The LeaderLab: Powered by LifeLabs Learning

Grow Kind: Reasoning Questions

• LifeLabs Learning • Season 3 • Episode 34

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Now that we’ve learned what it takes to grow kind from a systems level, it’s time to get a little more granular. In this series, we'll discuss how leaders can play an active role in helping their teams and people through periods of growth in the kindest way possible. In this episode of The LeaderLab, we invite Victoria Chen,  Facilitation Lead and Leadership Trainer, to demonstrate how leaders can use reasoning questions to create perspective and promote productive dialogue by understanding the ‘why’ behind somebody’s ‘what’.

Want to help your organization grow kind? Get in touch with us to find out which learning experiences are right for your team.

[Music by Blue Dot Sessions]

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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Leader Lab, the podcast powered by LifeLabs Learning. I'm your host, LifeLabs Leadership Trainer and Director of Product Strategy and Operations, Vanessa Tenisian. Join me and my lab mates as we distill our findings into powerful leadership tipping point skills, the smallest changes that make the biggest impact in the shortest time. We'll also welcome members from our learning community who share how they experiment with these skills in their world of work and beyond.

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you

SPEAKER_01:

Hello, listeners, and welcome to another episode of the Leader Lab podcast, where we are going to be focusing in on how to grow kind. This is so important, especially as so many things are changing in today's world of work. Today, I have Victoria Chen here in the lab, one of my absolute favorite lab mates. She is a facilitation lead, leadership trainer, and apparently an incredibly good actress because she's faked an American accent so much so that it just is how she speaks now. I don't know, Victoria,

SPEAKER_00:

what's the story behind that. It's definitely permanent now. I started off life speaking in an English accent, and I feel like if somebody had asked me reasoning questions, which we'll talk about in a bit, perhaps I wouldn't have felt the need to pretend.

SPEAKER_01:

So you already have something up your sleeve that you're going to be experimenting with today. So let's walk through that door. What is our growing kind concept? Right.

SPEAKER_00:

So the beauty of reasoning questions, where reasoning questions are basically the questions that help us understand the why behind somebody's what. In other words, it's a way of understanding the reasons for why somebody is thinking the way they are, allowing us to be responsive rather than reactive, allowing us to thrive. Extra helpful, as you can imagine, especially in times of growth, when we have conflict with others, when there's a difference in perspective, it's a way of creating productive dialogue.

SPEAKER_01:

So I'm all about conflict resolution tools, but how does this actually intersect with growing kind at all?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I would say part of growing kind means to be responsive rather than reactive.

SPEAKER_01:

What is the difference between a reactive leader and a responsive leader in a growing kind environment?

SPEAKER_00:

When we're reactive, we often end up, I think, making assumptions, not checking those assumptions. We often end up accidentally solving for the wrong problem. Or even if we're solving for the right problem, our solution may be wrong. Or even if we have the right solution, it's not sustainable, let alone scalable. Whereas when we are responsive We are taking into account things like people's challenges, their concerns, motivators, historical experiences. And it is these insights that actually help us to clarify what we're looking for, what the other person is looking for. And as a result, to start actually exploring mutually beneficial outcomes, creating psychological safety. This is a term coined by Amy Edmondson, who has said that there are three critical parts of organizational psychological safety. So it's framing the work as a learning problem not an execution problem. That's number one. Number two, acknowledging our fallibility. And number three, modeling curiosity by asking questions. And I would actually argue that reasoning questions allow us to do all three things. Oh my gosh. I

SPEAKER_01:

love the topic of psychological safety. It's something that's so important, especially in today's world of work.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I think it matters because it's how we allow people to feel comfortable sharing alternative points of view, ideas, critical feedback, things that are, I think, essential to helping a team, an individual, even an organization actually grow both successfully and kindly.

SPEAKER_01:

Ah, so I'm so excited to dig into reasoning questions. And I know our listeners are curious, how do

SPEAKER_00:

you do it? Well, there are three steps, I would say. The first step, pausing to notice when differences in opinion and in perspective might be arising. If we don't pause to do this, it's all too easy to respond in a reactive knee-jerk way, right? Now, the second step would be to ask Ask ourselves, what am I curious about? What do I actually want to learn more about in this situation? And once we've locked in on what we are curious about, we can start identifying, number three, the reasoning questions that we can ask to actually surface that information, those insights. So now the question, of course, is how, right? What are those reasoning questions we can ask? Here, I want to clarify that I mentioned earlier, reasoning questions are all about getting to the why, but I really want to emphasize here that we want to get to the why without asking asking questions that begin with why. Ooh,

SPEAKER_01:

Jedi trick, Victoria. So we're not using why questions. What questions are we using? We're using questions

SPEAKER_00:

like, you know, what's important to you about this? Or who else might have a different perspective? Or how might we make this 10% better? So I would say basically the what's, the who's, and the how's. Now, the reason why we're actually staying away from questions that begin with why is because sometimes those why questions come across as implying judgment or skepticism. You know, they can accidentally make people defensive. Like when we ask questions like, well, why'd you do that?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I can already feel about creating psychological safety. I just saw my meter go way down with those why questions. Apologies, that's on me. Ah, so I love that. And I can really kind of feel that it's opening up a block. As we know, when businesses are scaling, there's lots of anxiety, tension, conflict. And it seems like reasoning questions help out with that. Speaking of psychological I would agree. Totally sexy. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00:

Ultimately creating the space where people feel comfortable sharing differing insights, points of view, In our

SPEAKER_01:

Behaviors of Inclusion workshop, one of my favorite things to say is that conflict itself is not bad. It's how we use that conflict that makes the difference. Absolutely. Fully agree. Okay. So let's actually like bring this into the world of work. Can you give me an example of what it would look like?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. All right. Let's absolutely take an example, Vanessa. So let's say that we've rolled out a new purchasing policy at our company. And people are upset about it. because the rollout process coincided with the rollout of the new vacation policy and people are feeling overwhelmed. So it's really insights like these that give us way more options to explore instead of finding ourselves trapped

SPEAKER_01:

in a rigid binary. Yeah, definitely. I can imagine that getting the true insight as to why something isn't working is better than working on those assumptions, right? The idea that we know it all, but instead of being know-it-alls, I guess we want to be learn-it-alls. Shout out to Leanne. Honestly, I I can't think of being a learn-it-all without remembering that conversation we had. And she's a big proponent of curiosity.

SPEAKER_00:

There we go. That's exactly what we want to do. So by extension, I think it's really those reasoning questions that allow us to learn it all by creating possibility, by creating organizational agility as well. Ah, fantastic. So that

SPEAKER_01:

leads us to our Leader Lab listener experiment. So Victoria, what are we asking our listeners to experiment with in their laboratories of life?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, dear listeners, I'm asking or rather inviting you to think of one reasoning question that you would like to ask more often. When the opportunity presents itself, ask it of different people. You know, maybe it's a colleague, maybe it's a client or even a friend. And then pay attention to what you learn that you may otherwise not have known.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. I love that we're unlocking people's minds one reasoning question at a time. Thank you so much, Victoria, for joining us. Thank you, Vanessa. And that's a wrap of another episode of the Leader Lab podcast powered by LifeLabs Learning. If you're loving the Leader Lab, subscribe so you never miss an episode. The Leader Lab is executive produced and hosted by me, Vanessa Tenisian. Alana Berman is our creative director and senior editor. Juliana Jack is our assistant editor. Lauren Feller is our associate producer. And Yadier James is our senior producer. You can find all our episodes, transcripts, and more at lifelabslearning.com slash podcast. While you're there, you can learn more about our learning programs to help you build an engaged high-impact team faster. See you in the lab.