How to be a "Quiet Leader"

My top book recommendation for new managers is Quiet Leadership by David Rock. The core idea is that effective leadership isn't about giving answers — it's about helping others improve their thinking.

Let’s say you’re having a one-on-one with someone you’re managing, and they have a problem with a task. Many people’s instincts will be to try to solve the problem for the employee, or provide advice and solutions. According to Quiet Leadership, you shouldn’t provide solutions yourself, but rather help the employee find the solution on their own.

David Rock proposes six steps for improving your employee’s thinking and helping them find the solutions on their own. I’m only going to focus on the three takeaways that I find most useful, but I recommend reading the whole book. 

Ask, don’t tell

The main takeaway from Quite Leadership is that you should ask, don’t tell. When someone comes to you with a problem, it’s tempting to give advice and suggest solutions. You may have been in their exact position, and feel certain you know the answer. They may even specifically ask you to choose for them or come with answers. Still, you should almost always only ask questions, and let them find the answers on their own.

Helping them coming up with or finding the answer for themselves is usually what’s best for them and the organisation -- it’s often also most effective in the short term.

By supporting your employee to find the answer themselves, you’re helping them practice tools for solving the problem without your help in the future. It’s an investment in their skills and capacity.

In my experience, people are more likely to do something if they feel like they came up with the solution themselves. I think there are especially two things going on here: 1) People need to feel ownership of the decision, and 2) the solution needs to match their experience and way of thinking. 

There are especially three types of questions you should ask:

Clarify – ask questions that have to do with their thinking, vision, planning, detail, problem or emotional feelings towards the problem. As a general rule, David recommends asking at least 5 questions that clarifies their thinking.

Explore alternatives – ask how you can help, ask them to brainstorm ideas, ask what are the possible paths, ask what different angles they can take.

Define next steps – do you want to take some specific actions? What do you want to do next time? How will you make that happen? When do you want to do this by? How can I help you make this happen?

Make sure you’re talking about the same thing

At the beginning and throughout the conversation with your employee, make sure you’re talking about the same thing and that they’re in the right mindset for that conversation.

It should be clear to them why you’re talking, for how long, who’s involved in the conversation, who it’ll be shared with, and what the output of the conversation should be.

Try to also think about what context they may be missing that you have, or vice versa. Do they have all the relevant information they need to be able to contribute in the meeting? Is there anything about their experience or background that you may be missing in order to best support them?

In Quiet Leadership, David Rock recommends starting each meeting with what he calls “placement”. At a minimum, this should entail:

• Why are we talking?

• For how long are we talking?

• What do we hope to accomplish?

In addition, placement could include:

• What concrete output should this meeting have, and what does it look like?

• What is the relevant context for this meeting?

• Are there any updates that should be shared?

• Are we talking about process (how we do something) or content (what we’re doing)?

• Who’s leading the conversation? Who’s making decisions and how? Who’s taking notes?

• What mindset is the other person in? Are there things I can say or do to help get them in the right mindset?

I recommend creating a checklist that you use to prepare each meeting where you write down the answer to the questions above and note down what you want to share at the beginning of the meeting. As a general rule, it’s better to have too much placement than too little. 

This may feel awkward at first, especially if you’re reading out loud your notes from when you prepared for the meeting. To mitigate this, I recommend saying something like the following before you do placement:

“I made a list of things to go through at the beginning of the meeting to make sure we’re both on the same page and are as efficient as possible. I want to make sure I don’t miss anything, so I’ll be reading it out loud.”

When you get used to doing this over time, you’ll find that you no longer need an actual list, but are able to go through it in your head at the beginning of a meeting. This requires practice however!

Be short and sweet

To communicate as clearly as possible, and increase the chance of being heard, it’s important to speak with intent. This means being succinct, specific, and generous when you communicate. 

Having someone capturing the essence of what you’re saying in few words, in a way that makes others feel better, can be very powerful. You add value by showing you’re listening and explaining something that they themselves find complex in a clear and thoughtful way. 

Being succinct means saying something in as few words as possible. Shorter messages are often better listened to, and it forces you to choose your words carefully.

To be specific is to make it very clear exactly what you are talking about. There’s a big difference between saying “That was a great meeting”, and “That was a great meeting—especially the way we were able to bounce ideas off each other, and how easy it was to get through such a big agenda in two hours.”

Being generous is about taking ownership of the other person understanding what you’re saying. It often includes acknowledging the other person’s feelings or experience, choosing words you think will be most helpful in making them understand, and building trust by being personal and sharing of yourself.

In order to speak with intent, you often need to slow down, breathe, and think before you talk. 

Ask for permission

Should you really never provide an answer? If you’ve tried to help them do their own thinking and it seems like it’s not working, it can be most useful to provide solutions or options. However, to be most effective – to increase the chance they actually do what you propose – you should provide the answer in away that matches the person’s experience and way of thinking.

David Rocks talks about these different approaches as different steps of a ladder, where you should start with step 1. 

If you’re at the third step, starting each meeting with placement and speaking with intent as described above takes you a long way. 

There’s one more thing you can do that David Rock mentions again and again throughout the book: Ask for permission.

For example, you can say “I may have some possible solutions here, are you okay with me sharing them?” or “I’ve gone through something similar myself, would it be helpful for me to share how I went about it?”.

By asking for permission, you’re giving them ownership over how the conversation should go. In my experience, it also makes people listen more with intent.

Practice and reflect

What made Quiet Leadership so impactful for my management and leadership skills was actually doing the exercises in the book. My colleague and I would choose one thing to practice each week, and then discuss afterwards. You can do the practices with employees at work, or with friends and family. 

These practices are why I recommend you read the book instead of only reading a summary – I think it’s well worth the investment. 

Here are some of the practices I found most useful:

Let Them Do All the Thinking

This week, make a note of the number of times that people try to tell you what to do or how to think. Start to notice the impact that this has on your thinking—do you appreciate when people do this? What do you do in response?

Clarify

Imagine that you could capture the essence of conversations in just a few words, in a way that had people immediately feel better. That’s the essence of good clarifying. To build this muscle takes stepping back from the details, listening to people as their potential, and fo- cusing on emotions and learning. And, of course, being succinct, specific, and generous. Build your clarifying muscles by clarifying what people say to you for a few days. At the end of each day do some writing about what you notice. Clarify what you are noticing in your writing as well.

Placement

Practice placing people once a day. You could try it at the start of a meeting, talking about timing, roles, outcomes, and process, and see what happens. My experience is a little placement goes a long way to making just about every dialogue significantly more efficient.

Be succinct

Practice explaining yourself in single sentences for one day. Or if you prefer, focus on halving the number of words you use. Try this out in all sorts of situations and see what happens. Write down your insights from doing this exercise, as clearly as you can, as an exercise in being succinct in itself. Summarize the insights you uncover about being succinct—in succinct, visual sentences. For example, “I can see that people listen more when I am succinct,” or “I can be more succinct with a little focus.”

Be specific

Practice being specific for a day. Focus your attention on providing the full story in every conversation, though just in summary so you are still being succinct. Write down what you notice.