Shannon Minifie: Teaching Entrepreneurs to Embrace Curiosity in Leadership

Shannon Minifie: Teaching Entrepreneurs to Embrace Curiosity in Leadership

The Power of the Learning Mindset in Running a Business

I'm excited that you're joining me for an interview with my friend, Shannon Minifie. Shannon’s career began in academia, a pursuit driven by her desire to be a part of conversations that she thinks are important. In 2016, she embarked on a new path, starting a career in corporate learning and development. She brings to her role more than a decade of experience in education and in practicing intensive incisive investigation. She encourages her team an enthusiastic discernment that brings a depth of thinking to bear on everything she does as CEO of Box of Crayons. Shannon, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Andy. That's a mouthful of an introduction. I'm sorry for that and it is intense sometimes.

Becoming CEO

There are some big words in there, but I like it. It’s so great to connect with you. We were chatting before and I mentioned that I've known Michael Bungay Stanier for some time, the Founder of Box of Crayons. He spoke at our conference that I hosted back in January 2020, the Talent Development Think Tank. He has been on the show a couple of times after both of his books. I remember when he told me about you, how he found you, brought you onto the team, and how you rose so quickly to become CEO. I'd love to learn that story and share it with our audience.

It's a good story for talent developers because it's an unusual recruitment strategy, for sure and we've made some changes to our recruiting since. I've been working in learning and development for a few years so I'm relatively new to corporate learning but I've spent a long time in school and education before I got here teaching literature. My path into this space was through book publicity initially. I came on at Box of Crayons to help with a little book that you might have heard of The Coaching Habit and that was then launching. At that time, I was writing my dissertation and I was teaching adjunct at Queens where I was doing my doctorate.

I was working part-time at a small literary publishing house here in Toronto and I was working one night a week at a little place, a wine and pizza bar in my neighborhood, which also it turned out was Michael Bungay Stanier’s neighborhood. I met Michael and Marcella Bungay Stanier, the Owners of Box of Crayons, they're over the bar and somewhere between comparing notes on literature, because they're both MPhils. I picked up a third part-time job while wrapping up graduate school so it was in 2015.

They said, “Why don't you come over? We own this company. You know something about book publicity. It's 5 or 10 hours a week emailing and trying to get some coverage of this little book. That's a great little part-time job for you to pick up.” I did that. The success of The Coaching Habit book changed the company and in the years that followed, we transformed from basically a solopreneurship with a handful of contract staff supporting a thought leader to a company of about twenty full-time employees and two dozen contract facilitators delivering our programs globally.

Within that first year, I moved from publicity over to sales which was an interesting transition in itself. I was like, “I don't know anything about sales,” except Death of a Salesman. I failed all of the assessments that I went through about, “Will this person be good at sales?” I took the plunge anyway, in no small part, because Michael is great at identifying people's learning edge and pushing them off of that, and daring them to try brand-new things. I became the first sales leader in our growing sales organization and in July of 2019, at which time I was the Head of Sales with the team, Michael stepped away from running the business, and I replaced him as CEO.

It’s a good story because you had this confluence of experience that was perfect for them at the time but still willing to take on that role and come in and get uncomfortable and try new things. You’re right, this little book called The Coaching Habit, which Michael self-published and has now sold close to a million copies. It's the gold standard. I told him when I published my first book in November 2020, Own Your Career Own Your Life, I constantly would pick up The Coaching Habit and look at it and say, “What did he do to make this book so great? This is my guiding light because I follow that.” It’s the same with marketing and publicity, too so I'd love to talk to you more about that but we won't make this show about this. We will talk about learning and development.

[bctt tweet="Curiosity is distinct from other forms of knowledge-seeking, which can be about closure and finality." via="no"]

On that point, though, Michael wrote a little article about how he went about the publication of that book and his strategy.

You mentioned something in there that Michael is good at identifying someone's learning edge and pushing them off. Can you tell me more about that?

He holds things lightly. He's not too worried about things breaking. He's not worried about people making mistakes as they try new things. One of the most impactful memorable things he ever said to me, I remember and it's different from the way I was raised. I was on the road a lot all the time when I was selling. He asked about having some spacious time away from the family. I had a small baby at the time and I wasn’t getting some R&R in the hotel rooms.

I was like, “No. I'm alone. There are no distractions. I've got to do so much more work. I can't waste the opportunity.” He's like, “Shannon, please, waste the opportunity.” Imagine your boss telling you to waste the opportunity and relax. He's good at thinking about holding it all together. Where is the edge that's going to keep somebody interested and engaged? How do we make sure that who they are as a person and their life is still primary so they don't hit burnout? He's good at identifying what people’s superpowers are.

Something you may not necessarily know you're good at, but he sees an opportunity there and if you get a little bit uncomfortable, he pushes you off. You'll be able to grow so much more.

He doesn't hold on to things all that tightly, which is amazing. It's been part of why the transition as a first-time CEO to the founder has gone well.

It also reminds me of something. I've taught a little bit about delegation in leadership development programs and there's this magical area when it comes to delegation of stretch versus comfort. If people are too comfortable, they get bored, and if you stretch people too much, they might get completely anxious and leave but people do want to be stretched a little bit. You want to be able to try new and hard things and have a little bit of wiggle room to be able to make mistakes and fail because that's how we learn and grow. It sounds like you're working in a culture that provides that which is not all that common, which is pretty cool.

We try hard. It's what we teach in our programs with the organizations that we partner with. Coach with curiosity. Michael definitely models that and harnesses coach-like curiosity as a form of delegation. It’s what we say, “Be lazy,” as the first behavior around being coached. It’s standing back and letting other people try their hand at things and not assuming where people’s challenges are or where they want to go. It’s asking them the question, instead is a big part of how he leads and how we try to lead Box of Crayons as well.

Curiosity In Leadership: You need to have a degree of psychological safety to feel like you can bring up ideas without getting criticized for them.

What did you learn going from academia to corporate?

Probably the thing that helped me the most was the thing you're trying to crack when you're analyzing a text is how the signification works. You're trying to crack a language game like a novel in its own way, or a piece of writing is its own language game or set of signifiers. When I came over to the corporate world, I was like, “There are so many forms of jargon going on that I do not understand.” Everything has an acronym. I didn't understand anything about the corporate world. I didn't understand anything about learning and development.

I didn't know what people in learning and development thought about, cared about, or did all day. There were many different aspects of our client and the space that we exist in and that I had to learn but because I'm pretty good at finding my entryway through recognizing patterns in language, that helped me to learn quickly. It also took me a while to not have a white knuckle grip on everything that I was doing. Where I come from, you don't stand up and share an idea until that idea is so solid. You go and research something for 5 or 10 years and you get to open your mouth and share that idea. I remember Michael saying to me, “It's a lot more chilled out in the corporate world so you can relax a little bit.” That was an interesting learning moment for me.

That’s a big one especially because one of the things I wanted to talk about with you is this idea of creating a culture of innovation and it's huge when you're able to bring up ideas and toss ideas back and forth and have conversations and not worry about people judging you or saying, “That's not fully baked. That's not perfect.” Whereas you’re saying a lot of times in the academia world and even in a lot of big companies, you don't even bring things up unless it's completely thought through.

We're learning even inside our own company that you need to have a degree of Psychological Safety there for people to feel they can bring up as you say a half-baked idea. Are they able to share something without getting criticized for it?

Curiosity

That's such a key to innovation. We want to talk about curiosity and one of the things you do at Box of Crayons is to help organizations move from advice to curiosity-driven. Tell me more about what that means.

What we mean when we talk about moving from advice-driven to curiosity-led is what we've been seeing and hearing from our clients for years as we've been delivering programs around helping people to become more coach-like. When they've got managers and leaders in the organization who are too quick to jump in and give advice, too quick to take control that basically they're not open to new and different perspectives as a result, they disengage the people they lead. They become overwhelmed because they are overreaching in the work that they're doing.

[bctt tweet="Never underestimate the power of taking days off from your business, even just once a week." via="no"]

When we talk about trying to transition people from being advice-driven to curiosity led we want them to approach all of the work that they do from this place of openly embracing the unknown and giving up their own control which is hard work to give up control as a leader, as a person. We want them to be open to new and different perspectives. We want them to have a culture that is truly a learning culture. That means you have to be able to tolerate failure as you learn along the way.

It makes sense. There's so much more that we're already talking about before that we can accomplish. It changes everything when you go from advice to curiosity-driven. Let's talk about framing curiosity. You were saying before we were talking that there are a lot of implications to that. Organizations or people that come from a traditional approach tend to feel like there are implications or it's soft to be curious or empathetic. Is that a challenge that a lot of organizations deal with?

We anticipate that it might be difficult to build a business case around what you need to do is be curious. That's the answer and that's going to solve the problem. I suspect a lot of organizations haven't sat around and thought about the ways in which a failure of curiosity, of giving up power, of being open to new perspectives and a true learning culture is inhibiting their ability to grow and be innovative. It does feel a bit like, “Be curious. Sure.” It sounds whimsical so we've taken to calling that curiosity a troublemaker tendency. One that is fueled by mischief and sparked by prohibition.

Andy, we were talking before that we both have young children. In some ways, it's the curiosity you associate with that mischief-making. I want to go off and investigate this thing at least in part because I've been told not to do it. The work of Francesca Gino and some others show that there have been senior leaders and organizations who, on the one hand, espouse curiosity as something that they can get behind as that behavior. No one's going to say they're against it but on the other hand, they're a little anxious about openly inviting people to go and be curious over here.

A part of the challenge there is separating out curiosity as the thing you're going to go over and do here for, say 20% time versus a way of being with each other in general. We've been calling this other way of being curious, Changemaker Curiosity. “How can you find every interaction we have with people as a chance to be more coach-like and give up some of your power and let them stake some more territory? How can every conversation be a chance to hold that asking great questions is going to be better probably than finding good answers?” If you can find a way to get those curious practices into all the interactions that people are having, it's not going to be stigmatized from how things get done over here and it's going to be a more natural and habitual part of how people show up.

It changes everything so you're talking about making curiosity part of the culture a way of being the changemaker curiosity. One of the things that I've noticed in my work with managers over the years running a lot of leadership development programs is that especially I feel there's this stigma with a lot of managers when people become managers, and the more senior they get, they feel there's pressure to be the smartest person in the room.

People are going to be able to have all the answers and therefore, they've got to have answers. They've got to have advice. They've got to be able to tell people what to do or know everything that's going on to the extent that many often become micromanagers with everybody, which everybody hates working for. Why do you think people feel such pressure? On the other side for a lot of those managers, you said, “No, be curious. Ask questions,” which would probably make people uncomfortable.

The way that we talk about this in our programs, we address this head-on. We call this the Advice Monster so what you're talking about this instinct to want to jump in because people feel pressure to perform. They feel part of their seniority means they have to have the answers. That becomes particularly difficult when people inherit a team or they find themselves leading work they can't themselves do.

Curiosity In Leadership: Leaders in the organization who are too quick to jump in and take control are not open to new and different perspectives.

There are two sides to it. There are technical leaders who are leading folks whose work they're capable of doing themselves. That's a different advice monster that shows up. They’re like, “I know how to do your job so I want to tell you how you should do it.” If you're leading work that you yourself can't do, you don't know what the work is inside the work, you can still feel this pressure to somehow know all the answers when there's no way on Earth you could. Your role, in that case, is to ask the questions that help those individuals get clear on where their challenges are and to remove obstacles and barriers for them.

Micromanaging

I've been having a lot of conversations with people about this. There is that pressure, and it can be uncomfortable but you can get so much more done when you're focused on empowering people around you to get things done, which is the true role of a leader. It’s to empower the people around them to get things done versus trying to prop your own stuff up. This idea that you mentioned, a couple of different categories, but one of them being, “I know how to do your job, and let me tell you how to do it.” I've run many workshops, as you have as well. I've surveyed a lot of participants about the things that they love and hate about their managers. The number one thing that people hate about bad managers is micromanaging and yet people continue to do it. I see that as all being related or talking about here. Do you help managers get past that and stop micromanaging so much?

What we are trying to do is we got to help them. Our programs basically have two parts to them. We're about having them get brought in on the mindset shift that needs to take place around how being more curious and coach-like is going to help me and help the people that I lead or that I work with. After that, it's about the capabilities and applications. We're talking about the first part. How do you get them to get past thinking that the way that they add value is to tell people how to do their job?

We basically show them the price that they pay for wanting to jump in and give advice. They see that it's the thing that keeps them overwhelmed, keeps their team disengaged, and keeps them disconnected from the work that they showed up to do. When people see, “Jumping in and giving advice isn't serving me, and it's not helping me grow the people around me,” that's the gut-level of, “I can see why I would want to do things differently that helps people on the road to changing their behavior.”

Pivoting Through COVID

I'm curious how you guys at Box of Crayons pivoted through COVID? You mentioned you were traveling a lot. I know that Box of Crayons is running a lot of in-person workshops like I was here as well before COVID hit. As you and I record this, it has been about a year since that and everything shut down. I would imagine you've made the move to virtual. You also told me before that you switched from this strategy of ten-minute manager coaching to more of a culture of curiosity. Can you tell me more about some of the pivots that you guys have made?

The COVID one, I’ll take first. Most of our work was delivering live programs before COVID hit. Quickly, between March and May of 2020, we did all of our programs to be a virtual delivery, which was not for us a matter of copy and paste of what the live experiences to the virtual one but there is a difference. Our head of learning can come on and talk about these things more eloquently than I can but there are different strategies that we were trying to deploy or engage with people when we're delivering programs in a virtual setting rather than in a live setting.

[bctt tweet="Stop waiting to be perfect." via="no"]

They are shorter and we're having people do a lot of practice offline rather than sitting and doing the deep practice when they're in the session. There's a lot of good and interesting experimentation as we were iterating on how we moved that from live to virtual back in the spring of 2020. We had some great clients that hung in there with us willing to try that. “What's too long? What's too short?” That was a fantastic experience.

We've also been working with Microsoft for the last couple of years. They license our IP for a digital MOOC that we built with them. Our key client there, Andrew Warnerstrand was the lead instructional designer and Michael, our Founder was the talent and they built a digital program for their whole organization starting with their global sales and managers. That was our first foray into a real digital offering. We have since built our own version of that which we were working on getting into the market sometime in the spring or summer of 2021. That’s the pivot from live to virtual and digital.

The other pivot you talked about is not a pivot but one of the things is historically, we're an almost twenty-year-old company. It's our nineteenth-year anniversary in the summer of 2021. Our focus historically has been on manager coaching. “Can you coach in ten minutes or less?” That was about getting over the obstacle of, “I don't have time to coach. I'm a busy manager.” We sat down and with Michael leaving running the company day to day, we wanted to have a way for Box of Crayons to live on and well beyond Michael being the only person who is creating content at Box of Crayons.

The key behavior that we're driving in our coaching programs is being curious. When we talk about coach-like curiosity, it's the ability to slow down the rush to action and stay curious longer. We realized as we sat down that the broader umbrella of what we're trying to unleash in organizations is this ability to be curious. There are a lot of different kinds of capacities that show up once you start talking about curiosity. The coach-like curiosity honed in on driving accountability and creating autonomy for the people that you lead and in giving up your own power and all of those things and driving performance and engagement that way.

Organizations also come to us wanting to build connections. The empathy that is built-in folks that are more curious shows up there. Also, a lot of our clients that we work with are looking to find ways to cement a learning culture. You can say you have a learning culture but unless people exhibit behaviors like being open to people trying and failing, and asking questions of the process, “What went wrong there?” No one's blaming anybody here but let's be curious about this process that we did and what we learned. That shows that there's another way to think about curiosity as driving learning.

Empathy

I'm big on creating a culture of empathy and learning. Those are such important factors and you talk about that. When this idea of empathy comes up, I know the importance of it but it's still one of those “soft skills” that Josh Burson now calls Power Skills that are data showing that this can help you get a lot more done and is useful. Do you get pushbacks on that like, “We don't care about empathy, we want profits or clients pretty much completely on board and see the value there?”

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

No. We don't get pushback. At least with the clients that are coming to us, they're needing empathic leaders. The events of 2020 have meant that their senior leaders are scared of saying and doing the wrong thing. They're aware of the limitations of their own experience and point of view. They're responding to ask for help from senior leaders in their organization. They're also recalibrating or reassessing their whole catalog of programs to make sure that they're not inadvertently racist or part of systemic injustice. They are absolutely looking for ways to make people more empathic in their organization.

We don't do strict DI or unconscious bias training at all but some of you have heard from our clients that already running our programs is the way in which they're pointing out to people that, “We're helping people become more curious,” which is all about inhabiting somebody else’s perspective or holding space for a different experience. It's also an antidote to assuming things about other people being curious. They're noticing the way in which that builds a foundational starting point for being more empathic which helps people to be more inclusive and that's absolutely needed now. People are finally seeing that, so it’s not too convincing. Jennifer Brown said that on your show. She said, “It’s their phones ringing off the hook.”

I'm glad you brought that up because you mentioned the events of 2020 and a lot changed with the rise of the social justice movement which started in May 2020. Companies trying to pivot and figure out, how do we address this? How do we create a culture that is more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and empathic? I like that you brought that up and people feel like they're included and they belong. I feel a lot of that starts with curiosity. It's empathy. It's trying to understand other people's points of view.

A lot of us have tried to do that throughout this period to become better allies and help be part of the solution. If everybody led with curiosity and empathy, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place because we would understand people's perspectives instead of leading with fear and making assumptions which gets everybody in trouble. I can see making this move to a culture of curiosity, empathy, and trying to understand others’ points of view before making any type of assumption, decision, movement or even opening your mouth could help change a lot.

It's one of the things that I love about the nuance of curiosity. We haven't built out this pillar of programs around this particular framing yet but it's part of what we're working on. I love one of the nuances of it. It's not about posing questions to others but it's crucially about asking questions of yourself. Being curious about why you think the way you do and what underlies your thinking and motivates your behaviors.

If we all start from a point of curiosity that's completely right. Curiosity is distinct from other forms of knowledge-seeking which can be about closure, finality, or even possession. Curiosity is notably open. It's wondrous even. There's a study that the emotional signatures of curiosity are awe and wonder. It's an open way of countenancing something you don't know anything about that doesn't seek to own or control what you encounter.

Talent Development

Shannon, when you are in a position where you are developing talent internally, you're also working with a lot of clients on developing talent. What are 1 or 2 big trends you're seeing in terms of talent development these days?

[bctt tweet="All challenges in business are people challenges." via="no"]

We've talked about one for sure. DI is definitely one. More generally to organizations coming to us looking to develop leaders who are more courageous so they are inclusive, give feedback, coach well, they have the confidence and humility to stay curious when they need to. Those are all things we're trying to do to ourselves as a culture at Box of Crayons as well so we are walking the walk. These organizations, when they come to us looking for that, are looking to foster the exchange of voices and ideas at every level. They see that as key to inclusion and engagement, but also to the sharing of ideas that can drive innovation and help them stay more competitive.

That's one of the key trends we've been seeing lately. People have decreased bandwidth now. Everyone's working from their home so where they live, work and do everything is all in one place. While I would have thought that had cut down the commute and freed up a bunch of time for people, people feel everything's encroached upon. At Box of Crayons, one of the things we've been trying to do to combat that burnout is to continue to take things off the table.

What's the critical challenge, the one thing that will have the most impact? We are seeing that as well, with clients coming to us wanting to find a way to help leaders and individuals focus on the critical few. How can they be strategic? That being a part of the strategy is saying, “What are you deciding what you're saying no to, not what you're saying yes to?” How do you continue to take things off the table? They see our programs and coach-like curiosity as an approach to that, as a way of helping them select from the work that has less impact and the extra noise that people don't have the bandwidth for especially now.

One of the top things that I hear about in the talent development community these days is how we help our people avoid burnout because working all the time, engagement, and productivity are up with people working from home, but there are many things going on with kids. The fact that that computer is always there, I can always do a little bit more work. I can get this done. I can get that done. I’ll have dinner with my family, go back to work and not take a vacation. We've got to find ways to combat that and help people with wellness and figure out how to take breaks and do other things besides working all the time.

We've been doing as much as we can around that at our company. We're only twenty full-time employees, but we have a lot of parents and it's not only parents. That's an added logistical part of things. When virtual schooling happened and was mandated here, basically, after the winter holidays, it was a breaking point. It became a crisis for people and we introduced what we were calling Winter Fridays. In the spring and summer months, we have something called Summer Fridays, where we have a four-day workweek and the idea is not to cram five days of work into four days but rather what are the critical. We did that in the winter as well.

When my chief of staff brought that to me as a suggestion, I said yes so fast and when we shared it in a leadership team meeting, we had people that were so stressed out that they couldn't even talk or they might cry because of what was going on in the background as they're trying to work. Having that bit of extra space for a day with no meetings, even mentally having that off of the weekly calendar, was huge. We've been pushing out Wellness Wednesday things and inviting people to do co-working sessions and listen to music together. It’s constantly checking in with people and asking how they're doing and asking what they need rather than assuming flexibility around work hours and all of those things.

You're eating your own dog food and drinking your own champagne leading with curiosity.

Curiosity In Leadership: Just start being curious about where the problems are, and that's how you make a difference.

We're little. It's a little bit easier.

Asking what they need before making any assumptions. I love that. Shannon, is there a book that you often recommend or that has helped you in your journey of building a culture in talent development besides those from Michael that we've already talked about?

A helpful book that I read was Aaron Dignan’s book, Brave New Work. I don't know if you're familiar with it or not. He runs a firm called The Ready. His book Brave New Work is amazing. I don't want to mess up what he calls things but basically, he looks at the operating systems of what he calls the operating systems of a company so all the ways that people connect and do work. It is not for companies that are necessarily autonomous and have no hierarchy.

It seems mostly aimed at big companies that have a cemented historical institutionalized way of doing things that are no longer working for them. How do you get under the hood of all of the ways that people work? What are your meetings structured like? How are decisions made, and all those kinds of things? I read that book back in the summertime because I went out on maternity leave in September 2020. I read his book because I was looking for help on if the senior leadership team is a bit of a construct in terms of, “These are the people that have accountability. How do I push out accountability and autonomy, especially in the time that I'm gone so I can check in with my team and make decisions or weigh in when I'm needed?”

Most of the company runs on its own, which is what I should be striving for anyway with maternity leave. It became a real test of that. Dignan’s book, in particular his approach to thinking about what he calls Integrative Decision Making. How you use an advice and consent process and acknowledgement of one another's roles and expertise in order to make decisions together and have alignment is huge. We also did a whole overhaul of our meeting structure and thinking about how we communicate in the most useful ways. It’s a lot of that book so I would recommend it a lot. It’s Aaron Dignan’s Brave New Work.

I added it to my reading list. I'll have to check that out. Shannon, last question for you. For anyone working in talent development or anywhere, looking for ways to accelerate their career success, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

Get a part-time job at a wine bar.

Get a part-time job at a wine bar and meet some founders.

I'm kidding. I don't know what I'd say looking to accelerate their career. I'm part of a women's leadership group and we had the privilege of having Stacey Abrams come on and run a Q&A for us, which was awesome. She spoke these words which perfectly aligned to what we do but they’re important here. In response to a question about how women in particular, but this is true of any leader, step up and get involved. She said, “We have to stop waiting to be perfect and we need to start wanting to be curious. The best leaders are curious about where the problems are.” I would take Stacey's words and make that my advice. Stop waiting to be perfect and start being curious about where the problems are and that's how you make a difference. No matter what the challenges are, they're going to end up being people's challenges. All challenges in business are people challenges.

I love it and it's perfect that we ended this interview with your piece of career advice being to be curious, which is an important characteristic of a leader. It will take people far and it’s great for cultures as well. Shannon, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for making time to come and share with us on the show. For anybody that maybe wants to connect with you or find out more about Box of Crayons, where should they go?

They should go to BoxOfCrayons.com. Thank you so much, Andy. This has been great.

You're welcome. That’s BoxOfCrayons.com. This has been fantastic so much. There’s great information here. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much again and we'll talk soon.

Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Take care.

• Box of Crayons
• Talent Development Think Tank
• The Coaching Habit
• Own Your Career Own Your Life
• Article - How to Publish a Book on Amazon (and Sell Over 100,000 Copies the SMART Way)
• Jennifer Brown – Past Episode
• Brave New Work
• The Ready