Who Would You Ask?

A few weeks ago I blogged about a leadership retreat that Blueprint Education attended.  One of our sessions focused on Patrick Lencioni’s book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  You can read that post here. 

We realized the importance of developing a cohesive team takes deliberate practice.  For this reason, we decided to build a plan on the first principle – TRUST. There are a number of methods to build trust, our activity was to interview a randomly assigned colleague.  The questions we asked looked like this:

• Describe your childhood
• Describe your family
• What is your biggest fear
• What is your biggest professional weakness and strength
• Where would you build your dream house and why

In addition, we had the liberty to ask follow-up questions.  I was fortunate enough to interview Daniel Fisher, our Director at Kids at Hope Academy and enjoyed our discussion that was more meaningful in conversation than meetings and bumping into each other in the “hallways”.  What I was not prepared for was Daniels follow-up question:

Daniel:  If you could talk to anyone living or dead, who would it be?

Doug: Silence….

Daniel: When I ask people this question, it always stumps them

Doug: More silence…very long silence

Daniel: Because they feel like they should say something like Jesus or God

Doug:  More silence

Daniel:  For me, I’d like to talk to my mom when she was 21, to hear her thoughts on raising eleven children as a single parent

I appreciate Daniel allowing me to publish our conversation.  Asking thought provoking questions like his, allows us to look at ourselves and others in a light not normally shared in the workplace.  Aristotle said, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  The simplicity of this activity is only a part of the sum, I strongly encourage any organization to read Lencioni's book and most importantly build a plan around engagement and implementation of the pyramid in order to reach the “whole”.  The best place to start is asking your colleague “If you could talk to anyone living or dead, who would it be?”