Name: 110. Raising Your Answer Intelligence (AQ) with Dr. Brian Glibkowski
Uploaded: 2025-04-25T23:36:08.000Z
Duration: 50 min 52 s
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Hey, everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project with your host, Mick Spears.

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We bring you thought-provoking guests and topics every week to challenge your thinking about leadership.

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Our aim is to help you become the leader that you wish you always had as we learn together and lead together.

Hey, everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project.

I've got a real special treat for you today.

I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Dr. Brian Glibkowski, and he's the founder and the keynote speaker and researcher and author of a book called Answer Intelligence, Raise Your AQ.

Today we're going to talk about IQ and discover what this is all about.

I've been doing my own research into it leading into today's interview.

And you know that we pride ourselves here to challenge the status quo and to find new things that people are not necessarily talking about or thinking about.

And Brian has put considerable work into this research.

So without any further ado, Brian, please tell us a little bit about your rich background and what ultimately led you down this path to wanting to put so much research into Answer Intelligence.

Thank you, Meg, for the introduction and having me.

So I'll start with just a brief background on me and then I'll let you sort of have me expand upon that.

So my background is in and out of academia.

As a management professor, I did research on questions, published that in academia.

And one thing hit me that we know a lot about questions, 6WH questions, open and closed questions, coaching and sales methodologies are based on questions.

So I wanted to understand the answer side of the equation.

So I conducted research with the top golf instructors in the world about how they provide answers and develop this framework that I call Answer Intelligence.

That's six answer types that maps to questions.

So it's a framework of answers, but it's also inclusive of questions.

And we're going to unpack all of those six answer types in the first place.

Was there a particular moment in time where you went, hey, we're doing all of this work around asking better questions?

And I have to say, on this very show, we talk to leaders about asking better questions, being one of a leader's superpowers, but you decided, well, there needs to be a counterbalance to that.

Was there a particular moment in time that you went, I'm going to go deeper into this?

Yeah, I think it was a series of moments.

And then there was maybe some big moments as well in there that sort of pulled me in this journey.

And I didn't know what's going down the journey at first, but there was a consulting project I did in Texas where I was on leadership and it was an academic research project.

And we sort of identified the best theories of leadership.

We did some survey research, reported back to the company, and I was sort of naive and younger and excited about the results.

And this is back in the day when we still had binders, we'd hand the client and provided all this material.

And I thought the executives would be super excited about the results and they weren't.

And I started reflecting on this and the reason they were not was because we were asking these why questions, you know, why leadership was occurring and reporting theory that sort of maps to this why question and really focused on theory and concepts.

We weren't focused on all the answers they cared about and the questions they cared about.

They were really concerned about how are we going to implement this in hindsight and their interesting procedures and actions, and we totally abdicated our responsibility there.

So really what this was, you know, in question terms was helping to ask all the right questions, but also provide the right answers.

And at the most fundamental level with AQ, it's not a favoring of questions over answers.

It's realizing that questions and answers are two sides of the same coin.

If you want to ask better questions, you have to know what answers you're looking for.

And it was sort of this journey of self-awareness about what knowledge is and it's asking and answering questions and sort of being able to do it in a more thoughtful, intentional way.

And sort of had that lesson repeated, you know, again and again.

The second point I'll say is sort of thinking about consulting projects I did.

And basically I was hired because they had questions they didn't know the answers to.

You know, why is there turnover in our company or what is our problem?

They didn't even know exactly what was going on.

And essentially, you know, my ability to provide answers to them, they hired me for it.

And I think you can flip that to coaching where individuals, you know, want answers and maybe you have them self-reflect and find their own answers.

But at the end of the day, at the heart of all this is the framework of questions and answers and trying to navigate that.

There's two things I want to unpack there, Brian.

And the first one is close to the last thing you said.

And I think this might help us then set the scene for the rest of this conversation.

And you're talking about coaching and we encourage leaders to develop coaching skills.

We encourage them to ask better questions, to ask expansive questions and to expand people's minds around a reflective state.

That's one of the things that we encourage leaders to do.

And what I'm hearing you say here is, yes, the question and answer paradigm, if you like, it doesn't matter who the answer is coming from.

If you've got a structure of answer types, it's going to improve the conversation.

I think, you know, there's a way of looking at this and a continuum.

You know, one anchor point, you have the coach that asks all the questions.

The other anchor is the coach provides all the answers, which is probably absurd.

And I don't think anyone agrees with that.

And there's something in the middle that's balanced where the coach and the coachee are sort of equal in the questions and answers.

And sort of my fault is that it's the balance is sort of where we start with this.

And the idea is, and I think what you're saying, if I understand correctly, the main point is it's about effective conversations.

And the goal is to move the conversations forward.

And if a coach can provide an answer, like one of our answers might be a metaphor, and that helps catapult the conversation forward, then that relates to growth that might be healthy.

And I'm not sure if I've fully connected to your point.

And there's no doubt that metaphors are very powerful in coaching.

The purest form of coaching is one where the coach only asks questions and doesn't give any answers.

The more realistic form is an element of balance.

And wherever that pendulum swings to, coaching is all about drawing answers out of the coachee.

And that's what we encourage as a leadership style here at The Leadership Project.

But we're here to challenge the status quo and we're here to keep an open mind.

So we talk about seven common mistakes that most leaders make.

And one of them, Brian, is that leaders try to be the answer to every question.

And it usually ends up being their downfall.

They end up having a queue of people outside their door wanting their problem solved for where people don't become dependent in their own right.

And the leader becomes the choke point in the organization.

So what I'm looking for here is how do we counterbalance this?

Because we are a leadership program here.

And we encourage leaders that they should be asking more questions than they're giving answers.

How do we balance this with the minute where we're now telling about this answer framework that we're about to get into?

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110. Raising Your Answer Intelligence (AQ) with Dr. Brian Glibkowski

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