280. The Key to Effective Leadership: Asking Better Questions with Gary Cohen

Every leader knows the rush of validation when someone brings you a problem and you solve it on the spot. But Gary Cohen, founder of CO2 Coaching and author of Just Ask Leadership, learned that this habit can limit your team’s potential and make you the organizational bottleneck. While growing his company from a $4,000 investment to 2,200 employees, he and his business partner became overwhelmed by constant questions. The solution wasn’t giving faster answers—it was becoming question-askers instead of answer-givers.

In interviews with over 100 exceptional leaders – from Fortune 500 executives to four-star generals – Cohen discovered they all had a moment where they shifted from being “the answer person” to “the question person.” For General Jack Chain, a promotion made him realize his role had fundamentally changed. For ConAgra’s Mike Harper, moving from engineering to R&D forced him to lead experts whose knowledge far exceeded his own. These shifts inspired frameworks like the GPS model (Goal-Position-Strategy) for focused conversations and the PEAK model, which guides leaders through four questioning styles – Professor, Innovator, Judge, and Director – to spark breakthroughs.

Cohen’s most powerful insight is that most team members already know the answers. They don’t need you to solve their problems—they need you to help them uncover solutions themselves. When they do, ownership skyrockets, and so does performance. The path to multiplying your leadership impact starts with changing your identity from “the teller” to “the asker.” Everything else follows from that transformation.

🌐 Connect with Gary:
• Website: https://co2coaching.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garycohen/

📚 You can purchase Gary's book on Amazon:
• Just Ask Leadership: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071621776/

Chapters

• 0:00 The Answer Trap in Leadership
• 9:47 From Bottleneck to Multiplier
• 16:49 Gary's Journey With Just Ask Leadership
• 27:04 The Power of Letting Go of Knowing
• 37:32 GPS and PEAK Question Frameworks
• 46:04 Changing Your Identity From Teller to Asker

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

Have you ever noticed how, as leaders, we often fall into the trap of thinking our job is to have all the answers? It feels good, doesn't it? That quick hit of validation when someone comes to you with a problem and we solve it on the spot. But here's the catch the more answers we give, the more dependent our teams become. Before we know it, we're the bottleneck. Today's guest, gary Cohen, knows this story all too well. He's the founder of CO2 Coaching and author of Just Ask Leadership why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions. In this episode, gary takes us inside his research with more than 100 top leaders, from Fortune 500 executives to four-star generals, to reveal how they transformed from answer people into leaders who multiply the capability of those around them. If you've ever wondered how to stop being the bottleneck and to empower your team to solve their own challenges, this episode is for you.

Mick Spiers: 1:06

Hey, everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Gary Cohen. Gary is the founder of CO2 Coaching and the author of a book called Just Ask Leadership why great managers always ask the right questions, and that's what we're going to be focusing on today. What does it mean to ask better questions and ask better questions at the right time. What do better questions look like and how might you start doing that, building that into your leadership practice? So I'm dying to hear Gary's views here. So, without any further ado, gary, please say hello to the audience and give us a little flavor of your background and tell us what inspired you to do the work you do today and this book about asking better questions?

Gary Cohen: 1:55

Hello Mick, hello audience, it's good to be here on your program. A little about my background I started a business with a business partner, rick Diamond, and we started it many years ago and in doing so we started with $4,000. We both wrote a check for $2,000 and we grew it to 2,200 people and took it public, and that got me very interested in the topic asking questions. I know that Rick and I started out by asking questions that were really related to us making decisions and understandings and knowledge, and what I came to understand over time, as did Rick, is that our questions could move people and if we only asked them to gather information, it was a disservice because what was happening was people would come to us with their questions and then wait for our answer, and sometimes we had them, sometimes we didn't. We'd hire consultants, we'd go do research and we'd come back to them. And we became the bottleneck because when you're going from two of us to 2,200 people and for a number of those years we were growing at a compounded rate of about 50% a year, so doubling every two years in size and so you quickly become a bottleneck and you realize that the questions are the way to move forward because it shifts the responsibility from you as the bottleneck to the person that you're asking them to.

Gary Cohen: 3:47

And so when I Gary the business, I left on sabbatical and never went back. But I decided I wanted to write a book on leadership and most of the topics are really well picked over and everybody keeps trying but rewriting similar things. And at that time I think there might have been one or two books out there on asking questions, but none that quite had it the way I was thinking about it. So I went out and interviewed about 100, 120 different leaders. This is from people like Jeff Chain, who was a four-star general he ran the Air Force and all nuclear armaments and Mike Harper, who grew ConAgra from 500 million to 20 billion, and I asked all of them what they thought of asking questions and what I learned was that all of them started off, you know, using it kind of in the same way Rick and I did, which was simply to gather information. But then there was a pivotal moment For, like Mike Harper, it was when he moved from production.

Gary Cohen: 5:08

He was an engineer by training and he was in charge of a plant and he knew what to do there, but then he was in charge of Pillsbury, he moved to R&D for food and on the R&D side he really struggled because everybody there had a PhD in food science and he knew nothing about it.

Gary Cohen: 5:30

And that's when Gary he said he really started to learn questions as a leadership skill, which was to ask questions to get people to move forward in a manner that would be helpful to them and demonstrate leadership and vulnerability. And Jack Chain said that one day when he was promoted he realized he went from the answer guy to the question guy because his daughter had once asked him what do you do for a living? And he thought about it and he said I answer questions. And then when he changed jobs, he came home that day and he realized he was now the asker of questions and so many, many lessons in that. And you multiply that by a hundred plus interviews, I became quite knowledgeable way more knowledgeable than I was going into it, even though I realized it was the difference.

Mick Spiers: 6:36

I want to unpack each one of them, but I'll start Mick with a bit of a summary. I'm going to say that a lot of leaders fall into a trap that you were talking about early on there, which is, as leaders, we feel like we need to have the answers and that our job is to unlock our team by answering their questions. Right, so it's a common trap. Sometimes it can be almost a need, a validation need For me to add value here. I need to be able to answer people's questions. But to stop and pause and go well, is that really serving your people? Well? Which leads me to chapter two, which is in a 22,000 people organization, if the two of you are answering the question, you are the bottleneck. So how do you flip that script to become a multiplier instead of the person that's putting a cap on the productivity of these 22,000 people?

Mick Spiers: 7:29

And the third one's really interesting. And we 2200 people that's a lot of productive hours in a day, and you're the one that's I'm going to exaggerate here. They're coming to ask me oh Gary, I don't know what sandwich I should have today. What sandwich should I have? Imagine that, right, so I'm exaggerating, but on a business point of view it gets a little bit like that. And then the third one is really interesting and we do need to get to that as we go through this process is it's not just asking the questions. The purpose is not to gain more information, and there's a good chance. If you've been in your industry for a long time, you already know the answer. But you're still asking the question, but for a different purpose. So let's come back to that first part, what Ariel O'Farrell calls the manager's dilemma. People are coming to ask you questions and your thought, your instant thought, is oh, I know the answer to that and I'm going to reflectively give the answer to the team's questions. How do you stop yourself, gary?

Gary Cohen: 8:28

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. First was you know I could start with my own story, which was you're just burdened, okay. And now that I've coached well over probably 400 CEOs is you get to see the pattern right? And the pattern is that people are feeling overwhelmed, they really do feel like a bottleneck, that they come to me as a coach exhausted from this, and so they're telling their story. And when they tell their story, it just goes on and on in a pleasant way, not in an unpleasant way, about what interchange they had with a particular employee. And I'm always asking and what did they say? Right, and they focus on what they said as the leader versus what is the employee saying back. And that's very telling to me. And so I'm like, okay, I understand what you said and it seems like all makes sense. What is it you might have asked that would have communicated the same thing, but had the employee communicate to you what they needed to do, or what they were going to do, or how they were going to do or how they were going to do it, because I have found the straightest distance between two points is not a straight line, it's actually the other person's way, and I remind folks of this all the time, which is that what they think is efficient is telling them how they have done it.

Gary Cohen: 10:04

But so many things change when people are doing things. The personnel has changed, the resources available to the company have changed, and so the context really does matter who's on your team, who's not on your team, and when you're asking a question where you assume you know the answer, you're asking leading questions. So I relate this to Socrates, and Socrates was a scholar in Athens and he was offered a hemlock to put himself to death Y so Z suicide, but his friends were happy to give it to him. I don't know if that's true, but it really adds to the story because he asked questions that he already knew the answer to, and it really you could tell when you read the dialogues that it's frustrating to the other person that you're playing that game with. It's a bit of cat and mouse. And so, as a leader, to move to the idea that, even if you know I'm going to let go of that, knowing to hold it in a different way, I'm going to hold it lightly and ask questions of wonder and look at what that wonder will conjure up in the other person. So I think the best way is to give you an example of this.

Gary Cohen: 11:30

So I'm sitting across from a client I met many years ago, very talented executive, and he had just been promoted into a general manager role at a business unit of a Fortune 500 company. And the sales manager, the VP of sales, calls while we're at lunch. He answers he knows I'm sitting across from him, so he's particularly trying to ask the right questions. And he hung up the phone and he said so how did I do? And he said so, how did I do? I said you know how long have you been responsible for sales? He goes I'm not, I'm responsible for the whole business. He said how long is your vice president of sales? Well, in this role? About 15 years, and before that he was in another company for seven, and before that eight. So he's been at it a long time. And I said you presume to know sales with somebody who actually knows it. Well, he says how would you expect me to deal with that? I said assume that you don't need to know his answer and that he already has it. He just needs to be reminded that he has it. He goes well, okay, let's try. So he picks up the phone, he calls him back hey, when you have been faced with situations like in . the do? And it was so funny. The guy says got it, thank you, bye. And so I always am reminded of this, which is the sales leader was feeling stuck at the moment. He needed to be unstuck and he didn't need an answer that his general manager was going to give him. He needed an answer that he could give himself and he actually had it. He'd been, he had too many years at it to not have it. I think you said that earlier, mick, in our conversation how sometimes we have that history and we just know. So for folks out there, I think that the answer is let go of your knowing. It's the first thing, and it's so hard because we are so addicted Our ego, we're addicted to knowing. It's like every time we get to give an answer it feels so good that we want to do that. And so how would you reframe the thing you're going to share with somebody into a question? And into a question you might not know the answer to so remembering it's not necessarily a straight line for them like it is for you. You know it's so fun when you're writing a book, because you come across stories that just carry the message so loudly that you wouldn't necessarily pay attention to earlier.

Gary Cohen: 25:24

Yeah, very good point. So there's this story of the Liberty Ship, and the Liberty Ship was the turning point of World War II. What was happening is Yeah, very good. the U-boats were attacking the merchant marines that were sending cargo to the lines in Europe and it went from like in 1940, u-boats well, I'm sorry, before that it went in 39, 200 ships were sank to by 42, 1600 ships were being sunk, and that's a lot of ships being sunk. And if you consider at the time it took eight months to build on one of these ships that they called the Liberty Ship, and they built them in England. They knew how to build them. They had been building ships for over a century, well, over a century, in England and the US. Very few ships were ever built in the US by that time, and so they're trying to figure out how they're going to keep up getting supplies to the front line with ships when they were running out of ships because the U-boats were sinking so fast.

Gary Cohen: 15:33

Yeah you might know the name Kaiser, like Kaiser Permanente, he was quite an innovative industrialist at the time and he said send me the plans to build one of these ships, and I think Cargill did the same thing. But this story revolves around Kaiser, because Kaiser gets the plans and they ask can we send people who know how to build this ship to you? So boat builders, no, no, no, we'll figure it out on our own. And it was quite clever of him because he did not want to be held back by the constraints of shipbuilding in England, and so this redesign that he did was like prefabricated parts, introducing assembly line techniques, using these settling torches and replaced rivets with welding and all the answer she looking for. sorts of things. And you know, the ships of England were built to last. And Kaiser goes you know the average length of a ship is only going to be out there. You know months, not years, so we really don't need to build a ship that lasts for decades or a century, because the likely road of this ship will be to be taken down. And so it took eight months in England to build one of these ships. For a publicity stunt, kaiser got it down to four and a half days. So imagine going from the way in which we do things today is eight months to four and a half days. The average was two weeks for the Kaiser organization to build these ships, but it all changed because of the questions. They were not locked into how things were, they were locked into the opportunity and wonder of how they could change those things. And I think it's such a I want to say riveting story about boat building. But you know, you can apply that to just about anything and we did it in our business At the time.

Gary Cohen: 17:43

We were in the Gary center business and there were these things called least cost routing. This is when you had AT&T, mci, sprint, gte and the like and they all had different pricing based upon what you called. So you would buy a switch which was about a million dollars to route these calls to the lowest cost network and that's great, except if you remember the story, we started with $4,000. We did not have a million dollars at the time put in lease cost routing. So when we were getting a tour of somebody's facility we asked them to explain lease cost routing to us Gary and they did. And so we came up with a patch panel which was to plug our phone stations into a particular network focus all of our calls from, say, minnesota to Michigan, and we'd use MCI and then that night we were going to call California where Sprint might have been the cheaper carrier and we would switch it to that. But it was all about asking and continuing to ask and driving out what is behind the thing that we need to accomplish, and we did that through questions.

Mick Spiers: 18:59

Really good, gary. So the thing that I'm taking away there if you do find yourself like listening to Gary and what he's saying here, if you find yourself being that bottleneck where you are just giving people answers and you've got a queue of people at the door, you are the bottleneck in the business and by flipping over to a more question-asking scenario, you're going to become the multiplier in the business. You're going to unlock a lot of people far more in that way. The second part there is that open-mindedness that you might have a preconceived idea of what the answer is as you ask the question. But if you have that stuff in your head, confirmation bias might kick in and you might only hear what you want to hear. You might only hear what confirms what you believed before the conversation started, whereas if you keep an open mind I'm hearing two dimensions here, gary From the non-directive coaching point of view, there's a good chance that the person already had the answer locked away somewhere in the brain.

Mick Spiers: 19:59

They just needed someone to bounce ideas off so that they could decode their brain to oh yeah, now I know what to do. And when they have that moment of realization when they go oh, now I know what to do. They'll take great ownership of that, because now it's come from them instead of from you, right? So they're not dependent on you anymore. They're now off and they're taking ownership of the answer, because they came up with the answer themselves. You didn't give them the answer. They come up with the answer and they take great ownership.

Mick Spiers: 20:28

Yeah then I'm hearing this co-creation element that by keeping that open mind, you're going to discover something new by making sure that you're asking the right questions that uncover. Well, actually, we're not trying to build a ship in eight months, we're trying to build a ship in two weeks. So I need to ask the questions that lead us to that purpose. So I'm thinking it's a non-directed coaching, that the purpose of the coaching is to help the person declutter their own mind, to remove their own interference. The answer is there and you just need to help them dust away the interference so that they can get on with it.

Mick Spiers: 21:06

And then the second part is, if we're asking very purposeful questions, Gary going to get to. What is the real challenge here? Because someone might come to you and ask you a question that the answer is really obvious, but they didn't tell you that what they were really trying to do was over here, and you would have asked a completely different question if you knew what the purpose was. So how does that sit with you, this non-directive coaching and the ownership of decluttering their mind but then also making sure that there's a purpose behind the question mind?

Gary Cohen: 21:37

but then also making sure that there's a purpose behind the question. Yeah, so I can't help but do this to you, mick, in your career, where you've gotten to a point where you kind of knew the answer and you didn't want to go to the question, what was holding you back from asking? Because we all were there at some point. Do you remember facing that?

Mick Spiers: 21:59

Yeah, I do. I used to think and I hope I've reframed this, gary there is an exception. I'll tell you about the exception in a second. So I found myself in the situation where I thought in my own mind that by giving the instant answer, that I was the productivity machine, because if someone came to me with a question I could give them an answer in 30 seconds and then off they go. Their day is sorted. But what I didn't realize is all I taught them was dependence. And the next day they came and asked me the question again, whereas once I flipped the script and once I started to ask better questions, guess what? They became self-sufficient. They didn't have to come and ask me that same question again 27 times. They found it themselves. They developed their own problem-solving skill. They discovered they actually knew the answer the whole time, and then off they go and they went. But I was stuck and the mindset I was stuck on is I thought that was the answer to productivity was to be the quick answer, and then I realized it was actually a limiting belief.

Gary Cohen: 23:01

What did it feel like, though? Like when you gave the answer? What was the feeling inside, this sensation that you felt like I've got this answer for you. Here it is.

Mick Spiers: 23:13

Yeah, that's a great question and it was a validation because I know my industry very well. So there was this feeling of pride that you know. Person X came to me with a question and I answered it in 15 milliseconds. There was an element of personal validation of I added value today until later that I realized that I got more pride when I switched it the other way and when they came to me and said X, y, z and I flipped it back to them as a question when they found the answer themselves. It gave me this much bigger joy than the personal validation of proving that I was smart. Does? make sense?

Gary Cohen: 23:52

It does make sense, and we find it all the time with people because they're like I love coaching, because I get a bit of that hit, right, I'm not here to lead somebody, I am there to coach somebody, and so if I know something, I'll share it. They can use it not use it, right, but when you lead it's different. You are totally trying to help that person be self-sufficient and independent, right, and letting go of that, just, it feels so good, I feel so smart, I feel so valid that you've had all these many successful episodes with all these thought leaders, right? I kind of have in my mind it's the Oprah effect, right, which is, after a while, you become smarter than your guests because you've interviewed so many people.

Gary Cohen: 24:51

How can you not be, oh, that's Gary so-and-so or that's like this, and so there's a craving we have as human to feel validated, and so that's what we're fighting with in ourselves and why it takes a while to move from the no word to the asker. And let's face it, schools, like they, teach us to know they want Gary the answer, they want the right answer, right, and the right answer doesn't actually mean the right answer. It means the right answer according to that teacher yeah, very good point.

Mick Spiers: 25:24

Different is not wrong, different is not wrong. So if we, if we think that there's only one answer, we're keeping kidding ourselves.

Gary Cohen: 25:30

Yeah, very good yeah, my daughter was taking a test many, many years ago and she was studying Mandarin and we were reviewing the questions she might get and it said what you can see from outer space in China and what they want is the wall right, you can't see the wall. I've actually called a friend of mine who's an astronaut and said can you see the wall? No, you can't see the wall. It's too thin. You could see, like the highways in LA because they're so wide, but you can't see the wall Right. But so she goes to school, takes the test, and I said so would you put down? I said the wall. I said why did you do that? She goes, that was yeah.

Gary Cohen: 26:19

So people often ask questions that are leading that they want you to get to and they teach us this in school. And so we come out of school, we get our first job, you raise your hand or you stand up or you speak up in a meeting and they're happy that you have a really good answer, a really good answer right. And so you start moving your career along and at first it really does help you. It moves you forward, but at a certain point there is always a point, and it's different at different organizations. You need to switch, because that thing that got you there won't get you to the next place, and what they have found is, statistically, that people who move to the question style as they move into more senior level jobs do much better, they perform better, they're paid better, and so it becomes the question rather than the answer.

Mick Spiers: 27:15

Yeah, very Gary, gary. So how do we make sure that we are asking the right question, right? So there's going to be people listening to the show going yeah, sounds interesting. But if they are in the situation where they feel like they're asking a question that they already know the answer to, how do they check themselves at the door and go? Well, hang on a second. Let's keep open-minded, first of all, but secondly, how do we make sure we're asking the right questions, and can you give us some examples of what a good set of questions might look like, gary?

Gary Cohen: 27:46

Well, I'll give you an easy . acronym to use, but it's not the best model. And then I'll give you the co2coaching. com best model, which is a little harder to use GPS, just like the GPS device in the car, on your phone. It's goal position strategy. So you ask goal questions to begin with, which is even to yourself, before the conversation started. What's my goal here, you know, am I trying to teach, coach, educate, move the person forward? What is my goal? Who's the decision maker in this situation? Next is what's the kind position, because often people forget what the position is, and if you know from where you start, then where are you going to go? And so then, what strategy am I going to use to get there? So then the questions are strategy questions. So GPS is a really good tool that I have found in a pinch where you might go.

Gary Cohen: 28:48

The one I Gary have spent years developing is called PEAK, and it stands for Perspective, evaluation, action and Knowledge, and so if you think of perspective at the top and evaluation at the bottom, and then knowledge over to the left and action to the right, okay, I thought those were going to be the questions that people asked. They were perspective questions, evaluative questions, knowledge questions and action questions. And I was dead wrong because I created the model thinking that they were going to fall into those four categories. And so I went out to all those hundred plus leaders that I interviewed and I said what are the best questions you ask during a one-on-one meeting, during an ops meeting, a strategy meeting? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it came back and all but one or two questions fit neatly into the quadrants. And the quadrants are the professor, and the professor is one who gathers information. It's kind of current, historical and it's divergent thinking.

Gary Cohen: 29:57

The innovator is the one who moves to action. Right, and they do it. It's future-oriented and it's also divergent. Then we go to the bottom quadrant of judge, and judge is trying to form a conclusion, trying to be convergent with current or past knowledge through the questions they ask, and the last one is the director. So I always think of this person like the COO, and they're asking to move to action and they're being convergent and future-oriented, like what are the top three things we need to do to accomplish this? Be an example of that. So you're going okay, that's kind of complicated. How do I get to see this if I'm a listener, because just hearing it probably is a little bit overwhelming and I okay, that's kind of complicated. How do how do I get to see this if I'm a listener, because just hearing it probably is a little bit overwhelming, and I understand that is. You can log on to our website under resources and there's the absolutely free self-assessment. You can do self-assessment at 360.

Gary Cohen: 30:59

I decided I wasn't in the business of selling this as a service, so we just give it away, and I hired people from Stephen Covey's organization and somebody who helped build the Wilson Learning model to help me build this and it takes seven minutes and you can find out what style you are. Now here's the really interesting thing and I didn't realize this until one day I was giving a speech and it's true which is we're all one of these styles predominantly, we can change. So it's not like Myers-Briggs or Enneagram or any of those disks where they say it would take a life-changing incident to have you change. What it is is. It's a style that you have preference for and because you have a preference for it, you use it all the time. My natural tendency is to be the innovator, so I ask action-oriented questions with great perspective, like how can we go do this, you know, and people are used to that. However, over time I've trained myself

Mick Spiers: 32:10

to try to become more The the Project, mickspiers. com if I can move to the judge, Sedek then I wind up getting professor and director for free because of how we think of these things. So Joan you Gozon from Gerald Calibo to ask 25% of Sei Spiers questions, because you're stuck into this style, to having 100%. And what's so The fun? This is just. You know, it's a little bit of an ego thing for me. I admit it that when I'm reading books and they're always like the questions, the answer, and then they go proceed to tell you everything right. So I find that funny. But what's more interesting is if you start

Gary Cohen: 32:46

lining up the questions they ask throughout the book, they're usually stuck into a style and they're not even aware of that stuckness.

Mick Spiers: 32:57

I can definitely see how that would happen, and it's a good one that I like what you're saying there about intentionally stepping out of your natural style to enrich the way that you might go so you don't get stuck. That's really interesting, gary, so let me share with you what was bouncing around my head as you were talking. So GPS caught my attention. So goal position, strategy, and I was thinking here of. People are going to come to you with questions and quite often they might either come to you with word salad, a five-minute problem statement of blah, blah, blah, or they might come to you with one specific question. How do I do this If you don't stop and ask a GPS-style question? Actually, what are you trying to achieve here? You might answer the question straight away, but you didn't actually help them achieve their goal. So a goal-oriented question of what are you really trying to achieve, a position-based questions on where are you today and where do you want to be, and a strategy-based question on how do you think you might get there. I think that is powerful.

Mick Spiers: 33:56

And then this peak model asking questions about perspectives so that you can get different perspectives so we have a richer understanding of the current situation. Evaluative questions as to what is that telling us about the problem that we're facing today? The knowledge-based questions on how is it enriching our knowledge? What did we know before today? What do we know after this conversation? So our knowledge base is, it's expanding, but it's also I like that converging thing that you said you're also filtering as well in that knowledge.

Mick Spiers: 34:27

And then the action-oriented. So what are our priorities and what are our options? I think if you think about that and I like what you said about you know think about the questions that you find yourself asking Do you always gravitate to only one of those four dimensions? Asking do you always gravitate to only one of those four dimensions? And you've got me thinking about it, by the way, gary. I'm going to think about that for the rest of today and to make sure that you you experiment with some of the other styles to get a richer understanding. How does that sit with you, gary?

Gary Cohen: 34:55

yeah, there, there's a couple things that come to mind is one is we have found, when somebody is stuck so say, you're in a board meeting, a team meeting, and the team is stuck Usually one of these roles isn't being filled. So one of these styles, and so what I tend to do when I see the stuckness is I start writing down the questions people have and I put them into the quadrant. I'm not this nerdy all the time, but when I'm stuck I get nerdy, and so I find often not always often that the question from the quadrant that's not being asked of is the thing that frees us up. So that's a pretty powerful move. The other move that we've learned over time one of our coaches, Tom Schwick, who is just an amazing operator, and he said Gary, I really think the Z format is the way to go, and I have no idea what he's talking about he goes I've been playing with this and you should ask professor questions first, right? So what organizational assumptions might need to be challenged? That might be a professor question. It's open-ended, it's exploratory and it's historical.

Gary Cohen: 36:19

Then you ask an innovator question what would you do if time and funds were unlimited? Okay, perspective and forward looking Okay. So we're going from professor to innovator, then we move diagonally to judge where it's convergent, and past or current. What is the most important consideration here? Okay, and then the final one is the director question, which is both action and convergent and future oriented. How can we best leverage our resources? And so I'm just winging it on the questions, but the idea is that when you're working through something with someone, going in that order actually winds up unlocking them in a different frame, and so by doing that, you get more potentiality of the solution sets or directions that they're getting, and it covers all the bases. And so what we're teaching our clients is do the zigzag or the Z professor, innovator, judge, director and for those who are still going, like, what is he talking about? You can find the peak model on that resource page of our website.

Mick Spiers: 37:40

All right, we'll put the link to that in the show notes, gary, because I think that is going to help people if they've got a little bit of a guide as to how they can do that. A little cheat sheet, I guess, might be the best way to think about that. So I want to double down on something that we said earlier is that if you follow these models, first of all, you're going to be surprised how smart your team really are. So if you think that you need to put the answer to every question, you're not giving your chance to your team for them to show what they know right, and you're going to be surprised that they do know the answers and you're just helping them declutter their library so that they can find the answer. The answer is there, and when they find the answer themselves I said this before they'll then take greater ownership instead of just doing what the boss told them to do.

Mick Spiers: 38:27

It's an idea, and when it's your idea, you take great ownership and you go for it. And then what I'm hearing you in this boardroom situation is we're now co-creating an answer that none of us could have done individually. We're smarter together when we're listening to each other and we co-create something that is a far better answer than any individual could have come up with, and then we're off to the races.

Gary Cohen: 38:50

You know it really made sense back in the day, telling it really did. Like the people at the top were just super educated, they had the resources. You know, they knew where to go, or they knew somebody who knew where to go for that information. Today, today, just today, 6 000 new books were published and yesterday 6 000 books were published. That's new books, right. So there, there is no end to the amount of knowledge that is being spread. I have no idea what the Google hit rate is anymore, but you know trillions right of searches and now it's not just that, it's chat GPT. So one's access to knowledge and information has dramatically change, like if you go back in time and you said, okay, you know, in the 18th century a person average lifetime okay, is the equivalent of one week of the New York Times in knowledge. So I mean you know it took 300,000 years for humans raised to accumulate 12 billion bytes. This amount of information is doubling every six months now.

Mick Spiers: 40:08

Yeah, wow, that's mind-blowing. And you were just talking about ChatGPT and you did make me think of this as well. I think I read yesterday that ChatGPT is now the third most used website in the world, behind Google and YouTube. But have a think about this from a leadership point of view. What's the most common thing people type into Google Questions? What's the most common thing people type into YouTube Questions?

Mick Spiers: 40:35

And for people that are going to make the most out of ChatGPT, the answer to get the most out of ChatGPT is the question you ask. It's being a prompt engineer. The prompt that you give ChatGPT is whether you get gobbledygook back or you get something useful back. It's the same thing as a leader. If you're asking better questions, you're going to get better answers. This is really good. All right, gary, this has been a fascinating conversation.

Mick Spiers: 41:04

I'm going to draw us to a close now. I'm going to re-emphasize a few things as we go to our wrap-around. So if you are the answer to every question in your business, you are the bottleneck, and if you can flip from being the answer guy to the question guy or the answer girl to the question girl, you're going to become the multiplier. You're going to be the one that can unlock things for people. Chances are they already know the answer and you're just helping them find the answer. And when they find the answer, they'll take great ownership and off they go.

Mick Spiers: 41:31

Make sure that they're clever questions, right. So GPS goal position strategy or peak perspective, evaluative, action-oriented or knowledge-based questions. And if you find yourself trapped in one quadrant, go to Gary's resource so that you can help take this kind of zigzag model to help you unstuck where your own questions are. You get stuck too. So help yourself get unstuck to ask better questions and you're going to be surprised just how much your team know, how much pride they take in their work and what you can co-create together when you're asking better questions. And you're not presuming that you know the answer as you ask the questions. So you're keeping that open mind as to where all of this might go. So you've got some clear actions. Have a think about that.

Gary Cohen: 42:17

I have one more, just a quick, because I was hearing you play that back. It was great, by the way, so thank you for that. It's nice to be heard. The idea is like when you're a student in school, you have an identity. Right, your identity is I'm a student. And then you get into the professional world. You no longer identify as a student, do you? What do you identify as? Identify as a student, do you? What do you identify? As A worker, whatever the position is, but it's not student. So you've changed your identity. What we're asking for from your listeners is changing your identity from the teller to the asker and making that move. That mental move is the move. Everything else is noise. If you can change yourself from the teller to the asker.

Mick Spiers: 43:10

That's a great framing, Gary. I really love it. So that's your call to action today. So you find yourself telling all the time reframe your identity. As you said it before, I went from question guy to answer guy or question girl to answer girl, right? So reframe your identity. I really like that and that will be the powerful unlocking that you can make. All right, Gary, I'd like to take us now to our wrap-up round. So these are the same four questions that we asked all of our guests. So what's the one thing you know now, Gary Cohen, that you wish you knew when you were 20.

Gary Cohen: 43:43

I was on a committee at Tulane to bring in speakers and one of the speakers we brought in I'm forgetting his name, but he was a person who studied population growth and he told us so this would have been early 1980s that the population was going to 3 billion to 10 billion. And of course we all go, yeah, yeah, yes, and it was kind of so what? But the old me today, talking to the young me then, would say pay attention, Go where the trend is, Go into a business that leverages that growth. And I knew that. I had the knowledge, but I did not have the intellectual connectedness to that point that I wish I would have known. And there's, I'm sure, many equivalents of that today. For all of us, with what? The next 30 years?

Mick Spiers: 44:44

Yeah, that's an interesting challenge for you, gary, and you got me thinking about. You know, what did I not pay attention to 30 years ago? That's an interesting question. What's more interesting is what am I not paying attention to today that's going to be impacting 30 years from now? That's a great question. Okay, what's your favorite book, gary?

Gary Cohen: 45:04

Oh my gosh, I am a reader so I just read, read, read, read, read. Favorite fictional book Jeffrey Archer, cain and Abel. Just, I loved it, I always loved it, and I've read every book in between. So that would be on the fiction side, on the nonfiction side. So that would be on the fiction side. On the nonfiction side, oh gosh, I'm overwhelmed by. The most consumable of her books is Mind Traps, and she takes the adult development theory, which for those of us using it isn't so complicated, but those who don't need to use it every day, it's complicated, and so she makes it quite simple by saying here are seven identity traps that we have. Okay, mind traps that get us stuck, and I find it very useful for people.

Mick Spiers: 46:12

Yeah, I like it. I don't know that one, so I'm going to look at it myself. I'm going to read that one myself. Thank you, Gary. What's your favorite quote?

Gary Cohen: 46:19

A word is dead when it is said. Some say, I say it just begins to live that day. And who was that? That was, I'm forgetting the author of it, that's a very powerful one as well.

Mick Spiers: 46:32

And finally, gary, there's going to be people that want to do this, they want to go. Yeah, I have fallen into these traps that Gary's talking about. How do people find you if they'd like to know more about you, your services, the book, the model how do they find you?

Gary Cohen: 46:46

I'm pretty easy to find Gary B Cohen. You could type that in to any browser. You can also go to co2coachingcom and find us, find me, find my team A whole bunch of nerdy. We love learning, we just love learning. And then we love applying that learning to people so that they can outperform in building their businesses.

Mick Spiers: 47:15

Yeah, brilliant, gary. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for your gift today, the gift of your time, your knowledge, your wisdom, and for inspiring us into action to rethink and reframe who we are as leaders, and to giving us some very practical things that we can put in practice today to become a better leader and unlock possibilities for our teams. Thank you so much.

Gary Cohen: 47:36

Thanks, mate, I really appreciate the time.

Mick Spiers: 47:39

What a powerful reminder from Gary Cohen that leadership is less about knowing and more about asking. When we let go of the ego hit that comes from having the answer and instead ask purposeful, open-minded questions, we shift from being the bottleneck to being the multiplier. We build teams that think for themselves, own their results and discover capabilities they didn't even know they had. Gary's GPS and peak frameworks give us practical tools to guide any conversation, whether you're coaching a direct report, running a strategy session or leading through uncertainty. So here's your challenge for this week the next time someone comes to you for an answer, pause and turn it into a question. Watch how the dynamic changes.

Mick Spiers: 48:31

In the next episode, we're going to be joined by Scott Bergmeier, founder and CEO of the Become More group, and he's going to talk to us about the multiplier effect and cultivating leaders who create other leaders. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Project at mickspearscom. A huge call out to Faris Sadek for his video editing of all of our video content, and to all of the team at TLP Joanne Goes On, gerald Calabo and my amazing wife Say Spears. I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to the Leadership Project YouTube channel, where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey, as we learn together and lead together.