Sharon Drew Morgen – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

Decades ago I had an idea that questions could be vehicles to facilitate change in addition to eliciting answers. Convention went against me: the accepted use of questions as information gathering devices is built into our culture. But overlooked is their ability, if used differently, to facilitate congruent change.

WHAT IS A QUESTION?

Standard questions gather information at the behest of an Asker and as such are biased by their words, goals, and intent. As such, they actually restrict our Communication Partner’s responses:

Need to Know Askers pose questions as per their own ‘need to know’, data collection, or curiosity.

These questions risk overlooking more relevant, accurate, and criteria-based answers that are stored in a Responder’s brain beyond the parameters of the question posed.

Why did you do X? vs How did you decide that X was your best option?

Manipulate agreement/response Questions that direct the Responder to respond in a way that fits the needs and expectations of the Asker.

These questions restrict possibility, cause resistance, create distrust, and encourage lying.

Can you see how doing Y would have been better? vs What would you need to consider to broaden your scope of consideration next time?

Doubt Directive These questions, sometimes called ‘leading questions’ are designed to cause Responders to doubt their own effectiveness, in order to create an opening for the Asker.

These narrow the range of possible responses, often creating some form of resistance or defensive lies; they certainly cause defensiveness and distrust.

Don’t you think you should consider doing X? vs Have you ever thought of alternate ways of achieving X?

Data gathering When worded badly, these questions limit the possible answers and overlook more accurate data.

What were the results of your search for Z? vs How did you choose the range of items to search for, and what results did you get?

Standard questions restrict responses to the Asker’s parameters, regardless of their intent or the influencer’s level of professionalism, care, or knowledge. Potentially important, accurate data – not to mention the real possibility of facilitating change – is left on the table and instead may promote distrust, bad data collection, and delayed success.

Decision Scientists end up gathering incomplete data that creates implementation issues; leaders and coaches push clients toward the change they perceive is needed and often miss the real change needed. The fields of sales and coaching are particularly egregious. The cost of bias and restriction is unimaginable.

Sharon-Drew’s new book came out 9/16/2023

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WHAT IS AN ANSWER?

Used to elicit or push data, the very formulation of conventional questions restricts answers. If I ask ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ you cannot reply ‘I went to the gym yesterday.’ Every answer is restricted by the biases within the question.

Because we enter conversations with an agenda, intuition, directive, etc., the answers we receive are partial at best, inaccurate at worst, and potentially cause resistance, sabotage, and disregard.
There are unknown facts, feelings, historic data, goals, etc. that lie within the Responder’s unconscious that hold real answers and cannot be found using merely the Asker’s curiosity.
By approaching situations with the natural biases inherent in standard questions, Askers only obtain good data from Responder’s with similar backgrounds and thought processes.
Because influencers are unaware of how their particular bias restricts an answer, how much they are leaving ‘on the table’, or how their questions have skewered potential, they have no concept if there are different answers possible, and often move forward with bad data.

So why does it matter if we’re biasing our questions? It matters because we don’t get accurate answers; it matters because our questions instill resistance; it matters because we’re missing opportunities to serve and support change.

Imagine if we could reconfigure questions to elicit accurate data for researchers or marcom folks; or enable buyers to take quick action from ads, cold calls or large purchases; or help coaching clients change behaviors congruently, permanently, and quickly; or encourage buy-in during software implementations. I’m suggesting questions can facilitate real change.

WHAT IS CHANGE?

Our brain stores data rather haphazardly in our brain making it difficult sometimes to find the right answer when we need it, especially relevant when we want to make new choices.

Over the last decades, I have mapped the sequence of systemic change and designed a way to use questions as directional devices to pull relevant data in the proper sequence so influencers can lead Responders through their own change process without resistance.

This decision facilitation process enables quicker decisions and buy-in – not to mention truly offer a Servant Leader, win/win communication. Let’s look at how questions can enable change.

All of us are a ‘system’ of subjectivity collected during our lifetime: unique rules, values, habits, history, goals, experience, etc. that operates consensually to create and maintain us. It resides in our unconscious and defines us. Without it, we wouldn’t have criteria for any choices, or actions, or habits whatsoever. Our system is hard wired to keep us who we are.

To learn something new, to do something different or learn a new behavior, to buy something, to take vitamins or get a divorce or use new software or be willing to forgive a friend, change must come from within or it will be resisted.

People hear each other through their own biases. You ask biased questions, receive biased answers, and hit pay dirt only when your biases match. Everyone else will ignore, resist, misunderstand, mishear, act out, sabotage, forget, ignore, etc.
Due to their biased and restricting nature, standard questions won’t facilitate another’s change process regardless of the wisdom of your comments.
Without the Responder being ready, willing, and able to change according to their own criteria, they cannot buy, accept, adopt, or change in any way.

To manage congruent change, and enable the steps to achieve buy-in, I’ve developed Facilitative Questions™ that work comfortably with conventional questions and lead Responders to

find their own answers hidden within their unconscious,
retrieve complete, relevant, accurate answers at the right time, in the right order to
traverse the sequenced steps to congruent, systemic change/excellence, while
avoiding restriction and resistance and
include their own values and subjective experience.

It’s possible to help folks make internal changes and find their own brand of excellence.

FACILITATIVE QUESTIONS™

Facilitative Questions™ (FQs) use a new skill set – listening for systems – that is built upon systems thinking and facilitating folks through their unconscious to discover their own answers.

Using specific words, in a very specific sequence, it’s possible to pose questions that are free of bias, need or manipulation and guide congruent change. And it requires trust that Responders have their own answers.

Facilitative Question™ Not information gathering, pull, or manipulative, FQs are guiding/directional tools, like a GPS system. Using specific words in specific sequences they lead Responders congruently, without any bias, down their unique steps of change to Excellence. How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle? Or What has stopped you from adding ‘x’ to your current skill set until now?

When used with coaching clients, buyers, negotiation partners, advertisements, or even teenagers, these questions create action within the Responder, causing them to recognize internal incongruences and deficiencies, and be guided through their own options. (Because these questions aren’t natural to us, I’ve designed a tool and program to teach the ‘How’ of formulating them.).

The responses to FQs are quite different from conventional questions. By word sequencing, word choice, and placement they cause the Responder to expand their perspective and recognize a broad swath of possible answers. A well-formed FQ would be one we formulated for Wachovia Bank to open a cold call:

How would you know when it’s time to consider adding new banking partners for those times your current bank can’t give you what you need?

This question shifted the response from 100 prospecting calls from 10 appointments and 2 closes over 11 months to 37 meetings and 29 closes over 3 months. FQs found the right prospects and garnered engagement immediately.

Instead of pulling data, you’re directing the Responder’s unconscious to where their answers are stored. It’s possible Responders will ultimately get to their answers without Facilitative Questions, but using them, it’s possible to help Responders organize their change criteria very quickly accurately. Using Facilitative Questions, we must

Enter with a blank brain, as a neutral navigator, servant leader, with a goal to facilitate change.
Trust our Communication Partners have their own answers.
Stay away from information gathering or data sharing/gathering until they are needed at the end.
Focus on helping the Other define, recognize, and understand their system so they can discover where it’s broken.
Put aside ego, intuition, assumptions, and ‘need to know.’ We’ll never understand another’s subjective experience; we can later add our knowledge.
Listen for systems, not content.

FQs enable congruent, systemic, change. I recognize this is not the conventional use of questions, but we have a choice: we can either facilitate a Responder’s path down their own unique route and travel with them as Change Facilitators – ready with our ideas, solutions, directions as they discover a need we can support – or use conventional, biased questions that limit possibility.

For change to occur, people must go through these change steps anyway; we’re just making it more efficient for them as we connect through our desire to truly Serve. We can assist, or wait to find those who have already completed the journey. They must do it anyway: it might as well be with us.

I welcome opportunities to put Facilitative Questions into the world. Formulating them requires a new skill set that avoids any bias (Listening for Systems, for example). But they add an extra dimension to helping us all serve each other.

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen December 9th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening

7 Comments

As instructors you’re committed to collaborating with your students, inspiring their creativity and sparking their original ideas. You pose interesting questions to enthuse them and work hard at offering knowledge in a way that inspires their learning.

But are they hearing what you intend to convey?

When I heard two highly intelligent people having a conversation in which neither were directly responding to each other (“Where should my friends pick me up?” “There’s parking near the bottom of the hill.”) I became curious. Were they hearing different things that caused disparate responses?

I spent the next 3 years studying how brains listen and writing a book on it (WHAT? Did you really say what I think I heard?). I ended up learning far more than I ever wanted to: like most people, I had assumed that when I listened I accurately heard someone’s intended message. I was wrong.

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HOW BRAINS LISTEN

Turns out there’s no absolute correlation between what a Speaker says and what a Listener hears – a very unsatisfactory reality when our professions are based on offering content that is meant to be understood and retained. Sadly there’s a probability that students are not taking away what we’re paid to teach them.

To give you a better idea of how this happens and how automatic and mechanical this process is, here are the steps brains perform when hearing spoken words.

1. A message (words, as puffs of air, initially without meaning) gets spoken and received as sound vibrations.

2. Dopamine processes incoming sound vibrations, deleting and filtering out some of them according to relevance to the Listener’s mental models.

3. What’s left gets sent to a CUE which turns the remaining vibrations into electrochemical signals.

4. The signals then get sent to the Central Executive Network (CEN) where they are dispatched to a ‘similar-enough’ neural circuit for translation into meaning.

Note: The preferred neural circuits that receive the signals are those most often used by the Listener, regardless of their relevance to what was said.

5. Upon arrival at these ‘similar-enough’ circuits, the brain discards any overage between the existing circuit and the incoming one and fills in any perceived holes with ‘other’ signals from neighboring circuits.

What we ‘hear’ is what remains. So: several deletions, a few additions, and translation into meaning by circuits that already exist.

In other words, what we think we hear, what our brain tells us was said, is some rendition of what a Speaker intends to convey biased by our own history. And when applying these concepts to training and instruction, neither the instructor nor the student knows the distance between what was said and what was heard.

I lost a business partner who believed I said something I would never have said. He not only didn’t believe me when I told him what I’d actually said, but he didn’t believe his wife who was standing with us at the time. “You’re both lying to me! I heard it with my own ears!” and he stomped out of the room, never to speak to me again.

HOW TO CONFIRM STUDENTS HEAR US

What does that mean for instructors? It means we have no idea if some/all/few of the students hear precisely what we are trying to convey. Or they might hear something similar, or something that offends them. They may hear something quite comfortable or something vastly different. They may misinterpret a homework assignment or a classroom instruction. It means they may not retain what we’re offering.

To make sure students understand what we intend to share, we must take an extra step when we instruct. Instead of merely assuming we’re presenting good content or asking creativity-building questions, we must assume we don’t know what the students have heard, regardless of how carefully we’ve worded our message.

In smaller classrooms I suggest we ask:

Can you each tell me what you heard me say?

Or, with a large class, say the same thing in several different ways: you can begin by explaining –

Because of the way brains hear incoming words, you’ll each translate what I’m saying differently. To make sure we’re all doing the same assignment, I’m going to tell you the homework assignment in several different ways:

Write a 3-page paper on [how your creativity is inspired]. Let me repeat this in a different way:

In 3 pages, explain what’s stopping you from [being as creative as you can be]. Or maybe this is clearer for you:

How do you ‘do’ your [creativity to end up with a new concept]? Explain in a 3 page paper. Or:

Hand in a 3 page paper that explains [your thinking process that triggers new ideas].

It might sound like extra work but the learners will:

understand what you intend for them to do (in their own way, but they’ll get the meaning);
promote uniform topic discussions;
eschew confusion and inspire original ideas;
circumvent regurgitation.

Since students sometimes fear offering original thoughts as they don’t want to hand in a ‘wrong’ answer, this type of exposition ensures they’ll all hear your intent and be willing to share their authentic responses. And, they’ll understand that if they don’t precisely grasp what their instructor is offering, it’s their brain’s fault.

______________________

Sharon Drew Morgen November 25th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening

Our viewpoints, interpretations and assumptions are so unconsciously biased that we unwittingly restrict our ability to accurately understand, or act on, incoming information. Our brains are the culprit, as they construct the way we make sense of the world; we don’t question what our brains tell us.

Responding from historic personal norms and beliefs, we instinctively assume our perceptions, actions, interpretations, are based on reality. But we invent our own reality. As David Eagleman says in The Brain,

“Each of us has our own narrative and we have no reason not to believe it. Our brains are built on electrochemical signals that we interpret as our lives and experience… there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth via billions of signals triggering chemical pulses and trillions of connections between neurons.” [pg 73-74]

Our brains actually restrict us to seeing, noticing, hearing, understanding, and learning what we already have circuits to translate – what’s comfortable and acceptable – causing deep seated biases. Our subjectivity maintains us.

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In this article I will explain how our brain biases us and what we can do to override the patterns.

SUBJECTIVITY VS OBJECTIVITY

We live our lives subjectively, based on the way our brains code and retrieve our personal, unique, and idiosyncratic beliefs, assumptions, history and norms. We think we’re making good choices when we choose or consider one thing vs another, when we easily reject something because it makes no sense or annoys us. Or worse, when it’s ‘obvious’ to us that one thing should be valued differently than another.

We like to think we’re objective. But we’re not.

The Wikipedia definition of objectivity is “… the elimination of subjective perspectives and … purely based on hard facts.” And “a lack of bias, judgment, or prejudice.” But is this possible? What are ‘hard facts’ when our brain rejects them as faulty? When our brains determine what ‘reality’ is? I suggest that objectivity is only slightly less biased than subjectivity.

Indeed, it’s pretty impossible to experience or interpret most anything without bias. We act, make decisions and choices, communicate with others, raise children and have friends, all from a small range of favored, habitual mental models and neural circuits that come from oft-used superhighways in our brains that we’ve spent a lifetime culling and assume are accurate.

Regardless of how ‘factual’ it is, when incoming data doesn’t jive with our existing beliefs, our brains ‘do us a favor’ and resist and re-interpret whatever falls outside of what we ‘know’ to be true. Obviously, anything new has a good chance of not being understood accurately. Bias is just cooked in; we don’t even think twice about trusting our intuition or natural reasoning when there’s a good chance we shouldn’t.
Whether we’re in a conversation, listening to media, or even reading, we listen through biased filters, and hear what our brains tell us was said – likely to be X% different from the intended message. Unless we develop new neural pathways for the new incoming data, we will only hear what our brains are already comfortable with.

Indeed, our worlds are very tightly controlled by our unconscious, habituated, and brain-based biases, making it quite difficult to objectively hear or understand anything that is different. It takes quite a bit of work to act beyond our perceptions.

WHY CAN’T WE BE OBJECTIVE?

Each of us interpret incoming messages uniquely. Indeed, objectivity is not, well, objective. Here’s what happens: Sometimes

the way the new information comes in to us – the words used, the setting, the history between the communication partners, the distance between what’s being said and our current beliefs – cause us to unconsciously misinterpret bits of data;
we have no natural way of recognizing an incongruity between the incoming information and our unconscious thoughts;
our brain deletes some of the signals from incoming messages when they are discordant with what we already accept as true, without telling us what we missed (My book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? explains and corrects this problem.);
our beliefs are so strong we react automatically without having enough detachment to notice;
what we think is objective is often merely a habitual choice.

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We each live in worlds of our own making. We choose friends and neighborhoods according to our beliefs and how our ears interpret ‘facts’, choose professions according to our likes and predispositions, raise our kids with the same norms and beliefs that we hold. In other words, we’ve created rather stable – certainly comfortable – worlds for ourselves that we fight to maintain regardless of how our biases may distort.

When communicating with others, ‘objective facts’ might get lost in subjectivity. In business we connect with different viewpoints and attempt to convince other’s of our ‘rightness’, and either they don’t believe us or they feel we’ve made them ‘wrong’. Our children learn stuff in school that we might find objectionable regardless of its veracity, or we might disagree with teachers who have different interpretations of our child’s behavior.

And of course, most scientific facts we deem ‘objective truth’ may just be opinions. Folks like Curie, Einstein, Hawking, and Tesla were considered to be cranks because their ideas flew in the face of objective science that turned out to be nothing more than decades and centuries of perceived wisdom/opinions.

The problem shows up in every aspect of our lives. Sometimes there’s no way to separate out objective fact from subjective belief, regardless of the veracity.

I remember when my teenage son came home with blue hair one day. Thinking of what his teachers would say (This was in 1985!) or his friend’s parents, I wanted to scream. Instead I requested that next time he wanted to do something like that to please discuss it with me first, and then told him it looked great (It actually was a terrific color!). But his father went nuts when he came to pick him up, screaming at both of us (“What kind of a mother lets her son dye his hair blue!!!”), and taking him directly to the barber to shave his head. For me, it was merely hair. We both had different ‘objective realities.’

CASE STUDY IN OBJECTIVITY VS SUBJECTIVITY

I once visited a friend in the hospital where I began a light conversations with the elderly orderly helping her sit up and eat. During our chat, the orderly asked me if I could mentor him. Um… Well, I was busy. Please! he begged. Not knowing what I could add to his life and having a bias that folks who asked me to mentor them just wanted me to give them money, I reluctantly, doubtfully, said ok.

He emailed me and invited me to dinner. Um… well, ok. I’d donate one night. He lived in a tiny room in a senior living center, on the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks. It was very clean and neat, and he had gone out of his way to prepare the best healthy dinner he knew how to offer. Shrimp cocktail. Nice salad. Hamburger and beans. Ice cream. During dinner he played some lovely music. Just lovely. I was transfixed. Who is that playing, I asked.

“It’s me. I wrote that piece, and I’m playing all the instruments. I have several CDs of music I’ve composed and self-produced. Can you help me find someone who might want to hear it and do something with it? I’ve never met anyone who could help me.” I helped him find folks who helped him professionally record at least two of his compositions.

By any ‘objective’ measure, using my own subjective biases and ignoring the objective truth that we’re all equal and everyone is capable of having talent, I didn’t initially consider that someone ‘like that’ (old, black, poor, uneducated) had the enormous talent this man possessed, regardless of my advocacy of non-bias and gender/race equality.

Unwittingly, we seriously restrict our worlds the way we process incoming data. We live subjective lives that restrict us. And as a result, we end up having arguments, misunderstandings, failed initiatives; we end up having a smaller pool of ideas to think with and don’t see a need for further research or checking; we make faulty assumptions about people and ideas that could bring benefits to our lives. I personally believe it’s necessary for us to remove as many restrictions as possible to our pool of knowledge and beliefs.

HOW TO COMPENSATE

To recognize bias and have a new choice, we must first recognize the necessity of noticing when something we believe may not be true, regardless of how strong our conviction otherwise. It’s quite difficult to do using the same biases that caused us to unconsciously bias in the first place.

Here’s a tip to help expand your normalized perception and notice a much broader range of givens, or ‘reality,’ to view an expanded array of options from a Witness or Coach or Observer position on the ceiling:

Sit quietly. Think of a situation that ended with you misinterpreting something and the outcome wasn’t pretty. Replay it through your mind’s eye. Pay particular attention to your feelings as you relive each aspect of the situation. Replay it again.
Notice where your body has pain, discomfort, or annoyance points.
As soon as you notice, intensify the feeling at the site of the discomfort. Then impart a color on it. Make the color throb.
Mentally move that color inside your body to the outer edges of your eyeballs and make the color vibrate in your eyes.
When you mentally notice the color vibration, make sure you sit back in your chair or stand up. Then move your awareness up to the ceiling (i.e. in Witness or Observer position) and look down at yourself. From above you’ll notice an expanded range of data points and options outside your standard ones, causing you to physiologically evade your subjective choices.

Since the difference between subjectivity and objectivity is one of perception, and in general our brains make our determinations unconsciously, we must go to the place in our brains that cause us to perceive, and make it conscious. Only then can we have any objective choice. And next time we think we’re being objective, maybe rethink the situation to consider whether new choices are needed.

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Sharon Drew Morgen November 18th, 2024

Posted In: Communication, Listening, Sales

When my son George was born in 1972 I was determined to give him attributes I found compelling: kindness, respect and an awareness of others, creativity, a willingness to listen and to collaborate. To accomplish this, I kept TV out of the house, gave him creative toys like blocks, Legos, and art supplies like paints and pipe cleaners. I brought him to theater and galleries as was age appropriate. I began teaching him colors at the Picasso exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum when he was 18 months old and in a backpack. I began a storytelling routine so I could instill in him the skills to listen. Yup. I was raising a creative, kind leader.

By the time he was 2, George was making guns with his pipe cleaners, drawing pictures of rocket ships and army tanks. Where did he gain an affinity to guns? How did he know about army tanks? No idea. But it wasn’t from me.

Eventually he turned into a professional jock (Ok. I’m proud. He’s a silver-medal Olympian.) and a game hunter (Not so proud.). But he’s not creative, certainly listens with very biased and judgmental ears, and only kind under a gruff exterior. How did I not raise the person I tried to raise? Sure, it was ‘nature’. But where did the ‘nurture’ go?

DO MEN WANT THE SKILLS TO CONNECT?

I have come to believe that men and women have vastly different communication skills and assumptions that seem gender specific, so obvious in this story: Friends recently did construction on their house. When they showed me around, one of the new rooms had 5 comfy leather chairs lined up side by side facing a huge TV screen. It was obviously a Man Cave. I started to laugh.

Peter: What’s so funny?

SD: This is obviously your man cave.

Peter: Why is it so obvious?

SD: Women would never line chairs up like that. They’d be in a semi-circle.

Peter: Why would you do that?

SD: So we could engage with each other, communicate, see and hear each other.

Peter: But why would I want to do that?

Right. Why.

THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

I was the second woman on a public Board of Directors in the UK in 1986. I quickly learned to keep quiet during our Board meetings: men would over-talk me when I spoke; seize and spout my ideas to broad approval with no attribution; fail to invite me to meetings even though my group was bringing in 142% of the net profit of the company. I was once so furious tears of rage seeped out of one eye. “Awwww. Let’s give Sharon-Drew a moment to compose herself,” said the Chairman. “I have no need to compose myself. I’m just enraged at all of you.” Funny, but the next meeting one of the other Board members cried. As women have done for centuries, I had given them permission.

Times have changed a bit. But why, why, has it been such a struggle? And why, why are women in leadership still uncommon? 25% of leadership positions go to women, even though 60% of the workforce are women; 5% of women’s start-ups get funding; 20% of companies have at least one woman on their Board, and there are 53 women CEOs – 9% – in the Fortune 500.

There are lots of reasons offered as to why the numbers are so low: women have babies and aren’t represented in the workplace; women aren’t accepted into the Boys Club and don’t have the mentors to provide them a leg-up; men don’t respect women and won’t listen to them; women don’t play by the rules. Obviously these are all silly. And yet.

Much has been written about the differences between men’s and women’s leadership styles. And yes, it’s been proven that working for a woman leader offers more success – staff are happier, there’s less turnover, more profit is generated, teams work better with a more creative output. For sure more women are being hired in leadership roles. But it’s not enough and it’s not representational.

Given that we make up 51% of the population, women are misrepresented, leaving their experience, ideas, people-orientation and leadership capabilities outside of standard practice.

Instead business employs timeworn bastions of testosterone-laden traditions that put technology, rules, time, and money where relationships, kindness, service, people, and collaboration should be.

And it’s costing us via increased stress levels, dysfunctional teams, lost and disloyal clients, incomplete roll-outs, and far, far too much hubris.

WOMEN HAVE GREAT SKILLS

With so many excuses as to why women aren’t promoted to leadership positions, maybe it’s time to explain precisely why women make great leaders.

We care. That’s right. We not only care about the bottom line, our place in the market, our regard among competitors. We care about people – staff, teams, creativity, well-being. In my company I gave staff one week and $2,000 a year (in the mid-1980s) to take some type of program that wasn’t work-related to boost their creativity and expand their thinking. They had to take one day off a month to do volunteer work in the community. They weren’t given vacation days but told to take off whatever time they needed to maintain their creativity and clarity, so long as they covered the work. But they were having so much fun at work I literally had to push them out the door to take time off.
We listen. Women not only listen for details, but we closely attend to differences in speaking patterns so we can ascertain shifts, problems, feelings. Our listening enables us to bond with another’s humanity, not for what they’re doing but who they’re being.
We’re curious. When women notice a problem, we get curious. Instead of going straight into action, we wonder about its origination, how to fix it from inside, how to assemble the right people to design a fix. And then we trial different approaches, get team agreement for different outcomes.
We’re problem solvers. And not in conventional ways, but often out-of-the-box thinking.
We’re risk takers. This is a well-known fact. Women have less fear of failure then men, with a greater understanding of possibilities. Since we’ve had to go-it alone, we’re willing to offend the status quo.
We communicate. We inspire discussions, ask questions, pose hypotheticals. We start conversations where there is too much silence. We don’t do denial.
We collaborate. Working in groups is natural. If you’ve ever done an exercise where everyone in the room is given 6 pipe cleaners and told to make a ‘reporting’ structure, all the men attach each to the ones above and below. Women make a daisy chain, in a circle. It’s endemic.
We work to the future. Instead of taking steps sequentially with a perfect forward-moving plan, we think in systems, in circles. We see the aggregate and try different actions to cause change as a whole.

I will never understand the full set of reasons given why women are kept out of leadership positions. But I do know that by leaving us out, our companies suffer, lose market share and profit and have diminished creativity and kindness.

It seems that in today’s workplace, change is afoot. I look forward to there being an equal number of men and women leaders someday. And just maybe we can all raise our sons in an environment where kindness doesn’t have to be hidden, and equality and respect is the norm.

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Sharon Drew Morgen November 11th, 2024

Posted In: News

We all know the importance of listening, of connecting with others by deeply hearing them share thoughts, ideas, and feelings that enable us to be present and authentic. We work hard at listening without judgment, carefully, with our full attention. But are we hearing others without bias? I contend we’re not.

WHAT IS LISTENING?

From the work I’ve done tracking how words and sound enter brains, I believe that listening is far more than hearing words and understanding another’s shared thoughts and feelings. Listening is actually a brain thing that has little do to with meaning. It’s about puffs of air.

Indeed, there are several problems with us accurately hearing what someone says, regardless of our intent to show up as empathetic listeners. Generally speaking, our brains determine what we hear. And they weren’t designed to be objective. There are two primary reasons:

Words are meant to transmit meaning, yet they emerge from our mouths smooshed together in a singular gush with no spaces between them. Our brains then have the herculean task of deciphering individual sounds, individual word breaks, unique definitions, to understand their meaning. No one speaks with spaces between words. Otherwise. It. Would. Sound. Like. This. Hearing impaired people face this problem with new cochlear implants: it takes about a year for them to learn to decipher individual words, where one word ends and the next begins.
When others speak, their words enter our ears as puffs of air – sound vibrations that have no meaning at all. None. We only ‘understand’ or ‘hear what’s been said’ after these vibrations go through several iterations as electrochemical signals, being distorted and deleted along the way before finally being translated into meaning by our existing circuits. And our brain doesn’t tell us what was deleted or distorted, leaving Listeners to incorrectly assume that what they think they heard is what the speaker meant.

What we think we hear is not necessarily what a Speaker intends to share. Here’s my definition of listening that includes the full set of brain factors:

Listening is an automatic, biological, electrochemical, physiological, mechanical process during which spoken words, as meaningless, incoming puffs of air, eventually get translated into meaning via existing neural circuitry.

In other words, there is no direct route between what was said and what’s heard. Hence the reason for arguments, confusion, and all kinds of errors in communication.

HOW BRAINS LISTEN

Like most people, I had thought that if I gave my undivided attention and listened ‘without judgment’, I’d be able to hear what a Speaker intended. But I was wrong.

When writing my book on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, I was quite dismayed when I learned that what a Speaker says and what a Listener hears are often two different things.

Sample

It’s not for want of trying. Listeners work hard at empathetic listening. But the way our brains are organized make it difficult to hear others without bias. Here’s what our brains do when someone speaks:

– Words enter our ears as mere vibrations (puffs of air with no meaning),

– get turned into electro-chemical signals (also without meaning) that

– get sent to existing circuits

– previously used for other translations,

– that then discards whatever signals don’t match

– and using what’s left as the basis for translating the new incoming content

– that we mistakenly believe was what the Speaker said.

It’s mechanical. As a result, we not only mishear what was intended, but – because the new content is translated by historic circuits – we unwittingly maintain our biases, not to mention our ability to expand our knowledge base is restricted.

With the best will in the world, with the best empathetic listening, by being as non-judgmental as we know how to be, as careful to show up with undivided attention, we can only hear what Others say according to what our brain allows us to hear.

IT’S POSSIBLE TO GET IT ‘RIGHTER’

We can’t easily change the process itself , but it’spossible to interfere a bit and add new circuits with the brain change models I’ve developed.

Sample

I’ve come up with two ways to listen with more accuracy:

When listening to someone speak, stand up and walk around, or lean far back in a chair. It’s a physiologic fix, offering an Observer/witness viewpoint that goes ‘beyond the brain’ and disconnects from normal brain circuitry. I get permission to do this even while I’m consulting at Board meetings with Fortune 100 companies. When I ask, “Do you mind if I walk around while listening so I can hear more accurately?” I’ve never been told no. They are happy to let me pace, and sometimes even do it themselves once they see me do it. I’m not sure why this works or how. But it does.
To make sure you take away an accurate message of what’s said say this:

To make sure I understood what you said accurately, I’m going to tell you what I think you said. Can you please tell me what I misunderstood or missed? I don’t mind getting it wrong, but I want to make sure we’re on the same page.

Listening is a fundamental communication tool. It enables us to connect, collaborate, care, and relate with everyone. By going beyond Active Listening, by adding Brain Listening to empathetic listening, we can now make sure what we hear is actually what was intended. To train your team on how to listen without bias, please contact me for a one-day zoom course. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharondrewmorgen.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen November 4th, 2024

Posted In: News

I wonder why I rarely hear the word Dignity used in business. Not only do we each seek to do work and have relationships that encourage and include dignity, we aspire to promote products and have client connections in ways that maintain the self-worth and self-respect of all.

But I’m certain we could all do a lot more to achieve it. Let me share a personal story that first alerted me to the importance of dignity.

In the 1980s I moved to London to start up a tech company and simultaneously started up a non-profit to support folks with the neurological disease my son suffers from (We just had our 40th year anniversary!). The woman I partnered with (Joan) was a long-time sufferer of the illness and had great difficulty opening her eyelids or lifting her neck. But she worked hard to type notes (just a few typos!) to other sufferers sending resources, and setting up ‘meet and greets’ with doctors and medical schools around the UK where we’d travel to share the latest treatment information.

Every Wednesday night Joan and I went to dinner prior to getting down to work. And every Wednesday night I picked up the check, knowing Joan – age 75 at the time and obviously disabled – was living on state assistance. But one Wednesday as I reached for the check, Joan’s hand came down onto mine.

Joan: I’ll pay tonight.

SD: That’s okay. I’m working and have more available cash than you have.

Joan: I said I’ll pay. I may not have money, but I have dignity. Don’t take away my dignity.

I then realized that by always paying I was taking away her agency, her dignity as an equal partner. Seems it wasn’t about the money at all. In fact, my decision to pay for each meal suddenly seemed like a power thing. How many times had I substituted money and power for dignity?

PROMOTING DIGNITY IN THE WORKPLACE

Dignity is a private, personal consideration we each hold that matches our beliefs about who we are; we gravitate toward people who honor it. Through our personal dignity we show up authentically and remove ourselves from people and situations that threaten it.

In our personal lives we observe the dignity of our friends and family. But I am unaware of this term being applied in the workplace with specific actions that will ensure we provide dignity to those we touch. This article discusses how to impart dignity and what to do to achieve it.

As entrepreneurs and business owners we must

build dignity into our norms, policies, communications and conventions,
make sure we treat each other, our employees and our clients, with respect at meetings, interactions, emails, etc.,
act in ways that respect each other’s self-worth,
minimize the stress our employees feel when being disrespected.

But how do we ‘do’ dignity?

1. Fair pay: I can’t say this strongly enough. Paying people fairly enables them to feel respected and valued, and take care of their families and their health. Without fair pay, the rest of this article is moot.

2. A culture of diversity: Diversity is a word thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean? Sure, it means racial and gender diversity in hiring and advancement practices. But what about neurodivergent folks who get ignored because their ideas don’t seem to fit in? What about folks who think or act differently? Each difference expands possibilities and enables a broader range of ideas and promise.

As someone with Asperger’s and highly out-of-the-box ideas, I spent years being ignored and denigrated when in fact my concepts would have prevented many situations, facilitated successful projects without resistance, and closed a lot more sales. How do we create and maintain a culture of real diversity in which everyone’s voice gets appreciated and no one faces indignity?

3. Transparent communication: Too often management omits making the full data set available, making it impossible to gather the full fact pattern or inspire creativity. Worse, good ideas get dismissed or go unheard and employees end up being disincentivized. The cost is incalculable to companies, employees, and clients: not only does creativity falter, but people lose trust in their employers.

4. Work-life balance: When we expect our folks to work weekends, long hours, lots of overtime, we take away their dignity as human beings, not to mention their time to destress, think, relax so they can return to work invigorated and creative. We not only harm them, we harm our own productivity and success.

If there’s a frequent problem causing staff to work excessive hours, it becomes a stress/health issue. We need to either hire additional staff or allow the problem a lengthier solution process that doesn’t require employees to regularly give up their private time.

When we exploit our employee’s dignity, we cause folks to go home crying, face sleepless nights, feel disrespected. I know this from the countless interviews I’ve had with unhappy employees: They may not tell us, but their work will fall off and eventually they’ll leave for a job that will respect them.

Sample

PROMOTING DIGNITY WITH CLIENTS

Promoting dignity must extend to clients and customers. Here are a few factors to consider:

Communication: Too often we fail to let our clients and customers know if there’s a problem from our end: delivery/time issues; delivering the solutions promised with the same people they’ve become accustomed to. When I ran my tech support company, I checked in with each client for 15 minutes every month. That went a long way to resolving brewing issues. And when some companies find a flaw in their product or service, it’s vital they formally announce the issue and resolution so clients aren’t left in the dark.
Value our promises: As per above, our clients and customers must be notified if there are disruptions in service or quality. It’s respectful and maintains the dignity of our promise as suppliers.
Respect clients/customers as partners: There are plenty of other providers our clients/customers can go to when/if they feel we’re not respecting them. In other words, no overly long hold times; delivery as promised; follow up to ensure quality as promised; no pushy sales practices.

Remember: without addressing and maintaining our client’s dignity, we wouldn’t even be in business.

DIGNITY IS A PRIMARY BUSINESS PRACTICE

It’s necessary to add dignity as a necessary element for creating and maintaining integrous business practices for our staff and customer base. Here are some Facilitative Questions™ to help you think through any changes you might need to make and inspire compliance:

How will you know when/if your current business practices need upgrading?
What criteria will you and your team need to meet to decide on what practices might need improvement?
What skills/tools will you use to let your clients/customers know of changes or problems, to insure your communication enhances their dignity?
What skills/tools do you and your team need to learn to ensure you consider Dignity as a standard business practice?

Should you wish to enhance your skill set to include Dignity in your staff training as a soft skill, marketing, promotions, decision making practices and projects, please contact me to discuss: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon Drew Morgen October 28th, 2024

Posted In: News

A few years ago I had an incident that illustrated the restrictions of my own curiosity. I’d begun attending life drawing classes as an exercise to broaden my observation skills. In one session I had a horrific time trying to draw a model’s shoulder. I asked the man next to me – a real artist – for help.

Here was our conversation:

SDM: Hey, Ron. Can you help me please? Can you tell me how to think about drawing his shoulder?

Ron: Sure. Let’s see…. So what is it about your current sketch that you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: If I put a gun to your head, what part would you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: You’ve done a great job here, on his lower leg. Good line. Good proportion. That means you know how to do a lot of what you need on the shoulder.

SDM: I do? I didn’t know what I was doing. So how can I duplicate what I did unconsciously? I’m having an eye-hand-translation problem.

Ron: Let’s figure out how you drew that leg. Then we’ll break that down to mini actions, and see what you can use from what you already know. And I’ll teach you whatever you’re missing.

Ron’s brand of curiosity enabled me to make some unconscious skills conscious, and add new expertise where I was missing it in places I wouldn’t have looked. His curiosity had different biases from mine. He:

entered our discussion assuming I already had all of the answers I needed;
only added information specifically where I was missing some;
helped me find my own answers and be available to add knowledge in the exact place I was missing it.

My own curiosity would have gotten me nowhere. Here was my internal dialogue:

How the hell do I draw a twisted shoulder? This sucks. Is this an eye/hand problem? Should I be looking differently? I need an anatomy class. Should I be holding my charcoal differently? Is it too big a piece? I can’t see a shadow near his shoulder. Should I put in a false shadow to help me get the proportions right?

Ron’s curiosity – based on me already possessing the skills I needed – opened a wide range of possibilities for me. I never, ever would have found that solution on my own because my automatic assumptions would have limited my curiosity to little more than an extension of my current knowledge and beliefs.

WHAT IS CURIOSITY?

Curiosity is a good thing, right? As you can see from my story, it’s far more restricted than we imagine it would be. But what is it? Wikipedia defines curiosity thus: a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and animal species.

What, exactly, does this mean? What’s ‘inquisitive thinking’? Does it matter that everyone’s inquisitiveness is subjective, unique, and limited by their biases? ‘Evident by observation’? Evident to whom? And by what/whose standards? And ‘observation’? Really?

In this article, I’ll explore what stops us from being curious (and why it’s so difficult to recognize or learn from the data we find), offer loads of questions that will take you beyond assumptions, and steps to follow to enhance our curiosity.

IT’S A BRAIN THING

We all see, hear, feel the world through our subjectivity. Our assumptions, what we notice, what we’re curious about, is largely automatic mostly outside our control. Even worse, adding new ideas when we seek out answers to what we’re curious about is not so simple as, well, adding new ideas; it’s a listening problem and a brain problem.

Listening: It’s hard for us to take in new information when it goes against what we take for granted. Because of the way our brain filters incoming words, we end up (unwittingly) restricting what we think we hear Others say according to our own beliefs and history, i.e. subjectively. As a result we may not readily accept new ideas that are different from what we currently believe because we ‘hear’ them through our own biases, even if they offer relevant data on what we’re curious about.

Neural Circuits (brains): We can only be as curious as our existing neural circuits allow. Said another way our curiosity is restricted to what we have stored in memory, and we can’t notice, think, etc. anything we don’t have representative circuitry for. Try as we might, our subjectivity rules our lives.

Since our exploration involves some unconscious ‘givens’, here are some questions to inspire a broader curiosity:

How can we know that the information we retrieve is accurate, complete, or the most useful data available?
Can we be certain that our data gathering was sufficiently broad?
How do we know that a new piece of learning is important, even though it feels uncomfortable and we want to dismiss it?
Can we supersede our biases that we judge all incoming data against?

Hence, I pose the question: can we really ever be entirely curious?

WHY ARE WE CURIOUS?

There are several different reasons for curiosity. I’ve included questions under each category to help you consider each:

Need to know something we don’t know. Sometimes we need to know something we have no, or skimpy, knowledge about. How do we know the difference between the ‘right’ or the ‘wrong’ answer? How do we know the most effective resources? How do we pose our query to lead to the broadest range of answers? How do we know that what our brain translates for us is an accurate rendition of new content?
Desire to expand current knowledge. We need more data than we possess. How will we recognize when the available, additional data is the appropriate data set? How do we pose an inquiry that offers the broadest range of relevant knowledge? How can we keep from resisting new data if it runs counter to our long-held beliefs (given that new data gets compared against our existing, unconscious judgments)? How can we be certain that we will accurately understand new content?
Achieving a goal. We’re missing data to achieve a goal. How can we know the extent of what we’re missing, or know to accept new content if our existing data has been our go-to knowledge and it now might be incomplete?
Interest in another person’s knowledge. We suspect someone has knowledge we need, but don’t know how to judge what might be accurate. How can we adopt/adapt new content so we can avoid internal resistance, so we ensure what we think we’ve heard is an accurate portrayal of what was said? How can we language our inquiry to avoid limiting any possibilities?
Complete internal reference points. Influencers (coaches, leaders, consultants, sellers) seek to understand the Other’s Status Quo to formulate action points. How can we know if our ‘intuition’ (biased judgment) is broad enough to encompass all possibilities – and be able to go beyond it when necessary – to match the Other’s mental models and existing/historic brain circuits? How can we know for certain that what was said to them was understood accurately?
Comparator. We want to know if our current knowledge is accurate, or we’re ‘right’. But we unconsciously compare our query and hear responses against our subjective experiences, running the risk of acquiring partial knowledge, misunderstanding what was said, or blocking important data.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty impossible to seek, find, or receive what we don’t know what we don’t know. When we hear content that doesn’t fit our existing circuitry – regardless of the efficacy of the information – we face:

Resistance: By the time we’re adults, our subjective beliefs are pretty much built in and determine how we organize our worlds. When we hear something that goes against our beliefs – whether or not it’s accurate, conscious, or unconscious – we resist. That means new knowledge will be accepted in relation to what we already know and believe, potentially omitting important data and making real change difficult.
Restricting data: What we’re curious about is automatically biased, mistranslated, and limited by our subjective experience, ego needs, history, and current data set. We have no way to know if we accurately understand what’s been said, or if we’re posing our search query in a way that will include the full range of possible answers.
Restricting knowledge. Because our subjectivity limits the acceptance of new knowledge to what fits with our current knowledge (we’re only curious about stuff that is tangential to current knowledge), our brains automatically defend against anything that threatens what we know. So we unconsciously choose answers according to comfort or habit rather than according to accuracy or need.
Intuitive ‘Red Flag’. When our egos and professional identity are curious about something we have assumptions and expectations about, we limit possibility by our unconscious biases. How do we know if there aren’t a broader range of solutions that we’re not noticing or eliciting?

If you’re interested in learning how to consciously generate wholly new circuits to permanently change habits and behaviors I’ve developed a How of Change™ program. Here’s a one-hour sample video of me teaching in the 5 hour program.

HOW TO EXPAND YOUR CURIOSITY

In order to broaden our curiosity and allow our unconscious to accept the full data set available, we must evolve beyond our biases. Here’s how to have a full range of choice:

1. Frame the query: Create a generic series of questions to pose for yourself about your curiosity. Ask yourself:

how you’ll know your tolerance for non-expected, surprising answers,
what a full range of knowledge could include,
if your answers need to be within the range of what you already know or something wildly different,
if you’re willing/able to put aside your ‘intuition’, bias, and annoyance and seek and consider all possible answers regardless of comfort,
if you need to stay within a specific set of criteria and what the consequences are if you don’t.

2. Frame the parameters: Do some Google research. Before spending time accumulating data, recognize the parameters of possibility whether or not they match your comfortable criteria.

3. Recognize your foundational beliefs: Understand what you believe to be true, and consider how important it is for you to maintain that data set regardless of potentially conflicting, new information.

4. Be willing to change: Understand your willingness to adopt challenging data if it doesn’t fit within your current data set or beliefs.

5. Make your unconscious conscious: Put your conscious mind onto the ceiling and look down on yourself from the Observer/Witness/meta position. This provides neutral data, sams your biases and resistence.

6. Listen analytically: Listen to your self-talk. Compare it with the questions above. Note restrictions and decide if they can be overlooked. And recognizing your brain may play tricks on you, be sure to ask if what you think you heard and learned is accurate.

7. Analyze: Should you shift your parameters? Search options? What do you need to shift internally?

Curiosity effects every element of our lives. It can enhance, or restrict, growth, change, and professional skills. It limits and expands health, relationships, lifestyles and relationships. Without challenging our curiosity or intuition, we limit ourselves to maintaining our current assumptions.

What do you need to believe differently to be willing to forego comfort and ego-identity for the pursuit of the broadest range of possible answers? How will you know when, specifically, it would be important to have greater choice? We’ll never have all the answers, but we certainly can expand our choices.

If you’d like some coaching on how to use your conscious mind to get into your unconscious neural circuits, I’d love to help. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon Drew Morgen October 21st, 2024

Posted In: Listening

I recently heard yet another excuse as to why a buyer didn’t buy: seller/buyer misalignment. Seriously? Because the seller didn’t close a sale (That was expected by the seller? In the mythical pipeline? According to the expectation of the seller?) there was a relationship problem? No. The problem stems from sellers not understanding what a buyer is, and what a buyer must know before self-identifying as a buyer. In this case, there was no buyer to be ‘misaligned’ with.

The fact is, selling doesn’t cause buying.

FROM PERSON TO BUYER

A decision not to purchase has very little to do with the seller, the solution, the relationship, or the need. In fact, making a purchase is the very last thing a buyer does. Just because a situation seems like a perfect fit with your solution does not make it a buying/ selling opportunity; just because someone really needs your solution does not mean they are ready, willing, or able to buy.

Let me begin by defining ‘Buyer’: a person (or group) who has

assembled all people, causes, and elements that created their problem and agreed to a problem definition AND
recognized they cannot fix the problem with familiar resources, usual vendors, or workarounds, AND
determined the risk of change and found it palatable, AND
gotten buy-in from everyone/everything involved with the changes a fix would affect, AND
decided that the cost of a fix is lower than maintaining the status quo,

and decides that purchasing an external solution is their best option.

As the thought-leader behind how buyers buy (programs, books, models, steps, terms, since 1985) , the author of the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, and the person who coined the terms Buy Cycle, Buying Patterns, Buying Journey, Buying Decision Team, and How Buyers Buy, I’d like to offer some thoughts:

1. A buyer isn’t a buyer until they’ve bought something. Until then they are people with a problem who may, if they can’t resolve the issue themselves and the risk is manageable, seek an external solution.

2. Solving a problem never begins as a decision to buy anything (unless a small personal item), regardless of ‘need’. People don’t want to buy anything; they merely want to resolve a problem in the most efficient way with the least risk. Hence, they won’t respond to or read your marketing or sales content based on ‘need’.

3. People prefer to resolve their own problems. Workarounds are always the first option, a purchase the last.

4. Unless the risk of making a purchase is lower than the risk of staying the same, there will be no purchase regardless of the need or the efficacy of your solution. By seeking folks with ‘need’, sellers only find the low-hanging fruit and reduce their potential prospect audience by 80%.

5. A purchase occurs only when the stakeholder group has found the risk of change manageable and buys-in to something new. It’s only when there’s agreement from all elements that created the problem that

it can’t be fixed with known resources or workarounds,
the cost in resources/change is lower than the cost of the fallout of bringing in something new,
a path forward is defined by everyone who will touch the final solution,

that the full scope of a bringing in a new solution (i.e. buy something) is understood. Until then ‘need’ isn’t fully defined, people haven’t yet self-identified as ‘buyers’, they won’t read your content or take a meeting (unless to pick your brain), and no external solution is required. Here is where sellers often get caught thinking there’s a ‘need’ before the folks with the problem think there is one.

‘Need’ is NOT the criteria people use to buy. Until they are convinced they cannot solve their own problem and change without much disruption, until the understand and can accept the risk of change, they are not buyers and won’t heed pitches or appointment attempts.

6. There is a defined series of 13 (generic) steps that determine if, when, why, how, what to buy. A buying decision is a risk/change management problem before it’s a solution choice issue. Until the full set of stakeholders have agreed they can’t fix the problem with familiar resources AND have developed a plan for congruent change with minimal risk, there is no willingness to seek an external solution. In other words, before people become buyers they’re merely people trying to fix a problem themselves.

Sample

7. People don’t need you to sell to them. They can get all the data they need from your site. They really need your help in traversing their decision steps: the time it takes them to figure this out (non-buying, cultural, systems/ rules based) is the length of the sales cycle, and sales overlooks this entirely.

8. Making a purchase is a risk/change management issue before it’s a solution choice problem. The first question people consider is how they can achieve Excellence with the least ‘cost/risk’ to the system; the last question they consider is what solution they’d need from ‘outside’. With a focus on placing solutions, there is no element of the sales model that facilitates systemic change. Sales overlooks the largest portion of the buyer’s journey – how to manage the change a fix will cost to the system.

9. Until any disruption caused by a purchase (i.e. all purchases are ‘foreign’ to the system) is understood, planned for, and agreed to, no purchase will take place. The existing environment is sacrosanct; keeping it running smoothly is more important to them than fixing a problem that’s already been baked into the system, especially if it would cost unwanted internal disruption.

10. Everyone and everything who created the current problem and would potentially touch a new solution must agree to any modification (purchase). This is why pitches, marketing, presentation will only be noticed by those who have completed their decision path.

11. The time it takes people/buyers to discover their own answers and know how to manage change in the least disruptive way, is the length of the sales cycle. It has nothing to do with selling, buying, need, relationship, content, or solutions until the route to congruent change is defined and agreed to. It’s a risk/change management issue before it’s a solution choice issue. And the sales model ignores this, causing 5% close rates instead of 40%.

12. The last thing people want is to buy something. With their criteria of ‘solution placement’, sellers often enter at the wrong time, ask the wrong questions, and offer the wrong data – and end up selling only to the low-hanging fruit (the 5% who have planned their route to change already).

13. Buyers buy using their own buying patterns, not a seller’s selling patterns. Using a specific type of sales effort further restricts the population of those who will buy. We don’t necessarily object to the products Robocalls promote. It’s the invasive selling patterns we object to.

14. There is a difference in goals, capability of changing, and level of buy-in between those who CAN/WILL buy vs those who sellers think SHOULD buy. By entering to seek folks in the process of solving a problem your solution can resolve, we can find and capture 40% of those on route to become buyers.

15. The time it takes people to come up with their complete set of buy-in and change-based answers is the time it takes them to seek an external solution – i.e. become a buyer. Let me say this again: Buying has nothing whatsoever to do with their need, your solution, or your relationship.

By only listening for clues that lead you to assume a ‘need’ for your solution, by entering into ‘relationships’ based on what you’re selling, by only asking questions to ‘prove’ a need/solution match (too often with only one or two members of the full Buying Decision Team), you’re not only biasing the interaction, but limiting your sales to closing those who have gotten to the point when they’re ready, willing, able to change – the low hanging fruit; you’re missing the opportunity to enter earlier, develop a real relationship, and facilitate the path that people who CAN buy must take before they are buyers.

The current sales model ignores the possibility of facilitative buying, or becoming real relationship managers and true consultants and Servant Leaders.

In other words, the sales model enters too early in the buying decision journey to reach or serve the maximum number of prospects.

BUYING FACILITATION®

Potential buyers need your help figuring out how to figure it all out much more than they need a product pitch, or more biased questions, that attempt to uncover a ‘need’ they don’t yet know they have.

I’ve developed a model (Buying Facilitation®) that uses wholly unique skills (Listening for Systems, Facilitative Questions, etc.) to facilitate a prospective buyer’s route to Excellence.

A generic model used for coaching, management, leadership, healthcare, Buying Facilitation® finds folks trying to solve a problem in the area of your solution, then leads them down their decision path and turns them into buyers in one-eighth the time it would take them to close.

I’ve been quite successful teaching it to global corporations ( i.e. 100,00 sales professionals at companies such as IBM, Kaiser, Wachovia, P&G, KPMG, etc.) to increase their sales. In fact, over 30 decades, my client’s pilot training groups close 8x more sales on average over the control groups, regardless of product or price.

Currently you’re now wasting 95% of your time running after those few who have finally arrived at step 10 – the low hanging fruit – ignoring the much larger pool of those who are on route, and fighting for a competitive advantage.

By adding new functionality to the front end of your sales model, you can enter earlier, be a Servant Leader, and facilitate congruent change and THEN be on board as a provider as they go through their buying decision process.

Buying Facilitation® is NOT sales; it’s NOT selling/purchase-based; it IS change- and decision-based. Right now you’re waiting while buyers do this anyway (or merely running after those you THINK have a need but end up fixing the problem in other ways) because all people must manage their change before they are buyers. Why not add a skill set, stop wasting time/effort, and close more. Then you’ll never be ‘misaligned.’

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharondrewmorgen.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Sharon Drew Morgen October 14th, 2024

Posted In: Communication

As an inventor of systemic decision-making models, I’ve worked with well-meaning leaders, coaches, sellers, and managers who frequently end up with inadequate decisions and difficult implementations.

Too often incomplete information is collected, causing time delays, resistance, or unsatisfactory results. Sometimes faulty assumptions end up misrepresenting important data sets. And far too often, standard decision-making processes consider and weigh options too early in the process.

I’d like to share with you what I think are the initial stages of decision making that often get ignored. By managing these steps it’s possible to achieve successful, timely, accurate outcomes that evade resistance and are maintained over time.

STEPS OF DECISION MAKING

Stage One: Assemble or represent (in large organizations, it could be a representative of a group) those involved with the initiating problem as well as those who will ‘touch’ the ultimate solution. Excluding any of these means

the originating problem cannot be fully defined;
ownership, creativity, consensus, and a full set of solution ideas won’t be obtained;
resistance and failure are possibilities;
risks won’t be recognized and addressed in a timely way;
human issues – trust, fear, ego slights – won’t be noticed until too late;
data gathering, research, weighing, and choice will be limited or unreliable;
time delays and inefficiencies become probabilities;
it’s difficult to make an accurate, long term decision that gets maintained.

Rule: A complete data set is needed to define a problem and goal. To do so requires the full representation of people, and an understanding of the systems, involved with the current problem and the final solution.

Stage One concludes with a complete, accurate, stated goal that’s been agreed-upon by all who will use the final output.

Stage Two: The system that underlies the problem/solution must be managed. Questions to be answered:

Are there existing solutions that can be tried before anything new is considered?
What has prevented the problem from being resolved until now (current systems, politics, rules, relationships, money, technology)?
What must be managed to set the stage to do something different and ensure buy-in, ownership, creativity, idea generation, and transparency?
Are the full set of the risks of change understood and agreed to beforehand?
What must be managed to remove any obstructions?
Is the system set up for change? What systems must be in place for the new solution to be created and maintained optimally?

Rule: Because outputs are restricted by the input, before the formal decision making process commences, it’s necessary to manage whatever has kept the problem from being resolved and new systems must be in place to house the new solution.

Stage Two concludes with an understanding of, and plans to resolve, the systems that have maintained the problem with new systems and rules in place to generate and maintain the new solution.

Stage Three: Standard decision-making models and processes take over, including research for solutions assigned, weighing of choices, plans for implementation, etc.

SKILLS FOR STEPS

To accomplish these early-stage decision making steps, you’ll need these skills:

Self/Observer/Choice. The ability to move between Self (our natural, unconscious, automatic, restricted, biased state) and Observer (our on-the-ceiling, dispassionate, rational, conscious viewing of a broad set of possibilities).
Rules of trust agreed upon in group.
Willingness to give up early biases.
Facilitative Questions™ to ensure data gathered is unbiased.
Listening without bias. Natural listening involves distortions, deletions, and biases from our brain causing listeners to hear and interpret incoming data uniquely. Extra steps must be taken to verify accuracy.

Sample

Too many decision-making processes forget these early steps and end up with flawed data and difficult goal setting, decision weighing, and implementation, not to mention the probability of resistance and struggle maintaining over time. If you would like help ensuring these early steps get done completely, I’d love to coach you and your team through the process. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

Sharon Drew Morgen October 7th, 2024

Posted In: News

I’m a dancer. When I studied the Argentine Tango there was a foundational metaphor that I believe is true for all leaders: The leader opens the door for the follower to pass through using her own unique style; the leader then follows. If anyone notices the leader, he’s not doing his job. The goal is to showcase the follower.

Much of what is written about leadership falls into the category I call ‘trait-centered leadership’: someone deemed ‘at the top’ who uses their personality, influence, motivational skills and charisma to inspire and give followers a convincing reason to follow an agenda set by the leader or the leader’s boss – a mixture of Jack Welch, Oprah, and Moses.

But what if the leader’s goal overrides the mental models, beliefs or historic experiences of the followers? Or the change is pushed against the follower’s values, and resistance ensues? What happens when the leader uses their personality as the fulcrum to cause change? What if the leader has a great message and incongruent skills? Or charisma and no integrity? Adolf Hitler, after all, was the most charismatic leader in the 20th Century.

WHAT IS A LEADER?

Whether it’s for a group that needs to perform a new task, or for someone seeking heightened outcomes, the role of leadership is to

facilitate congruent change and choice by
enabling followers to discover their optimal behaviors
in accordance with their own values, beliefs, and ability,
to match agreed-upon requirements
without resistance.

In other words, enable them to employ their best skills in service of an agreed-upon outcome. It demands humility and authenticity of the leader to let go of their own concept of success and enable Others to bring their ideas, skills, values, and commitment to the project to meet agreed-upon outcomes uniquely. This way, the followers share their best ideas, creativity multiplies, and resistance is avoided as everyone buys-in to the project they own.

This type of leadership is other-centered and devoid of ego, similar to a flashlight that merely illuminates the most harmonious path, enabling followers to discover their own excellence within the context of the change sought.

And remember: change is an inside job. Leaders are outsiders.

YOU CAN’T LEAD IF YOU CAN’T FOLLOW

Too often leaders use their own assumptions and goals to influence and persuade others to comply with their vision. They begin with something they want to accomplish and work hard at inspiring their followers to make the fixes they believe necessary, using their passion and motivational skills to encourage buy-in, later wondering why they’re not on target, or work is falling through the cracks.

But being inspirational, or a good influencer with presence and empathy, or a great storyteller that seeks to motivate, or even being a ‘nice guy’ that staff generally likes following, merely enlists those whose beliefs and unconscious mental models are already predisposed to the change. It omits, or gets resistance from, those who should be part of the change but whose mental models don’t align.

When we try to change others, we only reach those who have a conscious ability to comply, bypassing those who could use what we have to say but aren’t ready to change. I call this trait-centered leadership: using our own skills as influencing strategies.

Sample

SERVANT LEADERSHIP

What if our jobs were to serve? What if we trusted that Others had good skills, and by agreeing on a course of action that met everyone’s values and the ultimate requirements, help them figure out how to get there their own way?

If we enter our leadership situations as Servant Leaders we are guiding Others through to their own best actions in the area we seek to shift, facilitating them through their own ability to change according to their own beliefs and norms. This form of leadership has pluses and minuses.

Minuses: the final outcome may look different than originally envisaged because the followers set the route according to their values and mental models.
Pluses: everyone will be enthusiastically, creatively involved in designing what will show up as their own mission – meeting the vision of the leaders (although it might look different), and owning it with no resistance.

Do you want to lead through influence, presence, charisma, rationality? Or facilitate Another through their own unique path to congruent change and ownership? Do you want people to see you as a charismatic chief? Or teach them how to congruently move beyond their status quo and discover their own route to excellence – with you as the GPS? Do you want to push your agenda using your own ideas? Or enable followers to discover their own route to systemic change? They are opposite constructs.

POWER VS. FORCE

Here are some differences in beliefs between trait-centered leadership and more the more facilitative leadership that I call Servant Leadership:

Trait-centered: Top down; behavior change and goal-driven; dependent on power, charisma, and persuasion skills of a leader and may not be congruent with foundational values of followers.

Facilitation-centered: Inclusive (everyone buys-in and agrees to goals, direction, change); core belief-change and excellence-driven; dependent on facilitating route to excellence rather than developing and strategizing the route to enable systemic buy-in and adoption of new behaviors.

Remember that real change happens at the unconscious belief level. Attempting to change behaviors without helping people change their beliefs first meets with resistance regardless of the efficacy of the solution or the need for the change.

New skills are necessary for the facilitation-centered, Servant Leadership style I suggest:

1. Listen for systems. This enables leaders to hear the elements that created and maintain the status quo and would need to transform from the inside before any lasting change occurs. Typical listening is biased and restricts possibility.

Sample

2. Facilitative Questions. Conventional questions are biased by the beliefs and needs of the Questioner, and restrict answers and possibility.

3. Code the route to systemic change. Before asking folks to buy-in, facilitate them down the 13 steps of change to build consensus and collaborate to define, agree on, and set strategy for, the necessary changes thereby avoiding resistance.

Sometimes Leaders assume that their job is to assign tasks and get shit down. From what I’ve learned with clients, that only gets them mediocre results, resistance and time wastage. Worse, it fails to capture the passion and creativity of the followers. Be the Servant Leaders who open the door and follow your followers.

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Sharon Drew Morgen September 30th, 2024

Posted In: Change Management, Listening

Questioning Questions

Are Your Students Hearing You? by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Noise of Subjectivity: how our personal biases shape and restrict our worlds

Why Women Make Great Leaders, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Why We Misunderstand Each Other: brains don’t listen very well, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Dignity: the necessary element to ensure happy clients and employees, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Inside Curiosity

How, Why, and When Buyers Buy, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Overlooked Steps in Decision Making: how to avoid resistance and encourage buy-in, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Trait-centered Leadership vs. Servant Leadership, by Sharon-Drew Morgen