Edgar Schein Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Edgar Schein. Here they are! All 100 of them:

we do not think and talk about what we see; we see what we are able to think and talk about.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Most of my important lessons about life have come from recognizing how others from a different culture view things.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Questions are taken for granted rather than given a starring role in the human drama. Yet all my teaching and consulting experience has taught me that what builds a relationship, what solves problems, what moves things forward is asking the right questions.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
we must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Help in the broadest sense is, in fact, one of the most important currencies that flow between members of society because help is one of the main ways of expressing love and other caring emotions that humans express.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
When you are giving feedback, try to be descriptive and minimize judgment.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
If a client insists on getting a recommendation from you, always give him at least two alternatives so that he still has to make choice.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
Organizational analyses that show separate boxes for “culture” and “strategy” are making a fundamental conceptual error. Strategy is an integral part of the culture.
Edgar H. Schein (Organizational Culture and Leadership)
Our wants and needs distort to an unknown degree what we perceive. We block out a great deal of information that is potentially available if it does not fit our needs, expectations, preconceptions, and prejudgments.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Check out your own emotions and intentions before offering, giving, or receiving help.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
Remember that the person requesting your help may feel uncomfortable, so make sure to ask what the client really wants and how you can best help.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
Everything You Say or Do Is an Intervention that Determines the Future of the Relationship
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
Minimize inappropriate encouragement.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
Leadership” is wanting to do something new and better, and getting others to go along.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust)
Telling puts the other person down. It implies that the other person does not already know what I am telling and that the other person ought to know it.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
When our true intentions are something other than providing help, such as getting a job done or beating someone in a game, we are most prone to falling into the traps described throughout this book.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
In building the helping relationship, encouragement—via positive reinforcement—certainly seems appropriate. But if it is not sensitively handled, such encouragement can quickly become patronizing and insulting. My
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
Telling is only an investment if you know for sure that what you are telling is of value to the other person. That is why it is safest to tell only if you have been asked, rather than arrogantly deciding on your own to tell somebody something.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Gratuitous telling betrays three kinds of arrogance: (1) that you think you know more than the person you’re telling, (2) that your knowledge is the correct knowledge, and (3) that you have the right to structure other people’s experience for them.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Share your helping problem. More often than I care to admit I have found that when I was supposed to be helping someone, I suddenly did not know what to do next. When this happens, the best thing to do is to say to the client, “At this point I am stuck—I don’t know what to do next to be helpful.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
The point is that no matter what you do or don’t do, you are sending signals; you are intervening in the situation and therefore need to be mindful of that reality. Unless you are invisible you cannot help but communicate, so your choice of communication should be based on what kind of intervention you intend.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
The dilemma in U.S. culture is that we don’t really distinguish what I am defining as Humble Inquiry carefully enough from leading questions, rhetorical questions, embarrassing questions, or statements in the form of questions—such as journalists seem to love— which are deliberately provocative and intended to put you down.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
We know that negative reinforcement or punishment works well for behavior that should be eliminated. And we know from feedback theory that the best kind of feedback is descriptive because the client can then make the evaluation. These are valid guidelines but they don’t solve some of the subtle issues that can arise in the relationship.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.
Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
All groups and organizations need to know how they are doing against their goals and periodically need to check to determine whether they are performing in line with their mission. This process involves three areas in which the group needs to achieve consensus leading to cultural dimensions that later drop out of awareness and become basic assumptions. Consensus must be achieved on what to measure, how to measure it, and what to do when corrections are needed. The cultural elements that form around each of these issues often become the primary focus for what newcomers to the organization will be concerned about because such measurements inevitably become linked to how each employee is doing his or her job.
Edgar H. Schein (Organizational Culture and Leadership)
Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation—yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The Dip Organizational Change If you can read just one book on how organizational change really works: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch If you can read just two books on understanding that change is a complex system: Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations Dan Pontefract, Flat Army Hear interviews with FREDERIC LALOUX, DAN PONTEFRACT, and JERRY STERNIN at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just one book on using structure to change behaviours: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto If you can read just one book on how to amplify the good: Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance If you can read just one book on increasing your impact within organizations: Peter Block, Flawless Consulting Other Cool Stuff If you can read just one book on being strategic: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win If you can read just one book on scaling up your impact: Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence If you can read just one book on being more helpful: Edgar Schein, Helping Hear interviews with ROGER MARTIN, BOB SUTTON, and WARREN BERGER at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just two books on the great questions: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question Dorothy Strachan, Making Questions Work If you can read just one book on creating learning that sticks: Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick If you can read just one book on why you should appreciate and marvel at every day, every moment: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything If you can read just one book that saves lives while increasing impact: Michael Bungay Stanier, ed., End Malaria (All money goes to Malaria No More; about $400,000 has been raised so far.) IF THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, THEN WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO STUPID PEOPLE ASK?
Michael Bungay Stanier (The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever)
Don’t we all know how to ask questions? Of course we think we know how to ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questions are just another form of telling—rhetorical or just testing whether what we think is right. We are biased toward telling instead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solving culture in which knowing things and telling others what we know is valued.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Though helping is a common social process, it is not the only social process. Our relationships with others have many other functions. In order to offer, give, and receive help effectively, we also need the ability to shift from whatever else we were doing and adopt a readiness to help or be helped. It is part of our social training to be prepared to help and to offer help when the ongoing situation suddenly makes helping an imperative or at least an option. But this impulse to help or seek help can run counter to what else is going on.
Edgar H. Schein (Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (The Humble Leadership Series Book 1))
In airplane crashes and chemical industry accidents, in the infrequent but serious nuclear plant accidents, in the NASA Challenger and Columbia disasters, and in the British Petroleum gulf spill, a common finding is that lower-ranking employees had information that would have prevented or lessened the consequences of the accident, but either it was not passed up to higher levels, or it was ignored, or it was overridden. When I talk to senior managers, they always assure me that they are open, that they want to hear from their subordinates, and that they take the information seriously. However, when I talk to the subordinates in those same organizations, they tell me either they do not feel safe bringing bad news to their bosses or they’ve tried but never got any response or even acknowledgment, so they concluded that their input wasn’t welcome and gave up. Shockingly often, they settled for risky alternatives rather than upset their bosses with potentially bad news. When I look at what goes on in hospitals, in operating rooms, and in the health care system generally, I find the same problems of communication exist and that patients frequently pay the price. Nurses and technicians do not feel safe bringing negative information to doctors or correcting a doctor who is about to make a mistake. Doctors will argue that if the others were “professionals” they would speak up, but in many a hospital the nurses will tell you that doctors feel free to yell at nurses in a punishing way, which creates a climate where nurses will certainly not speak up. Doctors engage patients in one-way conversations in which they ask only enough questions to make a diagnosis and sometimes make misdiagnoses because they don’t ask enough questions before they begin to tell patients what they should do.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
we know intuitively and from experience that we work better in a complex interdependent task with someone we know and trust, but we are not prepared to spend the effort, time, and money to ensure that such relationships are built. We value such relationships when they are built as part of the work itself, as in military operations where soldiers form intense personal relationships with their buddies. We admire the loyalty to each other and the heroism that is displayed on behalf of someone with whom one has a relationship, but when we see such deep relationships in a business organization, we consider it unusual. And programs for team building are often the first things cut in the budget when cost issues arise. The
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Saying to oneself that one should ask more and tell less does not solve the problem of building a relationship of mutual trust. The underlying attitude of competitive one-upmanship will leak out if it is there. Humble Inquiry starts with the attitude and is then supported by our choice of questions. The more we remain curious about the other person rather than letting our own expectations and preconceptions creep in, the better our chances are of staying in the right questioning mode. We have to learn that diagnostic and confrontational questions come very naturally and easily, just as telling comes naturally and easily. It takes some discipline and practice to access one’s ignorance, to stay focused on the other person.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
How Does Asking Build Relationships?
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Finally, in Chapter 7, I provide some suggestions for how we can increase our ability and desire to engage in more Humble Inquiry.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Humble Inquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
About this book In this book I will first define and explain what I mean by Humble Inquiry in Chapter 1. To fully understand humility, it is helpful to differentiate three kinds of humility: 1) the humility that we feel around elders and dignitaries; 2) the humility that we feel in the presence of those who awe us with their achievements; and 3) Here-and-now Humility, which results from our being dependent from time to time on someone else in order to accomplish a task that we are committed to. This will strike some readers as academic hairsplitting, but it is the recognition of this third type of humility that is the key to Humble Inquiry and to the building of positive relationships.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Humble Inquiry is the skill and the art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
How does one produce a climate in which people will speak up, bring up information that is safety related, and even correct superiors or those of higher status when they are about to make a mistake?
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
The leader of the future will be a person who can lead and follow, be central and marginal, be hierarchically above and below, be individualistic and a team player, and above all, be a perpetual learner. – Edgar H. Schein
Murtuza Ali Lakhani (The Leader of OZ: Revealing the 101 Secrets of Marvelous Leadership for the 21st Century)
We tend to think we can separate strategy from culture, but we fail to notice that in most organizations strategic thinking is deeply colored by tacit assumptions about who they are and what their mission is. ~ Edgar Schein, professor MIT Sloan School of Management
John R. Childress (FASTBREAK: The CEO's Guide to Strategy Execution)
But especially if you are dependent on others—if you are the boss or senior person trying to increase the likelihood that your subordinates will help you and be open with you—then Humble Inquiry will not only be desirable but essential. Why is this so difficult? We need next to look at the cultural forces that favor telling.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
4 The Culture of Do and Tell The main inhibitor of Humble Inquiry is the culture in which we grew up. Culture can be thought of as manifesting itself on many levels—it is represented by all of its artifacts, by which I mean buildings, art works, products, language, and everything that we see and feel when we enter another culture.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Beyond these general points about culture, why do specific aspects of the U.S. culture make Humble Inquiry more difficult? THE MAIN PROBLEM–A CULTURE THAT VALUES TASK ACCOMPLISHMENT MORE THAN RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
The U.S. culture is individualistic, competitive, optimistic, and pragmatic. We believe that the basic unit of society is the individual, whose rights have to be protected at all costs. We are entrepreneurial and admire individual accomplishment. We thrive on competition. Optimism and pragmatism show up in the way we are oriented toward the short term and in our dislike of long-range planning. We do not like to fix things and improve them while they are still working. We prefer to run things until they break because we believe we can then fix them or replace them. We are arrogant and deep down believe we can fix anything—“The impossible just takes a little longer.” We are impatient and, with information technology’s ability to do things faster, we are even more impatient. Most important of all, we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.” In fact, instead of admiring relationships, we value and admire individual competitiveness, winning out over each other, outdoing each other conversationally, pulling the clever con game, and selling stuff that the customer does not need. We believe in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), and we justify exploitation with “There’s a sucker born every minute.” We breed mistrust of strangers, but we don’t have any formulas for how to test or build trust. We value our freedom without realizing that this breeds caution and mistrust of each other. When we are taken in by a Ponzi scheme and lose all our money, we don’t blame our culture or our own greed—we blame the regulators who should have caught it and kick ourselves for not getting in on it earlier.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Checklists and other formal processes of coordination are not enough because they cannot deal with unanticipated situations. Through Humble Inquiry teams can build the initial relationships that enable them to learn together. As they build higher levels of trust through joint learning, they become more open in their communication, which, in turn, enables them to deal with the inevitable surprises that arise in complex interdependent situations.7
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
We do not like or trust groups. We believe that committees and meetings are a waste of time and that group decisions diffuse accountability. We only spend money and time on team building when it appears to be pragmatically necessary to get the job done. We tout and admire teamwork and the winning team (espoused values), but we don’t for a minute believe that the team could have done it without the individual star, who usually receives much greater pay (tacit assumption).
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
We build coalitions in order to gain power and, in that process, make it more necessary to be careful in deciding whom we can trust. We assume that we can automatically trust family only to discover betrayal among family members. Basically, in our money-conscious society of today, we don’t really know whom to trust and, worse, we don’t know how to create a trusting relationship. We value loyalty in the abstract, but in our pluralistic society, it is not at all clear to whom one should be loyal beyond oneself.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
This may seem like a harsh view of our culture, and there are certainly trends in other directions, but when we deal with culture at the tacit assumption level we have to think clearly about what our assumptions actually are, quite apart from our espoused values. The result of a pragmatic, individualistic, competitive, task-oriented culture is that humility is low on the value scale.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
We take it for granted that telling is more valued than asking. Asking the right questions is valued, but asking in general is not. To ask is to reveal ignorance and weakness. Knowing things is highly valued, and telling people what we know is almost automatic because we have made it habitual in most situations. We are especially prone to telling when we have been empowered by someone else’s question or when we have been formally promoted into a position of power. I once asked a group of management students what it meant to them to be promoted to “manager.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
When we don’t get acknowledgment or feel that we are giving more than we are getting out of conversations or feel talked down to, we become anxious, disrespected, and humiliated. Humble
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Trust in the context of a conversation is believing that the other person will acknowledge me, not take advantage of me, not embarrass or humiliate me, tell me the truth, and, in the broader context, not cheat me, work on my behalf, and support the goals we have agreed to.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
and Tell” and argue that not only do we value telling more than
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
What we choose to ask, when we ask, what our underlying attitude is as we ask—all are key to relationship building, to communication, and to task performance.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Things we conceal from others are insecurities that we are ashamed to admit, feelings and impulses we consider to be anti-social or inconsistent with our self-image, memories of events where we failed or performed badly against our own standards, and, most important, reactions to other people that we judge would be impolite or hurtful to reveal to their face.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
We use the words relationship, trust, and openness glibly and frequently, as if we think that everyone will, of course, understand what we mean. Yet when we ask someone to define any one of these three words, we get either a blank stare, a disdainful look implying that we must be stupid, or definitions that don’t really explain anything and that don’t even agree with one another.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster)
Relationship is an interactive concept and must therefore be analyzed from a sociological point of view of interactions. It is not enough for one party to say “I feel I have a connection (relationship) with you” if the other party does not feel that connection. Unrequited love is not a relationship, but a casual friendship can be a relationship. If I trust my boss but he does not trust me, there is no relationship. If I am quite open with my boss but he is not open with me, there is no relationship.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster)
When we get to know someone personally and can work with him or her on a more personal level, this is Level Two, which is essential for real help to occur. Level Two trust implies that we are willing to make promises and will keep them. Level Two openness implies that with respect to our joint task we will share all relevant information and will not lie to one another.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster)
Building a relationship begins with attitudinal preparation, a conscious process of building the right kind of mind-set.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster)
The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships. Increasingly,
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
In my personal life, especially as I am aging, I find that the biggest mistakes I make and the biggest risks I run all result form mindless hurrying.
Edgar H. Schein
Why does this not occur routinely? Don’t we all know how to ask questions? Of course we think we know how to ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questions are just another form of telling—rhetorical or just testing whether what we think is right. We are biased toward telling instead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solving culture in which knowing things and telling others what we know is valued.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
We also live in a structured society in which building relationships is not as important as task accomplishment, in which it is appropriate and expected that the subordinate does more asking than telling, while the boss does more telling that asking. Having to ask is a sign of weakness or ignorance, so we avoid it as much as possible.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Ultimately the purpose of Humble Inquiry is to build relationships that lead to trust which, in turn, leads to better communication and collaboration.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Edgar Schein has said, learning only occurs when “survival anxiety” becomes greater than “learning anxiety.
Ben Dattner (Credit and Blame at Work: How Better Assessment Can Improve Individual, Team and Organizational Success)
But as MIT’s Edgar Schein—one of the world’s leading scholars on organizational culture—explains, those things don’t define a culture. They’re just artifacts of it. Schein has one of the most useful definitions of culture that we’ve seen: Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty)
As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.
Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong
Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.
Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
Edgar Schein has untangled the paradox of being helpful in his excellent book Helping. At its
Michael Bungay Stanier (The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever)
Nothing is more stultifying than running a meeting by Robert’s Rules of Order and to impose the political process of majority rule on small working groups where total commitment is needed.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Edgar Schein, Helping
Michael Bungay Stanier (The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever)
Laszlo Bock, Work Rules (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015) David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011) Arie de Geus, The Living Company (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Perseverance and Passion (New York: Scribner, 2016) Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012) Amy Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer, 2012) Adam Grant, Give and Take (New York: Viking, 2013) Richard Hackman, Leading Teams (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) Chip and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (New York: Broadway Books, 2010) Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: HarperCollins, 2016) James Kerr, Legacy (London: Constable & Robinson, 2013) Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002) Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (New York: Portfolio, 2015). Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012) Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009) Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013) Edgar H. Schein, Helping (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009) Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013) Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday Business, 1990) Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009)
Daniel Coyle (The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups)
The culture of Do and Tell does not teach us how to change pace, decelerate, take stock of what we are doing, observe ourselves and others, try new behaviors, build new relationships.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
One of the most difficult aspects of jumping to a new curve is setting aside your ego. In her essay, "Shedding My Skin," Rebecca Jackson writes, "Have you ever let go of something that simultaneously protects and strangles you; something that both defines you, but also suffocates your evolution? just like a snake shedding its skin, you have to lose something critical to grow, leaving you vulnerable and exposed in the process."7 When we take a step down to gain momentum for an upward surge, for a time we will know less than those around us. This can deal a blow to the ego. In achievement-oriented cultures, it is very difficult to look dumb even temporarily, asking questions like, "Am I doing this correctly?" especially to lower-status team members. MIT professor emeritus Edgar Schein describes a willingness to acknowledge that "in the here-and-now my status is inferior to yours because you know something or can do something that I need in order to accomplish a task or goal" as the art of humble inquiry. For many, this can feel very painful. In fact, in some cultures, says Schein, "task failure is preferable to humiliation and loss of face."8
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
Empathy One is to listen for and be curious about the actual situation or problem that the client is describing. Empathy Two is to listen for and be curious about what is really bothering the speaker as she is explaining the problem or the situation.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster)
Edgar Schein has untangled the paradox of being helpful in his excellent book Helping.
Michael Bungay Stanier (The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever)
(1) Learn to see, feel, and curb the impulses to lash out; (2) Learn to make a habit of listening and figuring out what is going on before taking action; and (3) Try harder to hear, to understand, and acknowledge what others are trying to express to you.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Edgar Schein has untangled the paradox of being helpful in his excellent book Helping. At its crux is the insight that when you offer to help someone, you “one up” yourself: you raise your status and you lower hers, whether you mean to or not. This idea seems counterintuitive, I know, because so often our desire to help comes from genuine caring. But the insight rings true when you put yourself in the shoes of the person who is being offered help.
Michael Bungay Stanier (The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever)
Humble Inquiry goes beyond mere questioning and displays an attitude of interest and curiosity that hopefully engenders a similar reciprocal demeanor of curiosity in the other person in the conversation. You can open the door to a relationship through your own Humble Inquiry, yet a relationship only flourishes if that attitude is reciprocated.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
another person in that moment. My Here-and-now Humility can by itself trigger a very positive and genuine curiosity and interest in you. You will feel acknowledged, and it is precisely my temporary “subordination” that can create psychological safety for you, which can increase the chances that you will reveal what I need to know to get a task completed and begin to build our relationship constructively.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
of something, seduce, or give advice. Your sense of purpose defines your attitude, and knowing why you are in a conversation helps you to clear your head of distractions and irrelevant feelings.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Humble Inquiry is therefore most relevant when you find yourself in a conversation that is initially just transactional but develops into something more personal because one or both of you want it.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
Humble Inquiry has the potential to humanize relationships across hierarchical and geographical boundaries, especially when people reveal aspects of themselves that are relatable. Of course each person’s experiences are unique. Yet the events of any story we tell reveal how we perceive things, feel about them, and act on them, which sooner or later provides opportunities for empathizing. Ideally, inquirers remember something similar from their own experiences and can identify with the storyteller. When we share our stories, we provide each other opportunities to discover important similarities in our experiences and our reactions, even as we know that experiences still differ in many ways. We have to listen and understand—this allows us to identify with the storyteller, which in turn prompts us to inquire further.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
We see Humble Inquiry as primarily about reducing one’s ignorance, making sense of complicated situations, and in that process, deepening relationships. In contrast, the primary role of helping inquiry is to influence—to teach, coach, counsel, and heal.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
By asking a diagnostic question instead of continuing to encourage the unfolding of the client’s story, you are taking charge of the direction of the conversation and should, therefore, consider whether or not this is desirable. The main issue is whether this steering is in the interest of actual problem-solving and helping, or simply indulging your curiosity in a way that may not be helpful.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
What you just said, that you didn’t do anything, made me realize that we don’t need an outside assessment. We just need to begin to act on those behaviors that we observe that no longer make any sense. We have allowed and maybe even encouraged some of the old rituals that we are now calling stodgy. We now need to change our own behavior to signal that many of the old ways of doing things will no longer work. So, with Ed’s help, let’s figure out when we personally have condoned what we don’t like, and in what way we could behave differently in the future.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
If you are trying to develop a good relationship and feel the conversation starting to go in the wrong direction, you can humbly ask some version of “Are we OK?” “Is this working?” or “What is happening here?” to explore what might be going wrong and how it might be improved.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
The power of this kind of inquiry is that it focuses on the relationship and enables both parties to assess whether their relationship goals are being met.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
The more we remain curious about the other person in the current context—before letting our own expectations and preconceptions creep in—the better our chances are of staying in the right questioning mode. The more we take a collaborative helping purpose into our conversations, the more likely we are to improve the relationship.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
working identity involves revisiting the basic assumptions we use to evaluate possibilities. To illustrate what basic assumptions are, it is useful to think of our career choices as a pyramid with three levels (see figure 4-1).4 At the top of the pyramid lies what is most visible, to us and to the outside world: what job we hold in what setting. Dan, for example, was an executive in a high-tech company. One level below are the values and motivating factors that hold constant from job to job and company to company. These are what MIT career specialist Edgar Schein calls our “career anchors,” the competencies, preferences, and work-related values that we would be unwilling to give up if forced to make a choice.5 Dan’s experience has led him to value himself professionally as someone who excels at turnarounds—at making troubled companies healthy. He could perform this role on a smaller or larger scale (for example, big company or small start-up), in an advisory or a hands-on role, and as a manager or an owner, but the constant is that managerial challenge is what excites him. Dan’s turmoil over the offer of a “perfect job” that would have again robbed him of his family time, however, belies a conflict between his professional and personal values that is rooted at a deeper level. In his search, therefore, he has to plumb deeper: He must explore the final, bottom level of the pyramid to understand the basic assumptions—our mental maps about how the world works—that truly drive his behavior.
Herminia Ibarra (Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career)
Thus the greatest and fatal flaw was the failure to draw on its intellectual capital
Edgar H. Schein (DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation)
Thus the greatest and fatal flaw was the failure to draw on its intellectual capital. - Gordon Bell
Edgar H. Schein (DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation)
In our view, leadership is always a relationship, and truly successful leadership thrives in a group culture of high openness and high trust. Leadership and culture can be seen as two sides of the same coin, and culture is quintessentially a group phenomenon. Though this book focuses on a new model of leadership, it is equally a book about culture and group dynamics.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust)
Leadership in this environment is categorically humbling because it is virtually impossible for an individual to accumulate enough knowledge to figure out all of the answers. Interdependence and constant change become a way of life in which humility in the face of this complexity has become a critical survival skill.
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust)
. All too often, problems aren’t in the “nodes” (individuals), but in the interactions (relationships). With the exponential rise in contingencies and interactions, we see signs of a deep malaise in many organizations that can be characterized most clearly as the persistent failure of both downward and upward communication, reflecting indifference and mistrust up and down the hierarchy. Quality and safety problems don’t result from technological failures but from socio-technical failures of communication (Gerstein, 2008).
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust)
To understand your connection—and your disconnection—to work on a deeper level, consider the concept of career anchors, introduced by Edgar Schein in the late ’70s. These anchors consist of values, motives, and needs that constitute a way we experience the world of work. Schein asserts that certain motivational, talent, and value self-images, formed through work experience, function to guide and constrain our entire careers. These self-images act, in effect, as career anchors that not only influence career choices but also affect decisions to move from one employer to another, shape what individuals are looking for in life, and color their views of the future.1
Thomas J. DeLong (Flying Without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success)
Keeping up with the content of accelerating change is really hard. Naturally we all share the inclination to focus on what we know, on our industry, or on our area of expertise, where we can be comfortable keeping up with what is changing. Yet trying to keep up with the content of accelerating change may actually be less important than keeping up with the context of accelerating change. There is a real difference between the content question “What changed?” and the context question “What is going on?” or “Why is this happening?
Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)