Ask The Question, Then Stay For The Answer

Every September the calendar wakes back up. School starts, the boards reconvene, the philanthropic season gets going, and the committees that went quiet in June suddenly have agendas again. From now until May we are all back in the same rooms with the same people, and for the first few weeks the same conversation happens on repeat. Someone asks how your summer was, you tell them it was good and a little busy, they say theirs was much the same, one of you marvels that it is already September, and the two of you move along.

I probably notice that more than most people do, and I should admit why. Small talk has never been my gift. I do not love a happy hour, I have never once enjoyed a meet and greet, and if you put me in a room where the entire purpose is to circulate, I will find the nearest exit and start calculating how long I have to stay before it would be rude to use it. None of that comes from disliking people, since it is very much the opposite. I like people so much that a shallow conversation feels like a waste of the one standing in front of me. Seat me at a table where I can actually ask something and I will stay all night, long past the point where anyone else wants to keep going.

So when I watch an entire season of reunions get spent on the weather and the calendar, what I see is the cost of it. If you multiply that exchange across one week back, across the carpool line and the first meeting and the fundraiser and the sideline, we have given away hours saying almost nothing at all to people we genuinely care about. We only get so much time with each other, and the questions we choose to ask are what set the ceiling on how much of that time counts for anything.

Curious for What?

Curiosity has become something of a leadership buzzword over the last few years. We are told to be curious, to stay curious, to hire for curiosity, and I agree with all of it, since curiosity is a wonderful thing to have. What I keep wanting to know is curious for what? Listed as a personality trait on a slide, curiosity costs us nothing and builds nothing at all. It needs a destination, and mine always ends up in the same place, which is trust.

The clearest example I have of that is not a leader I studied in a book, it is Dolly Parton. I grew up in Louisville on bluegrass, so Dolly was never a novelty in our house, she was part of the wallpaper of my childhood, and every year on my birthday we went to see her. When I moved to Dallas in my twenties I kept the tradition going, and these days I have a Dolly candle, a piece of Dolly art hanging in the closet where I get dressed, and a shirt my own team has seen on more than one video call. Most people assume the appeal is the sequins and the one liners, when the truth is that I have always been drawn to her because she was never once surface level. She talked openly about growing up poor, about faith and doubt, about heartbreak, and about being underestimated by nearly everyone who ever got the chance. She looked at people and genuinely saw them, she met them exactly where they stood whether they came from a holler in Tennessee or a corner office in Manhattan, and she never made anyone feel they had to become someone else in order to sit with her. Millions of strangers trust that woman with things they have never told their own families, and not one bit of that came from the glitter. It came from her willingness to go a layer deeper than the room was expecting.

That is the return on curiosity, and it is available to all of us. When I ask a real question and someone hands me back a real answer, something shifts between us. They learn that I can be told the truth, I learn what actually matters to them, and neither of us could have arrived there by way of a status update. Trust does not get built without curiosity, and curiosity that never earns any trust was really just nosiness wearing a nicer outfit.

I watch the absence of it play out constantly on the business side of my life. Leaders ask me how to get their people engaged, how to bring them back into the building, and how to know whether the space they are paying for is working at all. Very often the answer is not a strategy, it is a question they have not been willing to ask their own team, either because they are afraid of what they might hear or because it has honestly never occurred to them to ask. All the while, the information they need most is sitting in the heads of the very people who use that place every single day. The same thing is true at my own dinner table, where everything I most want to know about my children’s lives is right there in front of me and only ever comes out when I ask well and then get quiet.

The Half We Skip

Asking is the easy half of this. Staying is the part that costs something, which is exactly why we skip it.

You know precisely what I am describing, because it has happened to you. Someone asks you something thoughtful, you begin to answer, and their eyes start scanning the room over your shoulder. They cut into the middle of your answer with their next question. You can practically watch them loading up their own story while you are still talking. I have walked away from more conversations than I can count thinking that the person asked me something without ever really wanting to know, and what I felt afterward was not annoyance so much as a quiet decision not to bother telling them anything real again.

That version is performance rather than curiosity. Real curiosity works as an exchange, where I offer you a question, you offer me something true, and I have the discipline to receive it. If I am not willing to take, then I had no business asking in the first place.

Nothing in my lifetime has made it easier to ask without staying than the way we all work now. A question typed into an email thread requires nothing of me once I hit send, and a video call lets me nod along with my inbox open in the next window while someone tells me something that mattered enough to say out loud. I want to be clear that I am not romanticizing the past here, because the speed we live at is a genuine blessing. Speed to market, speed to solve, speed to results in healthcare where minutes decide outcomes. I have built a company that runs on tools which did not exist when I started, and I would not give a single one of them back. Every convenience arrives with a bill attached, though, and we ought to be honest about who is paying it. It is wonderful that I can FaceTime my mother from anywhere in the world, and it is not the same as sitting beside her on the couch and holding her hand. A screen will keep us in contact, yet it will never keep us in a relationship, which means the more of our contact runs through one, the more deliberate we have to be about the moments that do not.

Staying is what that deliberateness actually looks like in practice. It costs four seconds of silence while a person decides how honest they are going to be. It costs the follow up you had not planned on asking. It costs being a few minutes late to whatever is sitting on your calendar next. Every so often it costs you hearing something about your leadership, your company, or yourself that you would have much preferred not to know. All of that is the price of admission to trust, and I have yet to find anyone offering a discount on it.

Where I Would Start This Month

As we all come back into the same rooms this fall, I would love for us to retire the question about how our summers were. Try one of these instead, and then, I mean this sincerely, stop talking.

• What lit you up this summer?
• What is the most profound thing you learned over the last few months?
• What is the most memorable thing your child said to you?
• What did you say no to, and are you glad that you did?
• What have you changed your mind about lately?
• What is taking up more room in your head than it deserves?
• What are you walking into this fall that has you a little nervous?

A few more for the office, where the stakes are every bit as real:

• What time of day do you do your best thinking, and are we protecting it?
• What do you wish I would stop doing?
• What does everybody on the team know that I probably do not?

Not one of those questions is complicated, which tells you the barrier was never difficulty. It was willingness.

Someone is going to ask how your summer was this week. You can tell them it was good and busy, the two of you will move along, and neither of you will remember the conversation by dinner. You could also ask them something real and then hold still long enough to actually hear the answer, which is how people come to trust that you meant the question. Dolly built a life on meeting people right where they were, and every one of us has the same opportunity in every conversation we walk into. It happens one question at a time, followed by the silence we are brave enough to leave after it.

Ask the question, then stay for the answer.

– Beth