One afternoon many years ago, after hours of coaching McDonald’s corporate presenters for a company-wide conference, I stepped out to grab some lunch. It had been a full morning of back-to-back rehearsals at the company’s Chicago-area headquarters. And it was the final opportunity for the dozen or so speakers to fine-tune their presentations before the event.

As I headed back to the rehearsal room with my lunch, an event team member stopped me in the hall. She informed me that Paul Schrage, then McDonald’s senior executive vice president and chief marketing officer (whom I’d never met), had slipped into the rehearsal room to run through his speech but that I was welcome to go in.

This was good news. I was eager to hear Schrage, who’d become as legendary at McDonald’s as its founder, Ray Kroc. It was Kroc who’d asked him to start the marketing department for his then burgeoning burger business 30 years earlier.

I opened the door a crack to see Schrage alone in the large room, speaking from a script. I entered quietly and took a seat while he continued to read aloud his remarks at the lectern. Though it was just a run-through, a chance for him to get the speech “on its feet” and in sync with his slides, his delivery was performance-ready.

When he concluded his remarks a few minutes later, I fully expected him to collect his briefcase and go. But instead, the stocky marketing titan who’d given more presentations than I had hairs on my 27-year-old head looked at me and, without condescension, asked,

“Do you have any feedback for me?” 

“No, sir, I don’t.” (And I didn’t.)

If Paul Schrage’s question was mostly a gesture of acknowledgment, to my young self it had seemed a grand one, an unforgettable demonstration that humble leaders aren’t afraid to ask. And when they do, people remember.

The story above is excerpted from a longer discussion on the importance of asking for workplace feedback in Paul Quinn’s nearly completed book, The Big Ask.

Banner photo from Blue Diamond Gallery