequin romance.

That's what people want to hear about.

Yes because it makes you human. When you hear a talker or speaker, they're like, “Look at all their awards and look how flawless their life has been. I don't believe you. I’m slightly bored by that. Thirdly, I'm intimidated by it.” That's hopeless. I've failed and continue to fail in many ways. The thing that I've been sitting with recently. Box of Crayons, my company, is a training company, a learning, and development company. We've been growing fast for the last years and part fueled by the book. When you're growing a company, there are plateaus you hit. Revenue plateaus are a marker for that where everything that got you there stops working. All the systems melt, everything falls apart.

What got you here, won't get you there.

It's messy and it's hard. The hardest thing is not the systems failing, it's the people who carried you so far. They are no longer the people that will need to get to the next phase. It's hard to have that conversation with people. We've had a couple of times in the last little while where I hoped it wasn't happening. Feeling like it would be good if this person just somehow miraculously pulled it together, sorted themselves out and became the person I want them to be. Not acting soon enough on that, not being courageous enough to have that conversation to point out what wasn't working to set standards around it, to set consequences around has cost the company money to fix that. It's also been a burden I've had to carry for too long. It's also not fair to that other person who I had not actively managed in a way that I should have. That's the thing that is still the edge for me, which is having the courage to have those hard conversations.

It's hard to have those conversations. We don't want to hurt people, so we let them stay too long. I don't have a lot of experience with this but what I've seen over the years is that a lot of times, it works out well for those people because they needed to go do something else. We're almost doing them a disservice by not letting them go.

The Coaching Habit: Everything you do falls into one of three different buckets: bad work, good work, and great work.

I sit with that and I go, “That may be true for some people and may not be true for some people.” I can't take responsibility for that because it's their lives. Do I sacrifice what Box of Crayons is providing to other people and the future and the impact we want to have in the world because I'm too scared to have that conversation? That's what I'm trying to learn. I hope it works out better for them. I hope they're happier once they leave the job that they’re struggling at and all that. I also recognize that I don't want to buy into the magical thinking that I've actually been helping them by going through this because it's a hard process to get fired. Firing somebody is hard, but not as hard as being fired.

A couple more questions. You work with a lot of people in L&D, talent development. Are there any big trends, like one big trend that you're following or seeing, changing how things are being done?

This is a little self-serving, but there is this trend to coaching being seen as a business driver, not an HR skill. The idea of going, “We need our leaders and our managers to be more coach-like, not just because we need our people to be engaged but because you need to embody the future culture of our company.” We’re trying to be innovative here. We're trying to be agile. We're trying to be change resilient, coaching is a foundation leadership behavior that feeds into that. What’s front and center for us is these conversations about coaching being more foundational and more strategic.

I'm seeing greater demand for that and greater supply as well. A lot of coaching companies are popping up, coaching at scale. I have a partnership and can provide coaching to clients. I know you do a lot of coach training for clients. Companies are paying more attention and saying, “This is more of a business need than just this HR thing.” Last question, Michael. Most of my readers are in talent development, often looking for ways to accelerate their careers. I know you work with a lot of these people. What's one more piece of advice you would give to help them accelerate their careers?

You mean having spent an hour talking about not giving advice, you'd like me to offer and finish off with a piece of advice?

That's right, we’ll tell people to take with a grain of salt.

A little pause on the irony of that. There's a book I referenced earlier called Do More Great Work. The model that underlies it is a simple one. It says, “Everything you do falls into one of three different buckets. It's bad work. It's good work, and it's great work.” Bad work is if you like mind-numbing, soul-sucking bureaucracy. You know what I'm talking about. Good work is your job description. Productive, efficient, and getting things done. Great work is the work that has more impact and the work that has more meaning.

I would say that if you're in this world of talent development, it would be interesting for you to take a quick audit of your work life. Draw a circle, divide it into 3 segments that represent how much bad work, good work and great work you're currently doing. Write down an example or two of each type of work for you. Ask yourself, are you happy with that? If I was a betting man, I would say, “Probably not,” because most of us aren’t. Most of us are like, “I would prefer to have more great work and a little less of the other stuff.”

The question is how do you get a little more great work in your life? You need focus, you need courage and you need resilience to do that. Great work won't just come to you. It might, there’s a chance of that, but it's a question of taking responsibility for your own freedom. That Peter Block quote that I referenced to say, “I need to shape my destiny around here.” The way to do that is you do it through the work. You be smart about a bunch of things, but if you're doing great work by living up to your values, by doing work that actually has an impact, but also has meaning for you. That's a way that you make a difference to the world and you live a better life.

Speaking of doing great work, this has been fantastic. For anybody reading who wants to find out more about the great work you've been doing, where's the best place to go?

Our corporate training website is BoxOfCrayons.com. That's how you buy our programs to bring you into your organization. It's probably not what you're looking for. If you're interested in the book, TheCoachingHabit.com is a place where there's a ton of resources. You can download some free chapters, videos or a bunch of stuff there. If you'd like to pillage that website, you're welcome to. If you go to MichaelBungayStanier.com, there's nothing there other than a sign-up page to say, “Here's a way of downloading a report.” You'll get an early access to figuring out when the new book comes out. I'm going to set up a cool pre-publication giveaway there. You might want to go to MichaelBungayStanier.com.

Michael, thank you so much for coming on the Talent Development Hot Seat. This has been awesome. It's been great talking with you. I know it's been valuable for our readers as well. Thank you again.

Thanks.

Take care.

• Box of Crayons
• The Coaching Habit
• Do More Great Work
• Good to Great
• Get Unstuck and Get Going
• How I sold 180,000 copies of my book and doubled my business
• Multipliers
• The Advice Trap
• Corporate Culture Survival Guide
• Helping
• Humble Inquiry
• Humble Leadership
• BoxOfCrayons.com
• TheCoachingHabit.com
• MichaelBungayStanier.com