Episode 389: The Answer is a Question with Dominic & Laura Ashley-Timms

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, we have Dominic and Laura Ashley-Tims. They are CEO and COO respectively at Notion, and they're recognized as one of the UK's top executive coaches. In this episode, we talk a lot about management and leadership, how you can become a better manager and a better leader, and also teach certain skills to your managers and leaders, or even future managers and leaders in your organization. I've talked about— we talk about management and leadership a lot on this podcast. They have some of the most research and depth of knowledge into this topic. You're going to get a ton out of this episode. Can't wait for you to hear. Here's my interview with Dominic and Laura Ashley-Tims. Laura and Dominic, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Lovely to be here. Thanks, Bradley.

Yeah, very pleased to be with you. Thank you. Yeah, excited to have you.

Well, Laura, I'll start with you. Why don't you take us back and give us kind of background and origin story? We'd love to always kind of go back, hear people's journeys, how they got to where they are, how, what brought them to where they are today. So take us back wherever you feel like is relevant, bring us to present day.

Well, I could go back to when I was 9 years old and I read a comic strip that inspired me to kind of change my life in many ways, but I'll probably start a little bit later. I did international sport, um, as a young person and then went into business and really understood the combination of the value you can have coaching in the sports arena with the importance of driving business success commercially later in my career. And after, um, roles of running kind of international retailers, working in the States, in the UK, UK, in Asia, and then also working in a smaller family-run business that was globally successful, it really made me realize this— the nuance of what good leadership looks like and how critical it is to learn to unleash the potential of everyone you're working with. And that led me, um, it's really partly as a frustration of a frustrated entrepreneur, but also, um, as someone that was about to become a parent, to want to have more flexibility capability, which originally created Notion alongside my better half, who I am about to introduce. And after that, really, it was about how we leverage the capability of everybody at a global scale through supporting great management and leadership.

Wonderful. Dominic, anything you would like to add?

Yeah, Laura mentioned that we work together and we've been working together now for 24 years and this is really a core passion and my driver for this. I spent a period of my career in change management consulting, and I was often involved in projects where companies were being smashed together. There's only going to be one marketing department that survives. There'll only be one boardroom that survives. There'll only be one CEO. So there's lots of fear around that change. And I was involved with running multiple projects and working directly with the project managers. And what I noticed was that the more questions that we asked And the more questions we asked the people who were being affected by the change, the more that fear went down. And when I really thought about that, what was actually happening was even though people might be generating answers which might negatively impact them, at least they now had certainty. And fear is just uncertainty. Once you have some certainty, at least you can determine actions. So that really started me thinking around the idea that there's something in the way that we use inquiry and the way we ask questions that helps people progress. And that really was the, the inception, the spark, if you, if you will, for beginning the company Notion. And in, in the first few years of our, of our development of the company, we were very much focused on the application of coaching within organizations, but very quickly grew into something very different.

I have to tell you, um, I don't get very nervous on podcasts anymore. The most nervous I've been is, um, interviewed a 4-star, uh, general, General McChrystal, Stanley McChrystal, who actually came on the podcast. I was fairly nervous for that one. I'm a little nervous on this podcast because I feel like my quality of my questions has to be at a very high level given the fact that you wrote the book The answer is a question, which actually is going to lead me to a question, um, uh, Dominic. But in all seriousness, having this podcast the last 4 years, one of the benefits, huge benefits to me, has been a forcing function for me to learn how to ask better questions, to shut up on these interviews and ask, try to ask quality questions. I don't feel like I do that as well as I need to, but I have done better at it and it has translated over into the businesses and I'm grateful for that. That said though, Dominic, leaders don't need to go start a podcast, interview podcast, in order to be better at asking questions. We've heard that we need to do that, but yet very few people actually show us how to do it. What are some things that we can actually do to get better and asking questions?

Well, that is a great question, and you've struck to the core of our work, because as we progress through our careers, and we describe this within the book, each of us evolved into the manager or the leader we are today based on all the experiences we've had along the way, the people who've managed us, the things we've seen work, the things we've seen haven't worked, the nuggets that we've picked up from the various courses we've been on. And each of us is an amalgamation of each of those experiences, and we describe them as being Frankenstein managers within the book. We're each trying to do our level best based on what we've accumulated today that makes us who we are. But along the way, none of us are really taught. No one ever sits you down once you take that first line promotion and now you're responsible for a team. No one ever sits you down and says, look, now you're responsible for people. Here are a set of techniques to help you really engage them, you know, their hearts and minds, how to draw talent from them in a very respectful way. And as a consequence, there are some really hard statistics out there in the management, in the marketplace, including one which is pretty frightening, which is 50% of all employees will leave their job just to get away from a poor relationship with their manager. And that's catastrophic when we're trying to run our own business. So it's the question to your question, how do you change behavior? It's not easy. You know, we've grown up with assumptions and a mental model we've built about what we're supposed to be doing and how we're supposed to act. But changing behavior is the focus of the work that we do.

Hmm. Laura, I saw something that I wanted to double tap on what he shared. And it was something I've never heard before, some information you had shared with me, but 70 to 80% of bosses are accidental managers. What, what, what, what is— what does that mean? And then if I, if I do may ask kind of a part 2 question to that, in your version, can you differentiate to me how you view management versus leadership?

Brilliant. So accidental managers is, yeah, it's frighteningly high. I think it's actually just gone up to 82% since we wrote the book of managers who were deemed to be accidental managers. And what we mean by that term is that managers who've gone into a job because they were really great at something, they were technical experts, they were subject matter experts, and then they get promoted. And at the point they get promoted, they're given, like, you're a manager now. 'Here's some people to look after.' But nowhere in the remit did they intend maybe to look after people, or they've been taught how to really engage those people to get the most out from them. So they kind of accidentally find themselves as people managers, managers of people. And that is really quite a shocking percentage of our management population that are just kind of doing it by default, not by intent. And only, I think, 9% of people have management qualifications. Qualifications or around people management. So actually, something like, you know, nearly over 90% of managers have no qualifications to do the job, even though some of them might intend— intentionally want to be managers. So it's a really, really frightening statistic, and that's one of the areas we're really focused on because our mission is to really support and help all managers globally to create basic understanding of what good looks like, give them a baseline capability to be great, what we call star managers, managers that really know how to engage productive, inclusive, collaborative environments and get the most out of people.

It's interesting, I was speaking to a colleague over in the US recently and they said, yeah, it is incredible. He said, you know, to cut hair, you've got to be a licensed hairdresser. You know, you got to, you know, to be a realtor, you have to be a licensed realtor. To be an exterminator, you have to be a licensed 'Exterminator,' but to let you loose on my people. And, and, and even as I'm saying the words, it sounds crazy. There's absolutely no recognizable accomplishment for a manager or a leader when they start to manage other people. And that's something we're seeking to redress. There is a set of skills, and there is a way that we can learn very easily to be able to engage people in a much more respectful way that draws on their talent, and it's built around an idea of using inquiry in a very purposeful way. How do we structure questions in a way that's authentic and sincere, but demonstrates to the other person that we genuinely want to hear from them, and we genuinely want them to do the thinking? Because we don't own all the good ideas, and I think that's some of the pressure that managers and leaders feel. They, you know, we feel that now we're the adult in the room, that we should have all the answers. And that puts an enormous burden on us. And even in larger organizations, any change that an organization wants to make is put upon the managers. They're bearing more and more of the workload and the stress, but being regarded as the person that should have the answers. And that's just not the case. We need to find a much more equitable way of managing leaders being able to pull on and draw on the talents of their entire team to be able to share that load. but also to pull probably better ideas from the people who are engaged in that team. We, we need to shift our own mental model of what we're there to do in that role.

I didn't answer the second half of your question, Bradley. I'm very conscious of that. So leadership and management often gets used in multiple ways. So in the essence, when we think of leadership, we think of the most senior strategic level of leaders within an organisation, whereas managers is the whole remit of anybody that really has people management responsibility or even project management responsibility. That includes almost all senior leaders as well. So most senior leaders are still managers. And when we use the term for the work we're doing, it really incorporates all leaders and all managers because there's skills you can learn even if you haven't got people responsibility that can still help you manage up, manage sort of complex projects. Peer relationships, and even supports you back at home with your friends and family. It becomes a life skill as well. But that's in terms of how we view leadership and management. That's probably the simplest way of explaining it.

Got some things I want to go back in just a moment based on what you shared earlier. But on that point around management and leadership, is it possible to be a great manager, poor leader, or vice versa, really good leader but poor manager?

It's very possible, actually, because you could be a fantastic people person and you could really get the most from your people, but maybe don't always have the strategic vision. I don't think— so I think if you've got a very senior leadership capability but you don't have always strategic insights, then that is technically possible. But if you're a really good people manager, you'll have the right people around you, or have those skills so you can put the right team around you. So I think if you've got the people capability and the leadership capability through your people, then everyone should be able to be a good leader as well as a good manager.

Interesting. Dominic, I'm looking at— I pulled up as we were talking, I pulled up a slide from yesterday. You're going to be familiar, I'm sure, with what I'm about to share, this principle, but our listening audience may not. So I'll read it and then I'd love to get your thoughts, Dominic, on this. When you mentioned and you gave the definition of accidental managers, it Immediately a light bulb went off. The Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in organizational hierarchies is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence. And this really makes me think about the classic salesperson whose top has been top for the last couple years and they say, congratulations, you're now sales manager, or you're now sales leader, or whatever title they use. And they've gone from a place where they're incredibly, uh, talented, they're thriving, exceptional, smoking it, hitting all their numbers, to now they have to lead people and they're like, I have no idea. Or they have to manage people, right? And they have no idea how to do that. Thoughts on that, Dominic?

Yeah, a couple of things there, and I'd echo that. I had the good fortune to do some work with the, uh, the, the retail franchise automotive sector, and it was very typical that the best salesperson then goes on to become the dealership principal. What most people don't recognize though is very good salesmen within the automotive sector also have the highest levels of dyslexia. So you go from a role where you are sales engagement, working with customers, to now be the dealership principal. Now it's paperwork, it's spreadsheets, it's numbers, it's analysis. and there's just such a poor fit with that. And we do this time and time again. And the Peter Principle is something that began as a tongue-in-cheek idea, but there is now sound academic research supporting it. So what started out as a sort of a tongue-in-cheek is actually being shown to be true. It's the point where people continue to rise through the ranks to the point where their incompetence in the role becomes noticeable. And that's a horrible place to be, but no one's really thought about what are the skill sets that we'd need to have adopted at each level. I think the work that we've done over the past 20 years in particular has really shown that the development of purposeful inquiry, the skills to be able to formulate questions not for your benefit to collect information so you can cleverly solve a problem, but generally to formulate questions to stimulate other people's thinking is a universal skill set that will set us in good stead as we rise through the ranks. Because what we're actually learning to do is to draw on the fullest talents of the people around us. And if you think about the mental model that some of us hold about being a manager or a leader, it's, you know, the buck stops with me. When people come to me for help, I feel sort of obligated to help them because I'm now— I'm the adult, I'm in charge. We take on all that pressure, but what we need to do is flip that mental model. I am there not to solve and fix everyone's problems. I'm there to get the very best from this team, to help them to perform and to outperform and to draw on the vast talent that's locked away in these people and invite that into the business and into our team in a way that is motivational for for them, is rewarding for them, that drives towards a productive outcome for the team. And in that regard, I'm moving from a manager to an enabler of other people's talents. And that simple shift in our thinking means that the stuff that typically falls to the bottom of our work stack, those one-to-one opportunities, those conversations we could be having with our teams, should be now coming to the top of our work stack. And actually a greater portion of our time should be thinking about how am I getting the best from my team, who am I enabling to step up to take away from me some of the things that really shouldn't sit with me. And in that regard, I'm now working to pass work down to the lowest level I've enabled to step up to take it from me, and in so doing, I'm helping them advance. And that is a benevolent cycle that we want to encourage, and it begins with learning how to use this inquiry-led approach that we now call operational coaching.

Hmm.

Not even benevolent though, just to challenge, because one of the massive outcomes that we've got from the academic study that was conducted by the London School of Economics is that managers and leaders on average get 20% of their time back when they apply these principles. So for anyone working full-time, and I'm sure many of your listeners work even more than full-time, probably do even longer hours than that, that's over a day a week back to do this quality and sort of work you really want to do rather than the work you're stepping in to do, to take work, take on other people's work. So it's a real payoff when you learn to apply this skill.

You, you teed me up beautifully without even knowing it because I was actually going to go towards skills. Uh, I wanted to, I wanted to address this because one of the things that has been a mental model that has been very helpful for me, Dominique, is to, as you said, the mental model we hold used to be this, you know, I'm the manager, it's got to be all on me, and then I'm the one that's doing all of the talking. But in general though, when I've looked at where I've had struggles in business— let's, let's just get it straight, business is really hard. It has— it's hard. It's— there's a lot of moving pieces, there's a lot of hats to wear as a business owner, as an entrepreneur. There's a lot of— but when I started to see skills as things I could acquire, it helped me then to seek out, well, who are the people can help me to acquire those skills? Maybe it's a book. Maybe I can read, actually read Lencioni's books for once, right? Maybe I can read The Answer Is a Question, you know, like I could read these books to begin to acquire it. So Laura, I want to ask this. Given that you've mentioned a couple times around skills. So it obviously means that we can teach these skills to some of our budding leaders, people that we want to get into a leadership position. Let's say I have, as the, as the owner of my business, I have a big vision of, a big vision of where I want to go. And with that, I know that I'm going to end up hiring more people. More salespeople, more client success people, and there's going to be levels of management that are going to be needed. And so I want to develop some of these skills in, in these, in certain people who I think could be really great managers or leaders. Okay, with that, what is something that I can do today in addition to reading your book? We'll get that in just a second, but what are some things somebody listening to this podcast can do straight away to begin to teach some of these skills to those people in their organization?

I would say it depends how serious they are about wanting to really have great skills within the organization, because the, the program that I mentioned that was analyzed by the London School of Economics and evaluated is a structured program that actually helps managers change their behavior and acquire these skills in a sort of gentle, iterative way over a period of sort 3 to 6 months. So if they're serious about it, I would say invest in having certified STAR managers in your, in your organization, which are managers that have learned the capability and the skills to stop themselves from going in and solving other people's work and have learned to think, is it, is it a coachable moment? Have learned how to ask really powerful questions for the benefit of the other person and actively listen to them. So that they can step in and come up with their own ideas and own the outcomes of those ideas and be excited about implementing those ideas. But then as a manager, still help the other person get to a result and maintain that shared accountability. So if you can acquire that capability, you are going to be able to really, really increase the capability and the output and the productivity and the innovation from your people. So if you're serious about it, I would say that's what you would do. But the skills I've mentioned, learning to really learn how to craft questions for the benefit of others, actively listening, being really respectful, stopping yourself, building triggers to stop yourself from taking on other people's problems, and instead think, can I actually in this moment help them solve the problem for themselves? It's, it's areas like that that we really focus in. Lot of that is around behavioural change. We are busy managers. We actually are also always coming from a good place. We want to help our people that we work with. So someone comes to you with a problem, your gut instinct is to try and help them. And there is a change that needs to happen to instead stop yourself from coming in and taking the problem off them and doing it yourself, and instead learning how to change what you do in that moment to really benefit them for the long term. and that's the shift that needs to happen.

I was gonna say, and that is a behavioural intervention because most of us, as we've gone up through the ranks, we feel that we're there because we're the problem solver. In fact, all the indications are we've been promoted on the strength of our problem-solving skills, but actually that means we're going to continue taking on more and more stress, and then the Peter Principle kicks in at some point. But learning as we go now further up, how we're going to pull on all the threads and all the capabilities of people around us means that we have to change our behavior. We have to learn to stop. And that, that is, is challenging in learning to bite your lip when someone's asking for help, when you, when you know what you could tell them is the answer. Actually, what we find is we don't necessarily have the best answer. We're often recycling our old knowledge and we're denying an opportunity if we give them that answer of perhaps them having come up with something better. So the, you know, by asking, by stopping and asking and thinking about, is this a coachable moment? And then asking some questions actually opens the door to potentially much better outcomes.

You know, I have had a lot of guests on where we have talked about either management or leadership or some version of it. It's really great to have people that have a very strong depth of knowledge in this area. It's very clear that, number one, you have the research to back it up, written the book on it, and you just have the years of the experience to do it. I, I can't recommend enough for people to go and pick up the book, The Answer Is a Question: The Easy Way to Quickly Transform Your Impact as a Manager and a Leader. Laura, where would you point people to, to connect for— to find the book and information and also connect with you guys?

Well, definitely the book is available on Amazon and in Barnes Noble online as well. Um, and so that's the easiest place to get the book. In terms of learning more and connecting with us, I would send people to starmanager.global, the website star, S-T-A-R, manager.global, where there's a wealth of information and an easy way of connecting with myself from Dominic.

That's fantastic. Well, Dominic, I have a question. The name of the podcast is the Above the Business Podcast. What do you feel like working above the business means to you?

It particularly resonates with me running this business because it's, you know, we're finally, we're growing very rapidly and we're now in the US as well. The book's been selling very well. So it is being able to step back and, and ask myself those searching questions. How are we going to continue to grow this business? How are we going to further our mission and our purpose, which is to create epic workplace cultures that have been created by star managers? And that's what we want. We want more people to be able to adopt these skills because it drives much better outcomes. And that's, I think, what we all want. So yeah, it resonates with me very strongly. I'm focused How can we spread this far and wide?

Well, I have to tell both of you several of my key takeaways whenever you shared 70%, 80%, now 82% are accidental managers. You mentioned something, Laura, about the, instead of being default, it being intentional. That really resonated with me as a takeaway. And I have to tell you, just even the framework of having star managers, you know, like I adopt that. I'm like, yeah, I want star managers. In my organization. That in and of it— of itself. You also mentioned— I loved it— Frankenstein managers. That was really interesting, this patchwork. And I thought to myself, yeah, how does it go from a Frankenstein manager to being a beautiful quilt, right? Like, it can be different things, but, uh, that's just a, a thing that was going through my head. I loved your definition of managers versus leadership. And then, uh, Dominic, I thought your comment around the mental models we hold as to what managers and leaders actually do versus what they really should be doing, the mental model we, we tend to hold about what that person does. I thought that was just absolutely fantastic. Well, how did I do on my questions today, Laura? Did I do well on my questions? I was really nervous about this.

Yeah, I think you answered some really great questions.

Well, thank you for that. All right, thank you both so much for coming on the podcast. It was great having you on.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thanks, Bradley.

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