1. Ask more questions. No, more than that.
How many questions is too many? It’s way more than you think.
In research on sales calls, Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks found that the most successful agents were the ones who asked the most questions. But more than that, she found that the line between “lots of questions” and “too many questions” is much further out that most of us think. In order to reach that tipping point, you’d have to ask 4 questions a minute—that’s 1 question every 15 seconds!
When you learn to ask more and better questions, you’ll be able to listen so people talk—and get the best out of your relationships at work, Alison says.
2. Get to know your stress—and then use it.
Stress is the #1 killer of high performance. But if we learn how to leverage it, it can help us outperform our competitors and reach new heights.
“You need to get to know your stress like you would get to know somebody on a first date—so that you get to a point where you learn to fall in love with it,” says Modupe Akinola, one of the most highly rated professors at Columbia Journalism School. Modupe suggests that leaders use stress to bring the best out of their teams: for example, you could try introducing a time limit to get the most creative ideas without judgment, or creating overwhelming conditions so your teams are forced to rely on one another and use their unique strengths.
3. Fortune favors the curious.
Don’t just look at what your competitors are doing. Look at what everyone else is doing: from developments outside your sector to innovations that are quite literally out of this world.
Greg Hoffman, former CMO of Nike, explains that the air cushioning technology behind some of Nike’s most beloved shoes was actually invented for space suits by a NASA engineer. If Nike hadn’t been curious about the technology and willing to take a risk, they would have missed out on a massive opportunity. Greg suggests that leaders exercise curiosity like a muscle: “What starts out as homework becomes habit over time.”
Want to learn more about any of these leading thinkers, or invite them to speak at your event? Get in touch with us—we’d love to help.
