874: The Five Questions that Build the Best Possible Relationships with Michael Bungay Stanier

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Hey, I’m grateful that you’ve got a short memory and you keep inviting me back. I am thrilled to be back. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too. Well, you don’t give yourself enough credit. You just keep generating more groundbreaking intellectual insights that the world must hear.

Michael Bungay Stanier
You know, I do better when the expectations are lowered at the start of the conversation rather than raised, but I’ll do what I can to kind of rise to the challenge. But, thanks for saying that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s try again. Well, you threw together some words, half of it is probably AI but let’s see if we can muddle through this.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Thank you. That’s perfect. I can do that. I can crush that.

Pete Mockaitis
You got it. Well, so you’ve always got a lot of fun stories. I’m curious to hear the last year, two or three, any really cool coaching moments, or relationships transformed, or highlights for you?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Oh, man. Well, the biggest one for me, and that plays a role in this new book, was, and this is only going to go deep and maybe slightly really dark really quickly, but my dad died a couple of years ago. And I had flown back to Australia, I was living in the house with mom and dad, and dad had made it out of the hospital, and he had about two months living at home before he finally died.

And it was a miserable stressful time for everybody, mom and dad in particular, and they’d been a really good couple for 55 years, like they’re really tight, they loved each other, they supported each other, they were just like a role model in terms of how you wanted a married couple to be. And they were kind of a bit snippy with each other.

Dad’s stuck in a bed, he can’t do the stuff he normally does, he’s a little bit, “Hey, Rosie, get me this,” “Hey, Rosie, can I have that, please?” and mom was like, A, stressed that her life partner was dying, B, stressed a bit, going to being the servant, all of a sudden, in the household, in a household where chores had always been shared pretty equally.

And I kind of plucked up my courage and suggested that they have a conversation about how they wanted to be with each other in the remaining weeks or months of dad’s life together because I really didn’t want, mom in particular, to go, “I wasn’t the best version I could be in a stressful time in the last time I have with my husband.”

And so, we facilitated this conversation, mom was like, “This sounds like the worst thing on earth.” My dad was like, “This sounds bad but we should give it a go,” and we just had that conversation about how they wanted to be with each other in this final time. And they did so well, I was so proud of them and thrilled for them, and it just took a little bit of an edge off those last days together.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that really is beautiful. And did your mom talk to you about that conversation later?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, when I first suggested it, my mom was like, “Absolutely not. That sounds terrible.” And then the third time I suggested it, she’s like, “Well, maybe but do I have to be there?” And I’m like, “I think you do have to be there.” And we have talked about it since then in terms of just talking through those last days and talking about my memory of my dad, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that really is beautiful in terms of just positioning the richness, the value, all that is really wrapped up in our relationships and the conversations we have with those people. It’s big. And it does take some courage to have a conversation about your conversations, and yet really cool things are on the other side of them.

Michael Bungay Stanier
That’s right. As I’ve been kind of teaching some of the content from this book, I often ask a group, “Think of a really miserable working relationship you’ve had, or even just one that wasn’t terrible but just was kind of diminishing in a way, and think of what was said and done, and then think of the impact on you.” And then when you see what people put in the chat, it’s like, “I felt belittled. I felt shrunk. I lost my courage. I lost my sense of self. I did poor work.”

And then when you flip it, and you go, “Think of a really great working relationship you had, you might remember that, remember that back and forth, now what was the impact on you?” It’s like, “I feel braver. I feel more courageous. I did better work. I took bigger risks. I kind of expanded into the next version of who I am so I grew and I learned about myself.” And it’s like such a determinant of your work success and happiness in terms of the health of your working relationships.

But so often, we just cross our fingers and leave it to chance and hope for the best because it is an unusual and somewhat courageous conversation to say, “Hey, Pete, before we start working on the stuff, I think you and I have a conversation about how we do this best together so that we can not screw each other up and we can bring out the best in each other at the same time.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m a huge believer in this, and this has come up, I think, with my conversation with Mary Abbajay about how to manage your manager. She had a book about managing up, which is excellent. And she said that she surveyed folks, her audiences, and she said less than 1% of folks really have such a conversation.

And so, when I spread the gospel at different trainings and events that I’ve been at, and folks are like, “Oh, no, that seems kind of weird.” It’s like that’s how their fear gets articulated or manifests, “Oh, that just seems sort of weird. I don’t know about that,” as opposed to, “Pete, I’m terrified of engaging in those words.” They don’t say that, they’re like, “Oh, it just seems weird.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it is a bit weird. At least, if not weird, it’s unusual. And your statistics point to it, less than 1%. It’s a rare thing somebody says, “Let’s talk about how we work together before we talk about what we work on.” But I love the point you’re making, I hope people heard that, which is, this isn’t just for the people you manage and lead.

It’s for the working relationships, so you can do that with your best customers, and you can do that actually with your prospects, and you can do that with your colleagues you have to collaborate with, and you can do it with your boss. So, there’s all sorts of ways that you can enrich and strengthen and make safe and vital and repairable these key working relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, the book is called How to Work with (Almost) Anyone: Five Questions for Building the Best Possible Relationships. As you were putting this together and researching it, did you have any surprising moments of discovery along the way?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Part of it was trying to figure out what the goal was in these conversations, and it felt helpful to realize that it wasn’t to create the best working relationship but the best possible working relationship. If you think of your working relationships you have, it’ll be a Bell curve. You have a few at one end where you’re like, “I love this person. I love how we work together, and it’s just thrilling.” And you have a few at the other end where you’re like, “This is sand in the gears. This is kind of a miserable experience kind of working through it.”

And it’s not always that because they’re nuts or a psycho or whatever. It’s just that sometimes you just can’t figure it out with the other person. And then there’s a bunch of people in the middle where it’s good enough, and it’s solid, and it’s great sometimes, but less than great some other times. And each one of those different categories has the potential to be better than it is now, make the bad ones trending towards good or less bad, make the ones in the middle better than just average, and make the ones at the top end sustainable so that they stay sparkly and powerful as long as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. So, then that’s the notion of a best possible relationship, I suppose, is knowing that not every relationship is going to feel magical no matter what conversation you have but there is untapped potential that we can get after with some of these questions. So, shall we jump right into the questions, or how would you frame how we start getting into such a conversation where we engage these questions?

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, I want to get into that conversation and those questions but maybe a moment just to talk about the three attributes of a best possible relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, I’ve mentioned them but let me say them again. It should be safe and it should be vital and should be repairable. I think one of the interesting things that I’ve learned is these aren’t A + B + C, they’re not additive. They’re actually in a dance with each other. They’re actually in tension with each other. The place to start is safe. And everybody who’s listening to this podcast will have talked about it and heard about psychological safety as a kind of key attribute for success.

Google Oxygen and Google Aristotle, all those projects alike, it’s safety that allows people to grow. Amy Edmondson, kind of the OG in this area, kind of championing and helping us understand what psychological safety means. And that is, a sense, to kind of move away from fear, and say, “I say what I need to say. I can show up as who I am without that fear.”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s kind of ironic that Amy Edmondson is researching and teaching about safety and yet she’s a gangster.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I hadn’t thought of that.

Pete Mockaitis
I know. I love the verbiage. I’m just joshing with you. We had her on the show, she’s great, and that’s fair. It’s a fair assessment. You could call her the grandfather/grandmother as well but OG hits me in my Danville, Illinois roots.

Michael Bungay Stanier
There we go. But she blurbed the book, and I said, “Amy, can I call you the OG of psychological safety?” And she’s like, “I don’t know what that means.” I’m like, “I’m not sure what that means. I think it means original gangster. I think that’s what it means.” Then she’s like, “Maybe you can call me Harvard Business professor.” And I’m like, “Sure. Okay, we’ll go with that. I totally get that.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
But in balance with safety is vitality. Every relationship needs to be vital. And I like the kind of play on the words there, Pete. Vital meaning essential, but vital also meaning alive. And there’s a way that you want a relationship to push, and provoke, and challenge, and take you to the edge of your competence and your confidence, and what you can, and who you are so that you can…you want it to be fun and exciting.

And I think safe and vital are often in this kind of play with each other. There’s a way that you can make a relationship so safe that, actually, it loses some of its sparkle. There’s a way that you can make it so dangerous that it becomes unsafe. So, with whoever it is you’re talking to, you’re trying to find the right balance between safe and vital for you and that other person.

And then the third element is repairable. And as part of writing the book and reading around the book, I was reading people like Esther Perel, and Terry Real, and Dan Siegel, and John Gottman, some of the really big names who’ve written about the dynamics of marriage and romantic relationships. And one of the recurring themes across all of their work is how bad we all are at repairing damaged relationships.

Mostly, “Ah, I’ll pretend it didn’t happen,” or, “I’ll be sad and sulk about it,” or hopefully the fabric will just repair itself. But actually, it’s rare that people more actively say, “How do we fix this thing that got dented or cracked or banged up in some way?” But you can bet that any working relationship is going to go off the rails at some stage. And the ability to say, “How do we get it back on the rails? How do we get back to where we were before?” is a really powerful one, and the key contribution to a best possible relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, what are some common best and worst practices in the realms of safety, vitality, and repairability?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Good question. In some ways, that question takes me back to my roots, and it makes me think about questions, and it makes me think about not asking questions. I think that the act of remaining uncurious is one of the ways that damages safety and vitality. If you have a certainty about how right you are, how your point of view is all you need, how you should be the one who solves it, fixes it, comes up with the idea, explains a problem, sets the team going, there’s a way that that is a diminishing act for the people around you.

And I think part of one of the other things that’s diminishing or can detract from vitality is… it is an inability to see them for who they are and be curious about who they are. The question I suspect that could be most powerful for unlocking a sense of what vitality might mean is, “What do you want?” “What do you want?” is one way of coming at “Who are you? Who are you over there?”

Human beings are these messy, complicated, amazing, obscure, unpredictable people who we have to work with. And so, asking, “What’s your best? What makes you alive? Who are you? What do you want?” you’re using curiosity as a way of unlocking their humanity, the person in front of you. And when you unlock their humanity, when you see them more completely, you have a better chance of both creating safety and vitality.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay. So, when it comes to a relationship being repairable, I could think it’d probably be good to say, “I apologize” from time to time when you screw up, and to maybe just acknowledge and not ignore, or hope, or pretend that things are just going to get all better. Any other pro tips in that repairable world?

Michael Bungay Stanier
The fifth question of the keystone conversation, the fifth and final question, is “How will we fix it when it goes wrong?” because it will go wrong. And there’s something really powerful about having a conversation about “How will we get around to fix this even before anything bad has happened?” And what’s interesting is less, actually, the answers to the question. What’s powerful is a recognition that, at some stage, something is going to go wrong, something is going to be dented, somebody is going to be disappointed. How will we go about fixing that?

And if you and I were having a conversation, like, “Okay, Pete, you and I are working together. We’re going to do a joint podcast. It’s going to be amazing. You’re the lead guy because you’re smart and you’re handsome and you’ve got a voice for radio. I’m the tall guy because I’m taller than you. I’ll change the lightbulbs and make the lighting work but we’re going to work together.”

And if I go, “All right. Look, how will we screw this up?” And you’ll go, “I’ve worked with people like you, here’s where it goes wrong, and here’s what I do, and here’s what you do.” And I’m like, “I get that.” And I’ll go, “Pete, when I’ve worked with people like you, prima donnas behind the mic, let me tell you how it all goes wrong.” And you’re like, “Okay, I get that.”

I’m like, “Okay. So, how do we fix that?” And I might say, “Look, for me, if you just come up and say, ‘Look, I screwed up. I’m sorry,’ that’s it. That’s all I need. I don’t need an explanation. I don’t need to work it through. I don’t need to workshop it. I just need that.” With a former boss of mine, we agreed that we’d have what we call an off-your-chest session.

So, if I came up to Dave because he’d done something annoying, I’d say, “Dave, I’ve just got I need to have it off my chest with you,” and I just get a chance to rant a bit. And we both knew that his job was to sit there and listen. He didn’t even have to apologize particularly. He didn’t have to fix it or justify. He just had to listen to it. And it’s the negotiation to say, “How will we try and tackle this?” that makes repairability more likely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s really cool. All right. Well, so how do we kick off such a conversation in terms of I imagine we probably won’t just launch into some questions, like, “So, what’s your best”? Or, what do we do?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, I think it depends on who you’re talking to and what the setup is. I think you almost, in an early conversation with some people, you can kind of launch into it. And as an example, when I’m working with a vendor, somebody who’s supporting my small business in a way, in that first call, all I can say is, “Hey, I want to tell you about this project but before I tell you about the project and we get into too much detail about it, what is a good working relationship with somebody like me look like? Tell me what makes for a really good client. And then let me tell you what makes for a really good vendor.”

“And then, when we disappoint each other, and then how will you screw up this relationship? Now, let me tell you how I’ll screw up this relationship. So, how will we fix it?” So, there is a way that you can kind of plunge into it. I will you tell that when I do this with vendors, you can see their eyes widening a bit, they’re like, “What the…? What’s going on here?” But it allows me to have an interaction, a transaction, that has a chance of being the best version that it can be.

But if you’re working, say, with somebody on your team, you might choose to do this in a slightly different way. You might provide a little bit of setup. And I think it’s as simple as dropping them a note on Slack or email or something, and say, “Hey, I’d like a conversation about how we can best work together. Are you up for that?” It’s hard to say no to that invitation, because it’s like, “Yeah, I’d like to know how we can best work together as well.”

You can go deeper than that if you want. You could say, “Look, here are the five questions I think could be useful. I’m going to do some thinking about it in preparing my answer for that. If you have a chance to do that as well, so much the better.” Because it is true that everybody will have some first answers to the five questions. It’s also true that if you’ve thought about it, and you do some of the exercises that are in the book that will deepen and make more subtle and more nuance to your answers, that’s going to make for a better conversation as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let us discuss these five questions. Lay it on us.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, the first one is the amplify question, and the way it’s written in the book is, “What’s your best?” I’ve been thinking about it since the book has been written and created, I’m like, “Not sure that’s exactly the best phrasing of it.” But I’ll tell you what’s behind it, Pete. I didn’t go want to go, “What do you do best?” I didn’t want to ask, “What are your strengths?” I wanted a more general holistic sense of, “Who are you at your best? Tell me what you look like when you’re in full flow, when you’re working to your strengths, when you’re loving the work, the way you contribute best? What does that look like?”

And one of the nuances within that is, for instance, teasing apart, “What are you good at?” versus “What are you fulfilled by?” Because there’s also a way that what happens in our organizational life is we collapse thinking that just because somebody is good at it, they must enjoy doing it. And as we all know, we’ve all got something in our kit bag where we’re like, “I’m pretty confident that, man, this task sucks the life out of me. I don’t want to do that.”

But that’s a really powerful start, “Let’s just talk about what’s our best. What’s your best, Pete? What’s my best, Michael?” Now, we know the best version of each other, the strengths that we should be living with.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. And I’ve heard, I think we had Dan Cable, won some awards for a rock and scientific paper for a very simple intervention that involved just that, new employee sharing that, and then unlocked all kinds of things, like, “Wow, that’s a pretty good ROI for a little exchange of information.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. The second question after that is about your patterns and your preferences. It’s a steady question. Because, over the time, we’ve all built up the ways we work and the ways we like to work. And that is everything from the rhythm of our days, “I’m a morning person,” “I’m an afternoon person,” “I’m not a lunch person.” It’s the technology that we tend to default to, like, “I’m not a Slack person,” “I am a Slack person.” “Don’t ever leave me a voicemail.”

It’s right down to our kind of identity stuff around, “What’s my name? What’s not my name?” Like, “My name is Michael Bungay Stanier.” It’s a real mouthful. When I got married, I took my wife’s name, and it became Bungay Stanier. It doesn’t have a hyphen in it, which only complicates it. So, people are like, “Are you Michael Stanier? Are you MBS? Does that mean that you’re running Saudi Arabia?” I was like, “That’s a different MBS?” “Are you Mike?” I’m like, “I’m never Mike. There are only four people in the world that call me Mike, and it’s my brothers and their wives. That’s it.”

So, I’m best as Michael. And, in fact, before we hit record, you’re like, “What shall I call you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Even though we’ve interviewed before.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. And I really appreciated that because there was this little moment around, “What are your practices? And what are your preferences?” It’s like we’re having that conversation now to set this up. Because, just imagine, we’re halfway through this interview, you’ve been calling me Mike the whole time, I’m like, “Dude, this is a mic.”

Pete Mockaitis
M Sizzle.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
What up?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, that I can go with. If you live with that, I’d be like, “This is the best interview I’ve ever had.” It’d be perfect. So, that’s the second one, which is like, let’s exchange information about how we best work so that we can just start spotting the stuff where we’re well-synced on that, and the stuff where, “Well, we’re kind of out of sync on this. How do we want to manage this between us?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, it’s a steady question, “What are your practices and preferences, time of day, communication, technology?” All right, let’s hear the next.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, the third and the fourth questions are kind of a matching pair – dark side and light side, and they’re called the good-day and the bad-day question. The good-day question is, “What can we learn from past successful relationships?” because here’s the thing to take away. Your past relationships are a predictor of your future relationships. Even though I know your past relationships are in a certain context with a certain person, with a certain thing going on, a lot of the patterns that play out will play out again, dollars to donuts.

So, the first thing to talk about is like, “What has been really great? What happened? What did you do? What did you say? What did you not do and not say? What did they do and say, and not do and not say? What were the things that made this flourish?” And then you answer it, and then they answer it, or vice versa, but what a gift to know that this is the context, this is the way to make this person really flourish. This is all the things that can contribute to something working really well.

And then the pairing question is the flipside of that, which is like, “What can we learn from past frustrating working relationships?” because we’ve all had those, and we’re like, “Man, that sucked.” And even though it would’ve felt personal and individual at that time, there are patterns there, there are stuff happening there that if you can explain it to the other person, they’re like, “We should avoid that. We should avoid doing as much of that as possible.”

And so, the more that you can communicate what’s happened in the past that is both amplifying the best of you and shutting you down and making your life miserable, the more you’re able to go, “Hey, why don’t we try and avoid what we don’t like, and amplify what we do like?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the repair question?

Michael Bungay Stanier
And then the repair question, which we’ve touched on already, but it’s like, “How will we fix this when things go wrong because things will go wrong?” It’s just there’s no way of sustaining a perfectly undented amazing working relationship forever. Somebody will screw up, somebody will break a promise, something will be misunderstood, something will be missed, some damage will happen. So, when there’s a tear in the fabric, what are we going to do about that?

And the power of that, and we said it before but I want to say it again, it gives you permission to keep talking about the health of the relationship. That’s where the magic happens with all of this. It’s the answers themselves but it’s, really, we can now keep saying, “Hey, we’re trying to build the best possible relationship here. How are we doing? Is this good enough? Do we want to tweak anything? Do we want to adjust anything? Do we need to say something that hasn’t yet been said? Do we need to clear the tables, reset, get ourselves back on track? What needs to be done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, I’d love now, could you share with us some of the more interesting answers to each of these questions that you’ve bumped into in your travels?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it’s everything, really. So, if the people who are listening to this think of their own answers, you can imagine people saying exactly the same as you, and exactly the opposite to you as well. So, when people say, “Michael, what’s your best? Who are you at your best?” I’m like, “You know what, I’m best when I’ve got something to create, I’ve got a way of trying to, what my friend Shannon says, to thingify stuff, to try and make     abstract ideas feel more real tangible and more real.

I’m at my best at designing experiences. I’m at my best at trying to understand what a reader or a participant is looking for, and trying to design to their real and actual needs. That’s some of the stuff that’s at my best. It’s like having ideas, I’m great at having ideas. That’s some of the best stuff for me.” But I’ll talk to my wife, who I work with for many years, and she’d say none of that.

She’d say I’m at my best when I get all my emails answered; I’m at my best where I get to have conversations with people and work with people one-to-one and kind of champion them and coach them on; I’m at my best where I get to kind of push back against authority and kind of point out that the emperor has no clothes. This is why we no longer work together because I’m the so-called emperor in this business, and I’m like, “You know what, I know you want your…you’re not necessarily for the man but I’m the man. You’ve got to be kind to me. We’re married.”

So, you get all sorts of different answers. That’s really the point, in some ways, which is it is very easy to assume you know what the answers are going to be. And when you assume you know what the answers are going to be, you’re kind of like, “I think I already know who you are,” and you actually stop that moment of engaging with them as a full human being, and you’re like, “Seeing you as I kind of I’ve boxed you in, giving you a Myers-Briggs label, and I’ve given you a this, and I’ve given you a that.”

And what this does is actually say, “Your answers are going to be different and unique. My answers are going to be different and unique. And then how we bring them together to build the best possible relationship is where things get really interesting.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so now we’ve had the conversation, we’re doing this stuff, can you chat with us a little bit in terms of maintenance? How do we keep that rocking over the long haul?

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, it’d be lovely if this was a one and done thing. You have the courage, you have the conversation, and you’re like, “We nailed it. Now we can just go about our business and, like, never need to bring this up again.” But, as with all living things, maintenance is required. So, there is a way to say, “How do I best stay present and active in this relationship? How do I stay open to doing what I can to keep it alive?”

And for us to name a single thing to do around this, Pete, it would be to ask the question, “Hey, how are we doing?” It’s to actually just move out of the hurly burly of all the everyday stuff that needs to get done, say, before we plunge into all of the tasks and all the to-do’s, because there’s always an endless amount of work to be done, let’s just have a conversation and check in on how we’re doing, “What’s working for you? Here’s what’s working for me. What’s not working for you? Here’s what’s not working for me. What’s one thing we can do differently to improve the way we’re working right now?”

And one of the questions, Pete, that I ask, and I think it’s particularly powerful if you happen to be the more senior person to hold more of the positional power of the conversation, the question is, “What needs to be said that hasn’t yet been said?” I started a company 20 years ago, and about four years ago, stepped aside from that for Shannon to become the CEO of that company, but I still own it so she and I are in conversation all the time and kind of, I guess, calling me a board member would make it big hat, no cattle, but kind of that type of conversation.

And there’s a power dynamic between us because I’m the owner and she’s the CEO trying to run the company as best we can. And we ask each other that question all the time, “What needs to be said that hasn’t yet been said?” because it’s that little nudge give us permission to talk about the needly stuff, or the stuff that might feel too small, or the stuff where it’s felt, “I just haven’t found the moment to mention this awkward thing.” It really clears the space, and says, “Now is a chance to mention anything that you’ve got just lingering there so that we can make sure that we clean it all up, if that’s what needs to be done.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, Michael, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael Bungay Stanier
I’d say one of the unexpected benefits of doing this work and, perhaps, creating this book is that you deepen your own knowledge of yourself. It was very much about the relationship but, actually, there are exercises in the book. For each of the five questions, there’s three different exercises to help you deepen and enrich and make more subtle and more nuanced your answers to that.

And even if you’ve never had a best possible relationship, and you never had a keystone conversation, if you do the work and you come to understand in a more nuanced, more grounded way, “This is actually who I am. This is actually how I work. This is actually how I thrive. This is actually what shuts me down,” you’re better able to control and manage your work so that you can thrive and be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, Pete, I might’ve mentioned this the last time we talked, and so forgive me for coming back, but it’s a favorite quote, so it’s still my favorite quote. There’s a poem by the poet Rilke, it’s called “The Man Watching,” that’s the English translation. And it tells a story of wrestling with an angel, so it’s an allusion or a nod to kind of the Bible, and Jacob wrestling with the angel.

And it talks about being ambitious for the bigger things, the bigger things that open us up and challenge us, and bring out the very best of us. And there’s a couple of lines in that poem which I think are extraordinary. I actually keep a little printout on my desk. And the quote is this, “Winning does not tempt him. His growth is to be the deeply defeated by ever-greater things.”

And this idea of hoping, I hope this for me, and I hope it for others, but I hope I still have the courage to seek ever-greater things and be deeply defeated by that. That’s what I’m hungry for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michael Bungay Stanier
There’s a book I’m reading at the moment by Ed Young, and it is about how animals experience the world. And so, this is a little bit kind of a sideways angle into this, but we, as human beings, tend to assume that animals mostly experience the world kind of like we do. We tend to project the way we kind of embodied in this world onto all the animals around us. And nothing could be further from the truth.

As a very kind of slightly pedestrian way of talking about it, if you think of zebras, hey, however you want to pronounce that, in their black and white stripes, when you ask most people, “Why are zebras black and white striped?” they’ll go, “Well, it’s camouflage. It helps them blend in so they can hide from the predators.” But actually, lions have eyesight that is so shortsighted that they can’t see the stripes in a zebra. They just see it as a kind of a grey donkey. And, in fact, the stripes of a zebra are there to confuse a tsetse fly so that they don’t get bitten by these flies.

And as I’ve been reading this book in bed at night, every three pages I’ll say to my wife, “Oh, my God, did you know…?” “Oh, my God, did you know…?” as I keep hearing about how animals just experience so much more of the world than we do in a way that we can barely even imagine it. And why I bring it up is because, even on a human-to-human level, the person across the table from you experiences the world in a way that you don’t fully understand. And it’s so easy for us to just kind of think, “Ah, I know who they are, and I know how they’re feeling, and I know what they think because that’s who I am and how I feel and how I think.”

And this ability to stay curious about who is that other person, and how do they see and feel the world, opens up that ability for a more human-to-human connection and relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. And a favorite book?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Nonfiction, my favorite book is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson, as a writer about science, he has this ability to make the world feel miraculous because not only does he kind of make science less dusty, less boring, and kind of have the life gets sucked out of it in high school for us, but Bryson has this ability to say, “Look, this is amazing. And look what these people are discovering about our world.”

And then on a fiction level, there’s an Australian author called David Malouf. And one of his very first books is called An Imaginary Life. It tells a story of Ovid, the Roman poet, getting exiled to the shores of the Black Sea, as it is now. And it talks about him unlearning his urban ways and finding a new language and new way of being on the edge of civilization. And this integration between head, and heart, and the mind, and the senses is a really powerful journey.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Michael Bungay Stanier
I love the pens from Baron Fig. I’ve got one on my desk here made out of copper, I’ve got one other one on my other desk over there where I write, and I’ve got one in the little leather sheet. And I was home recently in Australia, and my mom has basically hundreds of cheap pens shoved in jars and cups all over the house. I have three pens and I only have three pens, and I love them. But writing is such an integral part of how I interact with the world, not just writing my books but kind of checking in my journal most mornings, that having a pen that brings me joy is an essential tool for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Making my wife coffee in the morning. And we both like coffee. I have espresso, she has an oak milk flat white but it’s the joy of the taste and the smell of really good coffee, but also the joy of being of service to my wife.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often, retweet it, etc.?

Michael Bungay Stanier
In The Coaching Habit book, I said, “Look, you can sum up this whole book as a haiku.” And I’m going to misquote it slightly, which is ironic, but it says something like, “Stay curious longer. Your advice is not as good as you think it is.” And “Your advice is not as good as you think it is,” is what I hear often from people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Michael Bungay Stanier
You can find more about me, in general, at my website MBS.works. And if you’re interested in the book, BestPossibleRelationship.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it can feel a little overwhelming to listen to what I’ve been talking about with you, Pete, and go, “How do I do that with all these people?” But if you can be the person who reaches out, who says, “I’ll take responsibility for starting to build the best possible relationship,” that is a great gift you and to them, and to your organization. So, don’t try and do it all, but perhaps pick one person, one key relationship that matters, pick one question of the five, and start a conversation where it says, “How do we work better together?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and great conversation.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Thanks, Pete. You are a gracious host.