How To Master The Power Of Questions With Sean Grace

As leaders, we often default to providing answers when what our teams truly need are better questions. In this episode, I sit down with Sean Grace, a seasoned communication consultant and author of The Art of the Question, to explore the pivotal role of questions in leadership, creativity, and problem-solving. Sean shares why many leaders lose their natural curiosity, how societal norms shape this behavior, and what we can do to reclaim the art of asking.

We dive into practical techniques for crafting impactful questions, such as the “why-to-how” shift and the communication wheel, and discuss how these tools can transform your approach to handling difficult conversations. Sean also reveals how continual learning and cross-disciplinary thinking have shaped his unique perspective on leadership. Tune in to discover how the power of questions can elevate your leadership and inspire your team to achieve more.


Connect with Sean Grace:
 
If you're ready to transform your leadership through the power of thoughtful questions, I highly encourage you to connect with Sean Grace on LinkedIn or visit his website at PeakLuma.com. And don’t forget to grab his book, The Art of the Question, to take your leadership skills to the next level.


Books Mentioned:

• The Art of the Question by Sean Grace

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Check out our new online membership site, with new resources by Dr. William Attaway and his team added weekly: https://checkout.catalyticleadership.net/

Chapters

• 0:01 Sean Grace’s Leadership Journey
• 3:45 The Power of Questions
• 7:45 Why Leaders Stop Asking
• 12:14 Techniques for Better Questions
• 22:09 Navigating Difficult Conversations
• 29:32 Continuous Learning and Growth
• 35:15 Connecting with Sean Grace

Transcript

Dr. William Attaway: 0:00

I'm excited to have Sean Grace on the podcast today. Sean is a communication consultant. He's an author, a coach and a speaker with over 25 years of experience developing and training sales, marketing and leadership talent across diverse industries. His unique brand of business consulting is forged from his long career in media advertising and the creative arts. From his long career in media advertising and the creative arts, sean studied music performance at the Juilliard School and SUNY Purchase and finance at Wharton, which I want to talk about. As an award-winning musician and multi-instrumentalist, he borrows techniques from jazz improv to help foster creative collaboration and cooperation within and across teams. Sean's track record of success as a consultant and a coach has earned him a reputation as a trusted advisor and trainer to some of the world's most innovative and successful organizations. With his new book, the Art of the Question, sean brings a unique approach to fostering creative collaboration and catalyzing change in leadership teams. Sean, I'm really glad you're here, man. Thanks for being on the show.

Sean Grace: 1:13

Yeah, thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation Will.

Intro/Outro: 1:18

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:35

I would love to start with you sharing a bit of your story with our listeners, sean, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How did you get started?

Sean Grace: 1:48

Well at a school, I found myself early in the advertising and the publishing industry, specifically magazine publishing, and very quickly I was managing teams in the sales arena specifically.

Sean Grace: 2:08

So I seem to have a certain affinity for the sales process and, as well as training and helping others learn that process, early on I rose through the ranks and became a manager and leader of several teams across many different types of publishing organizations and within that process gained a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge as it comes to leadership, management and especially questioning.

Sean Grace: 2:47

Questioning and over the many years as the magazine business transformed from a physical medium into a digital one, I moved into my own consultancy where I started consulting a lot of these traditional media companies on how to move into the digital world.

Sean Grace: 3:01

Within that process I continued my training as both sort of a hired gun to come in and help train teams, as well as just working with executives on helping them figure out how best to manage and lead their own teams. So in that process I developed some workshops, and one of the workshops that I developed about five years ago is called the art of the question, because questions were such a central aspect of communication and leadership, as well as creative thinking and creative collaboration. So from that workshop series, after several years of getting valuable feedback from those who attended the workshops, I was able to put together, I think, a fairly substantial amount of information to make a book. So about a year and a half ago or so, I sat down and said let's see if I can make this happen and by hook or by crook, I was able to birth this 300 page tome called the art of the question. It's a guide for seekers, dreamers, problem solvers and leaders.

Dr. William Attaway: 4:12

You know, the the book is where I really want to spend some time, because you dial in something that I believe to the very core of my being, which is the power of a question. Asking the right questions is how you get the right answers, and I believe so many people, particularly in leadership, are asking the wrong questions if they're asking questions at all, so often they're just making statements. Tell me what you believe about the power of questions and how mastering this should be such a core part of the leadership tool bag.

Sean Grace: 4:54

Well, certainly one of the main parts of your podcast is sort of the concept of being a catalyst, and I believe that questions are sort of like the key catalyst of cognition. They spark ideas, they spark exploration. They are, although answers may be what we might be after, the question is the journey, and that journey process is so important to discovering so many things more than just an answer.

Sean Grace: 5:29

So questions are become sort of this, this primary uh well, I'll use the word again catalyst for communication and conversation. Uh, if you uh ask great questions, you're likely to get into much deeper, richer conversations with the people that you are communicating with. If you're looking to solve difficult problems, the better you are at understanding the direction of questions and how questions can lead you in different types of ways, the better you're equipped to be able to efficiently get to that solution to whatever problem you're hoping to solve. So questions are so central to, in my view, not just communication, problem solving and creativity, but just sort of human relationships as well. You know, sort of.

Sean Grace: 6:21

I think the essence of great interpersonal communication is is the ability to be curious about someone over judging someone, and I think it's that concept of less judgment, more curiosity. Curiosity requires questioning. That leads us, I think, into much more fulfilling arenas for our own thought processes than strictly looking for statements and short, convenient answers to things which a lot of us will default to do, because sometimes questioning is not an easy thing, so it takes some brain power and many of us many times don't want to really exercise our brain power so much, so we tend to just give me the answer quick. I don't have to think about it. And not only that, I don't want to have to think it through, which requires me asking more questions. So there you go.

Dr. William Attaway: 7:30

You know, when my daughters were young, they would constantly ply me with questions, and I don't think they're unique. You know, questions are part of a kid's life. They're constantly asking questions, but when we grow up and become adults, we don't ask as many questions. I find that, particularly leaders and business owners, questions are not a normal part of their rhythm. Why do you think that is?

Sean Grace: 7:59

Well, I do address some of this. In the book it's been said that the average four-year-old asks about 350 questions a day where the average adult asks about 10 or 15, give or take.

Sean Grace: 8:13

And so what happens along the way? Right? We become these incredibly curious. We are these incredibly curious beings as young people, and as we grow we somehow stop asking questions. Now one could certainly say, well, you know, there's a point where we don't need to ask as many questions, right? So you get to eight or nine years old and you start to understand a lot of things about the world around you, so naturally, you may not need to ask so many questions of the people around you.

Sean Grace: 8:40

So maybe, instead of 350, maybe you're down to 100 or maybe 75. But that's still a pretty rich day of asking questions. But what happens, I think, is that when you get into that adolescent stage, your social status and your position within your peer group becomes much more important than your curiosity or your ability or needing to want to learn so much, right? So asking questions in a middle school, as an eighth grader, raising your hand in class, may pose more risks than just keeping to yourself, because maybe you might look incompetent if you ask a silly question, right? Whereas kids you don't think about that, you're just going to fire at questions.

Sean Grace: 9:28

But as you start to become more conscious of the people around you and how you fit in, these things become major pressures. So we start to pull back on our willingness to put ourselves at risk with questions. Or the other way might be. Well, we might look too informed, right? So oh, there's that kid who's got all the answers, who's so smart asking all these questions. So either way you lose, right? So I think we carry some of that anxiety into the business world, where answers are valued over the exploration of ideas, and in the old world of industrial style management. It was a command and control process where management was hired because of their expertise and their knowledge base, so they were trained to hand out answers and to expect the people that they hired to also hand out answers and not to ask questions which you know couldn't either. Once again put yourself at risk by showing maybe you're not as incompetent as you hired or you know when you interviewed.

Sean Grace: 10:42

So maybe I won't ask too many questions, or you know that well, solutions are really what they're after. However, I think that's all not true anymore and I'll think maybe in some cases that may have been true a little bit. But now what we need are people who are constantly looking to innovate, be creative about problem solving, not necessarily repeat the same ways that things used to be done. So questions, I think, are now critical, especially in the leadership side, to be able to inspire and empower your teams right. There's nothing more powerful than a great question to one of your direct reports to get them to think differently about how they're looking at their problem. So that's in a long environment where we may be less inclined to ask maybe some crazy questions, but maybe questions that might lead us into some interesting directions over how we're perceived and how that feeds into a fear that we're going to be perceived wrong and that hinders our curiosity and our questions.

Dr. William Attaway: 12:12

I see this so often with people that I work with, you know. There's this fear that holds them back from achieving their capacity as leaders and is really rooted in exactly what you're talking about. Well, what if they think? Well, what if they believe? Well, what if they perceive? Yeah, that that type of fear is not helpful. So how do you encourage people to begin to implement questions and the techniques that you talk about in the book in an everyday type of format, like how do they get started with this If this is not a part of their rhythm now?

Sean Grace: 12:55

Well, chapter three of the book is know Thyself, metacognition and the Beginner's Mind is what it's called, and it really talks about the questions we ask ourselves.

Sean Grace: 13:04

First, the way we probe our own thought processes and our own emotional makeup, you know, gives us a heightened sense of self-awareness and, uh, that self-awareness gives us a certain mindfulness, uh, to be present and also to be quite, um, just uh, aware of, of the way we learn, the way we communicate, the things we react to.

Sean Grace: 13:31

So it starts with asking ourselves, uh, questions. So it starts with asking ourselves questions and then, once we do more of that, then we start just asking more and more questions. And, for instance, one example I like to, or one technique I like to do, is, for instance, if you're in a meeting and big decisions are being made, or how we say, big decisions want to be made, and you're exploring ideas and everyone's throwing out their ideas one after the other, and because I prefer questioning what I like to do I might have a great idea, or I think I might have a great idea, or I think I might have a great idea I will pose the idea as a question and simple as saying something like would it make sense to consider this approach as opposed to that approach.

Sean Grace: 14:28

So there is an idea wrapped in a question which does several things. It gives the license for others to contribute, because you're essentially inviting them to uh opine about the idea and for them to think about it. You're creating some distance between yourself and the idea, uh, whereas you're just putting it on the table and acting as if well, you're not 100% sure either, but because I'm posing as a question, it creates safety around the idea, and what happens, what I've experienced is that there is a lot more willingness to consider the idea when it's posed as a question, as opposed to just making the statement that I know how to solve this problem or why don't we do it this way? Uh, and that's sort of a question too, why don't we do it this way? But it's not nearly as uh, as inviting as the one where you couch it. Would it make sense if you looked at it this way?

Sean Grace: 15:38

Now, this can be applied in everyday communication as well. So if you're talking to your partner or a loved one or your child, and there are issues that they're struggling with and you have some strong ideas, but you want to do your best to pose your ideas as questions, you know, have you considered looking at it this way. Have you thought about what the other person might be thinking about this? Is it possible that you could have misinterpreted the other person's reaction? So when you're posing your ideas in a question way, in that format and this is just, you know, between a loved one, interpersonal communication you once again you create more room for the other person to think about it and not to be feeling as if they're being indicted by the question.

Sean Grace: 16:36

And this I get into with why, the problem with why in the book, which is another area where how you can switch a question from a why to a how question, which gives it a completely different type of energy depending on the context and the topic. So, to answer your question around about why, once again, well, it's, I think, a matter of just starting it and thinking is there a way for me to say this as a question as opposed to a statement? And the more you think along those lines, the more it starts to be integrated into your regular communication, and then you just get more and more comfortable with that process If that makes sense.

Dr. William Attaway: 17:23

Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, talking about the why to how shift really keys in, and when I was reading that I was thinking you know, this is really around the mechanics of crafting a great question and that's a skill. How do you see people developing that skill? Are there ways that they can get better at crafting questions? I love the why to how shift. Are there other things that you would suggest?

Sean Grace: 17:50

Well, the why versus how shift is also trying to understanding the basic operatives of the interrogatives. So your interrogatives are your who, what, where, when, why and how, and those are your primary question. Uh, pivots, right, these are the things that direct, but each of those uh point in a different direction. Uh, so a why question is typically going to be focused on explanations, focused on looking back, focused on excuses. Now listen, why questions are imperative to understand the root cause of something. You know. Why is very important. Why is very important to understand why you get up in the morning purpose? You know this is a very important stuff. However, why is different than, for instance, a how? How is procedural, it's prescriptive, it's motivated, it's future-oriented or, at the very least, it's procedural in the sense that you could say well, how did this happen? Okay, that's one way. Or how might we solve this problem? Both of those things are really about laying down a prescription process. So when you pose the how versus a why, why tends to trigger an expository response, which is more okay. Let me explain.

Sean Grace: 19:14

But a lot of times in human communication, that can be received as a negative. So, for instance, if your partner comes home from work and walks in the house and declares why is this house such a mess all the time? Now, that's a why? Question. It's a powerful one. Now you may get that message and say, oh yeah, you're right. But you very well may not get that message, and your partner may not have been necessarily looking for a root cause, but might be looking to make an indirect indictment of you and your behavior. Now, if your partner came home, walked in the house and said how might we keep this house cleaner home, walked in the house and said how might we keep this house cleaner? Well, that's a whole different type of question which leads the thinking in a different direction. So it's cooperative, it's inviting, it's inclusive. It separates the issue from the person. Why questions can wrap themselves around the person, creating a sense of guilt and other things you know. So to understand some of those process can help start you on.

Sean Grace: 20:20

Okay, what's what's? You know what's the best way for me to pose this next question? So what can like? For instance, what if is another great question, right? So what if is once again proposing an idea. You're not necessarily saying this is absolutely the idea, but let's consider this as a what if, and the what if also creates creative ideas. What if we try this different approach completely? Once again, it invites the other person to participate in the idea. So what if? Is another example, how might we? Is another example, why again very powerful. One technique is the five whys, and that's more sort of like the deductive problem-solving process, when you continually ask why until you get to the potential root cause. But that's not as effective when you're talking with other humans. When you're talking with other people, I wouldn't use a five whys, unless you're four years old.

Sean Grace: 21:44

I was about to say yeah, but why, but why, but, why, but why. And that's valid as a kid, but as an adult you might end up upsetting the other person a little bit with that kind of questioning. So I think it's important to understand what I call the mechanics of questioning, and I have a chapter called Question Mechanica and it gets into how these questions function from a standpoint of where it takes you, the direction it goes and how you might be able to utilize the different types of questions in different contexts.

Dr. William Attaway: 22:18

Right, you know, one of the elements that I read is when you begin to talk about how difficult conversations can be navigated best with questions and this is something that I see in the leadership space a lot People have conversations that they are avoiding. People have conversations that they really want to not have and they will do whatever it takes not to have those. You bring a tool with the questions and how you craft those that can help leaders to navigate difficult conversations. Can you speak to that?

Sean Grace: 24:28

Are you referring to the communication wheel? Yes, the communication wheel is a brilliant tool. Yes, there are six components or or how should we say spokes, I guess, to the process, five or six, and it starts with observation. So, in other words, what you want to do is you want to say, in this case, you want to talk with somebody about some behavior. Maybe it's a partner, or maybe it's somebody that you know you're overseeing, or whatever the case might be, and you know you need to have this conversation. So the first thing you want to do is cleave the person from the problem, or cleave the problem from the person. So make sure you separate the behavior from the individual, so you place the problem in the center of the wheel, and then you start with this set of observations. This is what I observed about what happened, right. So this is very objective. I'm just looking at this. This is, this is what I saw.

Sean Grace: 25:41

The second stage is this is how I interpreted what I saw, or what I heard, or how whatever unfolded right. Um, say it was. You know, maybe you noticed, uh, one of your direct reports, um, speaking out of line at a meeting and maybe stepping on a colleague's ideas and behaving in a way that's not necessarily very team-like, and maybe this is a pattern, maybe it's not, um. So you observe the behavior. You then interpret the behavior, and this is what I thought when I saw what I saw. Okay, so there's the interpretation. Then the third stage is then you relate how you feel about how you interpreted what you observed. So, and okay, this is what I observed, this is how I interpreted what happened there and this is how it made me feel. I was, you know, I was pretty disappointed about the communication or the incident and, as a result, of how I interpreted it. Now, meanwhile, hopefully this is a conversation and then you could then pause to say have I interpreted this situation? Did I observe the same thing that you observed? Nah, you misinterpreted the whole thing. That's not what I meant. You're looking at it from their point of view, okay? So, whatever, either way you're moving through this process, you're keeping the problem away from the person, keeping it separate.

Sean Grace: 27:18

Then you move into what we'll call the wants stage. So, for instance, if you're a leader and you're managing this person, and this is, you observe this thing, you interpreted this thing, you told them how you feel and now you say this is what I would like. Ok, I want my team to work in harmony. I want to make sure everybody has a voice at the table. I want to make sure everyone's heard, and my hope is that all of us the entire team will behave in a way that will have this type of outcome. This is what I want. Now, here's what I'm willing to do. That's the final stage. So you say the wants and then you end with the wills.

Sean Grace: 28:01

Now this could also very easily apply to a behavior situation with your partner, and maybe it's a compromise that needs to be made, but making sure that you're not wrapping the problem around the person. It's a behavior, it's a, it's an observed thing. That happened and here it is. This is how I observed it, this is how I interpreted it, this is what I thought about it, this is how I felt about it, this is what I want. And, by the way, this is what I'm willing to do in that, for instance, say, in that conversation, the person says hey, uh, I think Sally is very disrespectful to me on a regular basis and that's why I kind of stepped on her idea, because she wasn't letting me talk.

Sean Grace: 28:43

So this is what I'm willing to do. I'm willing to have a conversation with Sally, I'm willing to talk about some of your concerns and, as a result, I'd like to get together again in a couple of days and maybe the three of us can talk this through. Whatever the outcome is, you know you want to get agreement right, but the communication wheel gives you this framework that moves you logically through these stages, which help you move through it in an unemotional way by communicating the salient facts, the salient ideas and feelings, wishes and wants and wills. So I think it's a great tool for navigating any type of difficult conversation and it can be really used in a lot of different types of contexts.

Dr. William Attaway: 29:28

I agree. It's one that I'm going to be recommending to quite a few people. I love the tool, I love the ease of use and I love the practical nature of it. I think it's incredibly helpful, so thank you for that.

Sean Grace: 29:40

Certainly I didn't come up with it.

Dr. William Attaway: 29:44

You shared it, though, and that's helpful, so let me let me ask you, sean, like you personally, how do you stay on top of your game? You personally, how do you stay on top of your game? How do you level up with the leadership skills that the people that you work with, the people who contract with you, are going to need you to have in the years to come?

Sean Grace: 30:07

Yeah, good question. You know, I learn probably most when I am teaching and working with others. So I may have expertise on an idea, but that expertise gets more and more refined when I communicate it and I get feedback. So my primary way of staying sharp and staying on the leading edge of some of these ideas is to not only research them and understand them and think about them and write about them, but to also present these ideas to others and open it up for challenge and open it up for different ways of looking at it, because that gives me something I could never do on my own and that is the ability to just see things that I may not be seeing about an idea. So the more I do, the more I'm able to stay on sort of the content and the material and the learnings and then just repeat them.

Sean Grace: 31:21

I'm constantly evolving and trying to figure out how to modify, improve and build upon these ideas.

Sean Grace: 31:30

And the other thing is I'm a very analogical thinker, so I'm always borrowing ideas. So if I have a client in the consumer electronics space and they're going against this specific problem, I'm able to take ideas from the biotech space that I have clients in and bring that over and say, hmm, this might work here, and vice versa, say, hmm, this might work here, and vice versa. So I'm constantly borrowing and trying to be open to figuring out how can this work over here and how can that work over there. So I try not to get stuck with this thing called functional fixedness, which is sort of like just okay, this is for this and that's for that. I try to figure out ways to connect the dots. So between that, I try my best to stay sharp and continue to develop my own skill set, which I find very satisfying because I'm a very curious person and you know I think I'd be very sad if I just gave up and said, all right, I've had it, enough is enough.

Dr. William Attaway: 32:41

I think you would too. So, as somebody who is in that continual learning posture, somebody who's always growing, always learning, always looking for ways to make those new connections, is there a book that you have read that you would recommend to the leaders who are listening? Hey, if you haven't read this, this made an impact on me, wow.

Sean Grace: 33:03

So many good books, man. Well, I love Adam Grant's work. He's very insightful, brilliant. It depends, I guess, on the subject. I'm a big Steven Pinker fan for sort of sociology and evolutionary psychology, but that's kind of a heavier read some of his stuff. And, geez, I have to think about that a little more Will, because I'm a voracious reader.

Sean Grace: 33:33

But I read such a variety of things and like I'm reading this book that essentially talks about how the natural world communicates and how, from the color spectrum to sound, to the electromagnetic spectrum, and what's fascinating about that book, written by a guy named Ed Young, and, uh, it's just fascinating to see he'll.

Sean Grace: 33:59

He'll dive into a whole chapter on how octopus, uh, relate to the world around them and using you know, real science, on on on how they perceive the world, and it's just gives you such an incredible insight into how limited our own, even though we have great eyesight and we have a lot of great things as bipedal primates that we are. But, boy, when you look at the rest of the animal kingdom, you really appreciate all the things that we don't see, don't feel, don't experience, and it just makes you appreciate things so much more, including our own abilities. So there's an example that just lights me up when I read it Now. Is that related to leadership development? Not necessarily, but it does certainly contribute to my own understanding of communication in the world at large. So 100%.

Dr. William Attaway: 35:01

I think you can learn from anybody and I think the ability to make those analogical connections I think is one of the strengths of your book. I know folks are going to want to stay connected to you and continue to learn more about what you do, and I'm going to recommend that they read your book. What is the best way for folks to connect with you?

Sean Grace: 35:25

Yeah for connecting with me. You can connect through my website, peakluma P-E-A-K-L-U-M-A peaklumacom. Or you can connect with me on LinkedIn Sean Grace LinkedIn and you can certainly find the book on amazoncom. It's the Art of the Question by Sean Grace. There is another book with a similar title that came out many years ago Not really related, but so it's just a red cover.

Dr. William Attaway: 36:00

Perfect, I definitely recommend it and we will have those links in the show note. Terrific, sean. Thank you for being here and for sharing so generously from your book and for writing it, because I know what a labor of love that is.

Sean Grace: 36:15

For sure. Thank you so much, Will, for having me.

Dr. William Attaway: 36:17

Thanks for joining me for this episode today. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, if you don't have a copy of my newest book, Catalytic Leadership, I'd love to put a copy in your hands. If you go to catalyticleadershipbookcom, you can get a copy for free. Just pay the shipping so I can get it to you and we'll get one right out.

Dr. William Attaway: 36:54

My goal is to put this into the hands of as many leaders as possible. This book captures principles that I've learned in 20 plus years of coaching leaders in the entrepreneurial space, in business, government, non-profits, education and the local church. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take a next step with a coach to help you intentionally grow and thrive as a leader, I'd be honored to help you, Just go to catalyticleadershipnet to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, leaders choose to be catalytic.