five years to get people to

come and practice the difficult leadership conversations.

These are like, how do you hold somebody accountable? I know how to answer that question now.

I'll happily share it as a spoiler if anybody's interested.

But it goes beyond that.

It's like, if you know how to hold somebody accountable, that's great.

But if you're a leader who's ever tried to hold somebody accountable and you realize mid-conversation you did a bad job of setting expectations...

It's a different relationship in that mode.

Thanks for that.

You mentioned a critical word there that I'll jump off with, and that is psychological safety.

And we've really done a lot of work to better understand what are the best practices around these simulators.

And in order to understand simulation, we kind of need to zoom out a little bit.

We forget in the business world how common it is for professionals to practice things before they go and perform them.

So we don't have to go make this stuff up.

We just have to look at other arenas to better understand how do the best performers in the world practice things before they show up for whatever thing they do.

Am I on the right track there?

Is that, is that what you have seen, um...?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's ...

The, the, the tale as old as time is, "You're our best salesperson, let's promote you to be a sales leader.

You're our best accountant, let's e- to- promote you to be the head of the accounting team.

You're our best lawyer, let's, let's put you at the charge of the, the law office and now you get to lead other lawyers." And there's absolutely nothing ...

Mm-hmm.

first time first time

This is an important thing to recognize.

My first answer to your question, how do you determine the way somebody would prefer to be communicated with? Well, you can ask them.

And you also have to recognize that it's not like somebody is sitting on the other side going, man, I really hope that this guy asks me my preferred way to communicate because I have such a well-prepared answer because I've answered this question so many times.

No, they haven't.

Almost nobody's ever answered that question out loud before.

Even if you've thought about it, ruminated about it, whatever, you've probably never had to articulate out loud the way in which you would prefer somebody communicates with you.

So like, it's kind of funny, uh, how she's also learned what, how that word is interpreted to me to recognize when I use it, that I mean it the way that I have always thought.

So like, how do you come up? How do you navigate that?

Great question.

And, um, Before we go forward, I want to go back, I guess, really quick.

I want to touch on a few things that you shared there.

The viability of grunts and nonverbal communication should not be overlooked because of exactly what you're saying.

The way in which the person sitting across from you prefers to communicate might be less words, might be more words.

That dynamic of how you and your dad communicate versus the way you'd see a buddy communicate with his parents is a shared experience almost everybody can understand.

And most people who do whatever they do for