Hilary Gridley: belief

Transcript context

…I talk about what I like to call the magic questions, but the thing about magic questions is they're not actually questions, they're statements and they end with, "Do you agree?" Or "Is that right?" And so I have found this, the most helpful way for kind of trying to understand a person's mental model is to just put facts in front of them and see what they say no to and what they say yes to. And then if you can get them to explain, great. And if they're good communicators, they often can, but if they're not, you don't have to let that stop you view. And so I mean, I'll do this even just as an example in a non-leadership context with if I'm working with legal teams or compliance teams or things like that, they're often working from a literal set of rules. Right? There are laws, there are regulations, and you are trying to understand if we were to take this path, would that be okay? Would that not be okay? And sometimes that's not straightforward. Sometimes there's regulatory areas that are up to interpretation. And so when I first started working in a regulated space, I would find this kind of frustrating and confusing because I would say, "Can you just give me the rule so I can understand what's right and what's left of it?" And they'd be like, "Oh, well, it depends. It depends, it depends." And so I learned that if I kind of flip that and approached that, "Well, what if we did X, Y, and Z? What if this is what it looked like? What if this is what the copy said? Would that be okay?" No, yes. If no, why? If yes, why? And so I'm sort of teasing out the mental model rather than asking them to explain it to me. And this is what I tell my team all the time to do this to me. When they come to me and they say, "Well, what do you think I should do?" Or "What could I have done differently?" I'll say, "Rephrase that as 'Tell me what you think you could have done differently.' And then ask me if I agree." And when I do this, I think it has a few benefits. One, it helps them kind of calibrate their judgment over time. So they're actually forcing themselves to make this assertion. And then they're kind of calibrating how close that was to how I would think about it, which will get you much faster, much further than just asking open-ended questions and getting the answer. And then the second part of it is they don't become reliant on me for answering these questions. I think that's kind of a trap that a lot of managers fall into is people come to you with questions, you want to help them, you answer the question, and then you find that they come to you with all their questions and you're kind of like, "Yeah, you got to solve some of these on your own." So again, I think the magic questions to me, is that right? Do you agree? And anytime you find yourself tempted to ask an open-ended question to somebody whose brain you're trying to understand, stop yourself and say, "Let me just say that. me, is that right? Do you agree? And anytime you find yourself tempted to ask an open-ended question to somebody whose brain you're trying to understand, stop yourself and say, "Let me just say that. Let me say as a statement what I think," and then try to calibrate based on their reaction. And I think that's the fastest way to understand how another person thinks. It makes me think about a lot of people, it could come across as it's a weird manipulative way of asking someone stuff, but it turns out that we're not good at really knowing what we think or know a lot of times. And you need someone almost to interview you in a really effective way to get out all this knowledge. And this is just a really simple way of getting that idea.…

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