We prep ourselves for so many challenging conversations, whether asking for a raise, delivering a tough performance review, asking for more budget, or even debating a political issue as if we’re going to war. We brace for the confrontation. That puts us in a really unhelpful place to have true connection and conversation – and that just intensifies the misunderstanding and animosity with no helpful outcome.
But there’s a way out of this cycle. And woo boy! I clicked instantly with today’s guest and I know you will, too. Today, Justin shares a very personal story about his trip back to Ghana to confront his absent father and how he changed the conversation following his own 5 pillars to bridge the divide. We also discuss how to practice conversational receptiveness, and how to avoid the dotted line dilemma and the illusion of asymmetric insights which both hinder meaningful engagements with those we don’t see eye-to-eye with. Justin also unpacks actionable ways to have better conversations and cultivate curiosity through the Power of 3 Questioning module.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- Plant the seeds with your kids of how to value humanity from a young age. Take them to places and events that will help them see more of the world and humanity.
- Be transparent when you are working on your leadership and changing conversations. Bring your team in, make it fun and light, and have one meaningful conversation per week.
- Just because it feels uncomfortable to learn about others and practice The Power of 3 Questioning. It doesn’t mean it isn’t working and strengthening your listening muscles.
“People are talking about things that are important to them. The question is, are we really listening?” — Justin Jones-Fosu
Episode References:
- Justin’s book: I Respectfully Disagree: How to Have Difficult Conversations in A Divided World
- The Empathy Edge podcast: Michael Bach: What Exclusion is Costing Your Company
- Book: Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together by William Isaacs
From Our Partner:
SparkEffect partners with organizations to unlock the full potential of their greatest asset: their people. Through their tailored assessments and expert coaching at every level, SparkEffect helps organizations manage change, sustain growth, and chart a path to a brighter future.
Go to sparkeffect.com/edge and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.
About Justin Jones-Fosu, CEO, Work.Meaningful and Author, I Respectfully Disagree
Justin is a full-time dad-e who also happens to be an international speaker, a social entrepreneur, a critically acclaimed author, and a mountain climber (he recently conquered one of the famed 7 Summits). His passion for elevation extends beyond trekking, it’s mirrored in his work as the CEO of Work. Meaningful, a firm he founded in 2017 focused on workplace engagement and inclusion. He consults with, speaks to, and trains 10,000 to 20,000 people per year. He is a former radio host and former workplace contributor to NPR’s The Takeaway Justin’s most recent book, I Respectfully Disagree, challenges the reader to focus on building bridges with people rather than barriers from them. He also wrote The Inclusive Mindset and Your Why Matters Now.
Connect with Justin Jones-Fosu:
Work.Meaningful: workmeaningful.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/iworkmeaningful
Instagram: instagram.com/iworkmeaningful
Connect with Maria:
Get the podcast and book: TheEmpathyEdge.com
Learn more about Maria and her work: Red-Slice.com
Hire Maria to speak at your next event: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take my LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. We prep ourselves for so many challenging conversations, whether asking for a raise, delivering a tough performance review, asking for more budget, or even debating a political issue, as if we’re going to war, we brace for the confrontation that puts us in a really unhelpful place to have true connection and conversation, and it just intensifies the misunderstanding and animosity with no helpful outcome. But there’s a way out of this cycle. And oh, did I click instantly with today’s guest, and I know you will too. Justin Jones, Fauci is a full time dad who also happens to be an international speaker, a social entrepreneur, a critically acclaimed author and a mountain climber. He recently conquered one of the famed Seven Summits. His passion for elevation extends beyond trekking. It’s mirrored in the work he does as the CEO of work meaningful, a firm focused on workplace engagement and inclusion that he founded in 2007 he consults with, speaks to and trains 10,000 to 20,000 people per year, and has clients like Toyota, Adidas, Mercedes Benz and the National Institutes of Health. He’s a former radio host and a former workplace contributor to NPRs. The takeaway, Justin’s most recent book, I respectfully disagree how to have difficult conversations in a divided world challenges us to focus on building bridges with people rather than barriers from them. Today, Justin shares a very personal story about his trip back to Ghana to confront his absent father and how he changed the conversation, following his own five pillars to bridging the divide. We also discuss how to practice conversational receptiveness and how to avoid the dotted line dilemma and the illusion of asymmetric insights, which both hinder meaningful engagements when we don’t see eye to eye. Justin also unpacks actionable ways to have better conversations and cultivate curiosity through the power of three questioning model. So many gems and quotables in this episode. Enjoy. Welcome to the empathy edge. Justin Jones Fauci, so excited to have you here today for a great conversation about curiosity and better communication. Whether you’re a leader or you just want to be a better human.
03:14
Super pumped and excited to be with you. Wow. We’re
Maria Ross 03:18
just talking about, I really like your energy. You’re lighting me up today. So folks are in for a treat. You know, we heard a little bit about your bio and the work that you do for companies like Toyota, Mercedes, Adidas, all the things, but tell us a little bit about your story and how you even got into this work of helping organizations and leaders improve their communication and understand each other better. How did you get here? Wow.
Justin Jones-Fosu 03:42
And really, the origin story started from a mom, to be completely honest. Mom, yes, my mom was one of the first black female air traffic controllers in the Air Force, and she told me the story that was really powerful, that she would be stationed in Japan for two years, and there were some soldiers in that same two year time frame that never left base. And she said, Justin, I don’t want you and your brother to be like that and never leave your metaphorical home base and not experience the beauty of people and cultures around you. And so I remember just she would take us to events that we didn’t know a lot about, and even ones that we disagreed with. I’d be sitting there mom like, why aren’t we even here, right? But she was planting these seeds of how we can value humanity and as a leader, one of the things that that’s been so impressed on me is, how do I value the humanity of those that I lead, whether at home, whether in my office and other places. And this specific story took me to this place of Ghana. So I am a dual citizen of both Ghana, United States. Uh, my dad’s from Ghana. My mom from America. That makes me African American. You might get that joke later, but the interesting thing you
Maria Ross 04:52
really are African American. Yeah,
Justin Jones-Fosu 04:56
in 2019 I was going to go back to Ghana. I’ve been there several times. Taking my kids for the first time, and I’m gonna go confront my dad. You see, my dad wasn’t in my life in ways that I felt I needed him to be growing up, and so when my parents divorced at four, I remember I would see my dad every other weekend. Then it became one weekend a month, and then there was two or three years where I didn’t see and or hear from my dad, and for a myriad of reasons, conflict between my parents, but I felt like my dad couldn’t have fought harder for me, and so I remember that I was gonna go and confront him Will Smith style. I’m not talking about the Chris Rock version, but more of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air version, yeah. And one of the things that stood out to me is I was a part of leadership Charlotte, as well as I have a really great therapist, and they help transform how I was going to approach it. So instead of going to confront my dad, they challenged me to go and hear his story. I like what somebody came up to me after one of my sessions. They were like Justin. They helped you to turn a confrontation into a conversation. And as I heard his story, and we had this conversation, and I asked more questions, and I was curious. And instead of going to tell Well, you’re wrong, and then I listened to how he got there. Now we still walked away, and I I disagreed and disagreed respectfully, but I better understood how he got there, and it allowed me to open up and realize that that whole process that I even went with with my dad, is actually the process that we take companies and leaders and executives through that they can create, not only these cultures within their own organizations, but these cultures at home and these cultures in their
Maria Ross 06:31
community. Oh, my God. I love that story, and I love that quote of turning a confrontation into a conversation. I often talk about empathy as a definition, so many times we get it wrong. If you can get empathy wrong right, we’re kind of doing it wrong. You know, I hate to say it that way, but we think empathy is people pleasing, or it’s just caving in, or it’s agreeing with someone. To this point, we can have empathetic conversations with people and still walk away with our own perspectives and opinions and ideologies intact. Yes, because it’s not about conversion, it’s about connection. And so we’re fans of the sea Yes, alliterations. I love it, but that’s so powerful, because I love how you and how you had to prep yourself. Yeah, you know. And that self awareness piece is the first pillar of the five pillars in my new book, The Empathy dilemma. But being aware of what you were bringing into the conversation and what you were bringing into the meeting is so important to being able to take that beat, take that pause, and not react so quickly. Yeah, I love it, and that idea of finding common ground, of like, I’m here to hear your story. I’m not here to condone what you’ve done. I’m not here to agree with you. And this is especially important, as we know with political discourse. Yeah, there’s a gentleman I talk about on the show all the time named Edwin rush. He runs the Center for building a culture of empathy. And back in 2016 2015 he had empathy tense set up at the most divisive political rallies we had in our country, and it was just to get one person and another person from each side into a tent to listen to each other, yeah, not to convert each other to their side, right, but to see each other as human beings. So your story is just such a personal example of that. I’m curious, do you feel like from that approach that you took? Do you think it made a difference to your dad, even though he might not have, quote, known you were doing it? Yeah,
Justin Jones-Fosu 08:34
I definitely. I think what we find often, not only with my dad and other people, is that when we approach people from you’re wrong, and how did you do this? Why in the world, you’re wrong and I’m right immediately, yes, defensive walls come up. Yeah. I love the body of research around conversational receptiveness that really talks through and I’ve done really good work about why people want to continue to have conversations with people, even if they disagree with and one of those things is in finding common ground, right? And choosing to seek understanding, and not only seek understanding, but utilize positive phrases like, wow, I can see how you got there. Well, thank you, right? And those are the things as my dad will open up and share a story, I could imagine me coming to my dad and saying, You abandoned me. You weren’t there for me. Why did you do it? And immediately the defensive walls can come up, of course, yeah. Rather than simply entering into the space of like, Hey dad, I realize I’ve never heard your story. You mind sharing with me? Yeah. Got along the story journey. One of the things I was able to do is to share and ask more pointed questions in terms of what happened when x? But I didn’t start with what happened when X? I started with, I’d like to hear your story.
Maria Ross 09:46
I love that. Yeah, it’s all about really understanding someone’s context. And you know when you go you know whether you’re having a difficult performance review or you’re having a contentious budget conversation with a colleague. I always. That phrase of like, it’s not about going in with, here’s why I’m right and you’re wrong, right? It’s try to take that breath and ask the question, first, tell me how you got here. Tell me why you think this is the right approach. Tell me what you think is going on right now. Are you happy with the way your work is going? Right? Tell me how you’re feeling about it? And then you can have a conversation where that person’s feeling heard. So it kind of lowers the temperature a little bit too, doesn’t it? Oh, 100%
10:30
so I’m sorry, go ahead.
Maria Ross 10:31
No, I was going to ask you more about this conversational receptiveness, because that’s actually a new term I haven’t heard about. And what are some other you know, you mentioned a few other tips there. But what do people do to prepare for that, to know that they’re going to go into a conversation where they might be triggered?
Justin Jones-Fosu 10:47
Yes, one of the things we talk about often is that the first thing that people should do in those conversations around respectful disagreements happens before it even happens. And that’s, I love, the five pillars. I thought you would talk about mine. We actually have five pillars as well. And pillar number one is challenge your perspective. And it happens before any disagreement even occurs, because the more we exercise those muscles of hearing people’s perspective, going in, understanding and listening and learning from others, that it allows us in those moments, to actually hear them deeper. So a practical action item. So the circles of grace challenge is one of those things that we challenge leaders to do and to lead their companies and organizations with. We recently took the Ford family foundation through this. And the circles of grace challenge is simply this that every six to 12 months I go to events experiences, or I engage with people in either which I don’t know a lot about or I disagree with, and I’m going asking two questions. One, what did I learn about these events, experiences and their people? And two, what did I learn about myself? Now, what was transformative, what we did with the Ford family foundation is at the end of the six months, we did a debrief, and oh my gosh, it was amazing to hear some people like, wow, I never knew they chose to focus on constituents and people that they serve within their organization. It’s like I didn’t know this about them, or I had mislabeled or, wow, I still disagree with them, but I want to have more conversations, and that’s because the inverted U theory applies here perfectly. It normally applies to performance, but it’s been attached to learning that says there’s two places that people don’t learn effectively, when they think they know absolutely nothing and when they think they know absolutely everything. And so yeah, how do we get people on that learning journey? It’s to engage and to choose to intentionally hear someone else. Yeah, well, and
Maria Ross 12:38
I think that’s why that’s such an important aspect of empathetic leadership of those leaders who are empathetic and effective is they are able to put ego aside. They’re able to say, I may not know all the answers, and I’m going to be willing to invite other perspectives into the conversation, because they’re not threatening me, they’re just giving me information. Yes, and so I, you know, I know, I’m sure, with your leaders that you work with, I tried to deflate their myths about empathy being this fluffy. Woo, Woo. Oh, it’s me crying on the floor with my employees, and I say, why don’t you just think of it as information gathering? Yeah, think of it as a way to just play detective and figure out. You know, you’re probably wondering, What the heck is that person thinking in a negative way. How about turning that into a positive way? Of like, Well, I wonder what that person is thinking instead of what were they thinking, right? But, and that seems to, like, calm their nerves a little bit if they’re sort of very uptight. And I say because you can’t, if you’ve got all your stuff in your head, you can’t take on another person’s perspective without defensiveness or fear, because you feel like it’s a personal attack.
Justin Jones-Fosu 13:46
Yes, yeah, and this is so true, because we’ve treated communication like war, right? Even leaders, we go into meetings and we talk to the person ahead of time like, hey, I need you to really support me on x, right? And somebody else goes so we’re developing allies, and we go in instead of approaching it from this place pillar four, seek the gray. And we’ve been challenging leaders to start off their meeting, saying, when we leave this meeting, we should have created something that is new and has not been thought of before, because when we seek the gray, right? Yeah, I come from Ghana, we have these drum circles. In a drum circle, you’re not going to get the same beat without each and every single person there, and how do we contribute now? Why is that important? And one of the best books that my professors during my MBA had me read was a book called dialog, the art of thinking together. And it was so profound because it’s not about a and convincing this other person of a. It’s not about B, convincing other person to be is, how do we create C together? And if leaders can start off their meetings, if they can challenge in our one on ones with those direct reports, it allows them to people say, You know what, they actually want a different perspective. They want to hear varying point, because we have to create something new.
Maria Ross 14:57
We have to and also, if everyone thinks this. Same way, you’re going to miss opportunities and you’re going to overlook risk. If someone’s looking at the problem or the challenge or the opportunity in a different way, we see more things that we miss. And this is the thing, you know, we could have a whole other conversation about the DEI be backlash, but that’s all very much about the culture war. The smart companies are actually still embracing deib, because they understand that it actually helps their bottom line. Yes, it helps them win, yeah. So they’re like, No, this is about I want all the information about every opportunity and every risk, and I want people to be looking at this in different ways, so you guys can have your culture war, but our company is still going to invest in
Justin Jones-Fosu 15:41
this, and that’s what I love about see, you’re so brilliant. That’s what I love about you, because you work right? You know, my last book, the inclusive mindset, the whole focus is, this is not something that we should do. This is something that we can it’s not the EIB is not something extra. It’s just a part of our everyday life, and how do we create spaces where people want to come to work, where people want to come back home, right our family members and loved ones, where people want to talk to us as neighbors? It’s these spaces we’re able to engage with people in real, meaningful conversations, because it actually drives results. When our people feel like they can bring their full and best selves to work. They show up with more creativity. Show up with innovation. They show up contributing to ideas in different ways. Rather than fighting. Can I fully be me at work? Yeah, that’s one of the things I’ve had to get even as a leader of a team here of like, Wow, am I creating these spaces for my own team. Yeah, itself,
Maria Ross 16:42
I had a guest on the show, Michael Bock, who does a lot of work. He calls it idea Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, accessibility. He does a lot of work up in Canada and in the US around that work, and has written a few books. And he presents when he was on my podcast. But he also does this as a keynote, he talks about the costs of exclusion like he’s actually gotten it down to $1 amount of how much money companies waste when they don’t enable people to come to work as their true selves, and they don’t enable the people to have those conversations and connect with each other. And it’s, you know, it is, it’s impacting the bottom line. So it’s just smart business. So we’re going to take a quick break, and then I want to ask you about the dotted line dilemma and the illusion of asymmetric insight, which I believe are concepts from your books. I respectfully disagree, how to have difficult conversations in a divided world. We’ll be right back, and we’re back with Justin Jones Fauci, and we are getting into we just had a great conversation about how to have great conversations, basically. And I want to talk a little bit about this concept, the dotted line dilemma. Can you explain to us what that means and how that gets in our way? Yeah,
Justin Jones-Fosu 17:59
so that aligned dilemma simply, where we start filling in the gaps, right? It’s making statements Right? Like, if I said something to you, like drivers who drive on the left side of the street are but what depends, right? You start filling in the gaps depending on what country we’re in, yeah, and our brains want to fill in those moments. And that’s the same thing that we do with people, right? Is that we want to fill in. We want to complete the dotted line, because our brains want to conserve energy for things. It thinks it doesn’t know. Imagine this, right? Imagine you’re driving. You take this exit. Monday through Friday, you take this exit, and one day you’re supposed to go straight. What do you do? Take the exit
Maria Ross 18:42
a million times. Yeah,
Justin Jones-Fosu 18:45
right, and I’m ready to autopilot, conserving energy, and that’s what we do with people and our teams right right before we get to know them, we take the exit based on second or third hand information. We start filling in the dotted lines, and that’s one of the big dilemmas that we have. But how do we drive forward? Pun intended towards some really amazing team members, employees and community members, but one of the ways that we challenge people to do that is in what we call one MC over W, right? And one is MC over W is only math we’ll do today. But thank you for one meaningful connection per week, and that’s where you build into your calendar, maybe the 15 or 20 minutes you have to put it in there, where you intentionally go and hear someone’s story. You intentionally go and ask, what brought you to our company? What brought you to our team, what brought you to our city? And if that’s too much, because you’re like, oh my gosh, Justin, how much I have so much stuff to do that’s 52 point 14 times a year, then make it one meaningful connection per month, put the W up down. That’s when we think we’ve been challenging leaders over and over again. Is like, what would it look like for us to eradicate the open door policy from our organizations? Because Open Door implies passivity. Hey, if you. Eat me. I’m here. We’ve even created a virtual Open Door office. I’ll be on teams Tuesday through Thursday, three to five. But what if we instead implemented what we call an out the door policy, where we intentionally go out the door to hear and experience the stories of our people that allows us to get closer, that allows us to hear those proximity breeds of empathy.
Maria Ross 20:21
Oh my gosh. I love that. And that’s so actionable. Like, do what you can do to actually proactively. And it might feel I always say this, you know, it’s about going to the empathy gym, right? Just like any fitness routine to strengthen a muscle, it feels weird at first. It hurts. You might get sore. You’re gonna feel uncomfortable. So if you’ve never done that approach. The first day you as a leader, go and ask to make a connection with someone. They might be like, what’s going on? Am I in trouble? Like you’ve never done this before, and you can be transparent with people that, hey, I’m trying this new thing. I encourage you to try it as well. I’m trying to find a way for us to build better connections and build, you know, better engagement with each other. So I’m going to try this out. You’re not in trouble. I’m probably going to come to you. We’re going to, like, go have a coffee. I don’t know, but I think that’s it’s the fear for people of flipping to develop the new habits sometimes, because they feel self conscious about but I’ve always been this kind of leader, and now one day, I’m going to come in and I’m going to start talking to start talking to you about what you did for the weekend. And I’ve never asked you what you’ve done in the weekend, and you’re like, what is happening? Are there layoffs? What’s going on? Yeah,
Justin Jones-Fosu 21:28
it’s talking to me, yeah. And so
Maria Ross 21:32
being transparent about, hey, I’m working on my leadership. I’m developing my leadership. A that’s a great model for your team, that you’re you as the leader. Are working on your leadership. Yeah, and two like, make them part of the fun. Make it light. Make it something that you guys can laugh at, you know, something like that. But that is such a great actionable thing. Okay, tell us about this other thing that gets in the way of these connections and healthy conversations, which is the illusion of asymmetric insight.
Justin Jones-Fosu 22:00
Yes, so illusion of asymmetric insight is where I can paraphrase. It’s where I feel like I completely know you. I get you right, but there’s no way you can understand me. I’m just complex. And that’s the the research behind that is how we approach people, not only people, but also groups, right? Imagine, you know, you’re a dog person, and you’re like, I get why I love dogs, but you just never understand dogs. Dogs are just unique, right? And cat people are like, well, you know those cat people, we just are so unique, but dogs, I mean, they’re simple, right? It’s easy to understand, and that’s and unfortunately, what we do with people is that we go into conversations instead of treating it with what we call beginner mind, we treat it with like you’re simple to understand. I’m really complex, so let me engage, right? And what the research actually suggests is that some of that’s fueled by ego, right? We talk about these three cells, and one of those is superior self is that I just I know I’ve had more experience. I went to this college, and I’ve had this position, I am a leader, and that gives me respect, and actually no our humanity should give us respect, and us as leaders model that behavior so they lose asymmetric insight in ways that we resist. It is by challenging ourselves to say, wait a minute, this person is probably more nuanced than I I’m thinking right now, let me ask more questions instead of hurrying to fill in the line. I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to somebody, and you’re always trying to finish your statement before you said it, right? I’m
Maria Ross 23:31
guilty of it too. I’m guilty of it too, because I get so excited. I’m like, I just want to help you find the right word, right? So, yeah, they’re
Justin Jones-Fosu 23:38
like, I went to a really good like, restaurant, because, you know, they love to eat, and they were like Jim, because I was on the way home, right? But that’s the that’s one of the reasons why I choose it to engage and hear the power of people’s stories and asking we talk about the power of three, one way to challenge the illusion of asymmetric inside is with the power of three. And what we found in as people listen is that people aren’t doing deep listening. They’re doing distracted listening, and we’re stopping at the power of one or the power of the power of two. What do I mean by that? So if I’m Sam Marie, how’s your day today? You’re like, Oh, my day is fine. I’m like, my day is fine, too. Power of One, power of two. Mary, how’s your day today? Oh, my day is fine. What made your day fine? Oh, I heard this interesting bald history. I know that ball has power of two, where the power of three goes at least into that third level of the conversation to better hear, understand, and get a better understanding of complexity that might exist.
Maria Ross 24:28
Oh my gosh, I love it. And so how does this go over in these big companies, when you’re having these conversations, do you find that, is it a hard sell? Is it you know, you’re working with leaders that are a little skeptical this is going to help improve their team’s performance or their own leadership capability, like give us a little insight on it, on what they’re thinking and feeling as you’re going into these organizations and talking to them about this, absolutely, one of
Justin Jones-Fosu 24:53
the organizations we work with, Asia coach, and one of the things I love is we practice this power of three, right? And. So they had opportunity to actually lean into this. And in this always. I mean, in any organization, you have a variety of people. Some people are really eager and excited, like, Oh, this is awesome. And some people are like, Yeah, this really gonna work. Is this another one of those sandwich models? I’m gonna tell you something that sounds good, give you feedback and give you like, No, right? But when they start practicing it, that’s when you see the transformation happen. So give you a great example. So we do the power of three, and we ask a very meaningful question about something that’s shaped who they are. And so people are listening and they’re practicing, and what they find is that some people are deep listening, some people still want to jump in, and then the debrief, what they talk and find is like, wow. Like, not only did I feel like more at ease of just hearing their story versus trying to jump in, but the person who was actually sharing their story actually felt heard. They actually felt heard. And oftentimes this doesn’t happen all the time with every person, but sometimes there’s just tears. And the CEO of a company, he said to me, he’s like, I’ve been working with this person for 35 years, and I thought I knew everything, and I just heard something new that I never knew, wow, and that’s gonna allow me to lead them better. And that’s the power of deep listening instead of distracted listening. So when you’re one on ones, when you ask, how was your weekend, then they say, oh, you know, it was good, instead of stopping there, that’s what made it good. Oh, well, I was, you know, did soccer practice with kids? That’s like, wow. You know the soccer did you play soccer growing up? You see, what just happened is that people are talking about things that are important to them. The question is, are we really listening?
Maria Ross 26:37
Yeah, oh my gosh, I love it so much. So, you know, we talk a lot about curiosity on this show, Curiosity is the number one trait of empathic people and empathic leaders. And back to our you know, point earlier that this is about information gathering. You know, empathy is about trying to understand someone’s context, and no better way to do that than to ask questions and be curious. Yeah, so how? What are some of the tips that you have for the leaders or the teams that you work with to maybe they’re not naturally curious, maybe they’re uncomfortable being curious. What are some tips that you have around how they can cultivate their curiosity in a way that feels genuine and natural for them.
Justin Jones-Fosu 27:20
Well, what I will say, and be completely honest about this, is it takes practice. The same way your empathy muscles, right? You talk about the empathy gym, it takes practice. So even the power of three, which is actually great moment of cultivating curiosity as we take that further, is that sometimes you don’t know what to say. You don’t know the next phrase. Use the power phrase. Tell me more. Invite three
Maria Ross 27:43
magic words
Justin Jones-Fosu 27:47
to come to, like, Oh, wow. Like this person actually wants to hear what I’m talking about. And that’s one way the more I’ve done it right? Because initially, when I even did that in my own life, because guess what, Justin was a distracted listener, right? And I still sometimes struggle with it is it felt mechanical initially, but now it’s just become a part of who I am. So I have people, my friends, who know I talk about this, and they’re like, Oh, you just did the power three. I mean, I had no idea I did it, right? Because I’ve just started being more curious and saying, This is, oh my gosh, this phrase is etched in my head.
Maria Ross 28:21
It’s the magic, three magic words we talk about all the time. Tell me more. Yeah,
Justin Jones-Fosu 28:26
more. The phrase, even before that, for me, that that’s kind of pushed me into that lens, is that we should seek to be more interested than interesting, and when we come from that approach, how can I be more interested in the people I encounter, rather than interest interesting, it allows us to hear people. That’s one reason I hate networking events, right? Because people, it’s very transactional. It’s like you work, right? Rather than asking deeper questions and learning and hearing some if you’re feeling comfortable doing it, you’re like the many people who are learning something new, whether in your marriage, whether as a parent, whether and you’re learning Pickleball for the first time or so, that thing may be you don’t know how to do it, and that’s why you take the tortoise approach. Yeah, the tortoise approach is not to be fast and showy and flashy and have it all together. It’s that I’m going to be strategic and steadily moving forward, and that’s leadership.
Maria Ross 29:23
So good, so so good. I think we’re going to leave it at that, because that is amazing, and I think that’s a really good last nugget and tip to leave people with. To your point, it does take practice, and just because it feels uncomfortable doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. So leave it there, all right. Well, this has been such a great conversation. Justin, thank you so much. I definitely want to encourage folks to check out the book. I respectfully disagree how to have difficult conversations in a divided world, which, as we talked about, is not just for leaders and business people, but for basically anyone who’s trying to have better conversations and relationships. So we will have all your. Links in the show notes. But for folks that are on the go, Where is one of the better places for them to get in touch with you and find out more about your work.
Justin Jones-Fosu 30:07
Find out more at how to respectfully disagree.com.
Maria Ross 30:11
Love it how to and we’ll put that link in there too. Thanks for your time. It was a pleasure to connect. Thank you Maria, and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do, rate, review, follow, share with a colleague or friend, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
