Allan Biggar, a former managing director (London) of the global public relations and communications PR firm Burson-Marsteller who became chairman of its global corporate and financial practice, is CEO of Allan Biggar & Company Limited, a business strategy and branding firm. I recently had the pleasure of talking with Allan about asking—asking and leadership, asking for the truth, asking the kind of questions that can change lives, and his not-quite-Downton-Abbey upbringing.
Paul Quinn: One of the areas I cover in my book is the role of asking and engagement, how taking time to ask people about themselves shows our interest and can build rapport and relationships. How has this dynamic played out in your career?
Allan Biggar: Burson-Marsteller had gone through a very difficult period. I got appointed to take charge of the London office, which was 280 staff, the biggest office outside the US. It had been leaderless for three or four years and losing money. I came back to lead it. It had always been my dream job and here I was being given this chance to lead London.
So, there were 280 people, all very disaffected. There’d been cuts and job losses, pay freezes, we’d lost business. The first day I came, I said I want to introduce myself to the staff and instead of email I wrote a letter to each one of them. I printed them out and topped and tailed each one and tried to [handwrite] an individual message on each one. The letter said, basically, You have no idea who I am and have no reason to trust me, but I want to know what you do and who you are. I want to make this the best possible place to work.
On the first morning, the letters were sitting on all their desks which blew their minds because it wasn’t an email from “on high,” it was a personal letter. It was the first time a member of the agency’s senior management had written to them and said, Look we do acknowledge these issues. So that was a huge, huge icebreaker to them.
I then met with all of them individually and asked a lot of questions and listened, right down to the guy in the copy room. And I got quite a lot of pushback for that. I remember colleagues asking me why I was talking to Tom, the mailroom guy. I told them, Because Tom’s an employee and part of the business. That’s what I do.
Then we did a big all-company meeting and introduced what we were doing. I was able to feed back all the ideas that had come in [from staff] and tried to implement as many as I could.
Paul Quinn: What were some of those ideas?
Allan Biggar: We cleared out the ground floor and got Starbucks to put a café in it. It became a meeting place for everyone in the building, because [the way the building was configured] no one talked to anyone. So, the café gave them a place to meet and interact and feel part of something. And for at least one Monday in every month, I would stand on the front steps of the building and hand out coffee, orange juice, and pastries to everyone as they walked through the door. It was so necessary for people to feel part of something, that they were respected and looked after by management.
Paul Quinn: I can personally relate to the power of coffee and pastries! Asking about people’s needs or challenges makes them feel seen and heard, but asking and responding to those needs builds trust. Would you agree that there seems to be a greater value today for leaders to build trust and relationships?
Allan Biggar: Absolutely. And I always tried to find an opening question about what they were doing or something I’d heard about them. What I’ve found hugely powerful in my life is that I like asking the very personal questions and building a relationship. Even with clients, I like to find some common ground that doesn’t have anything to do directly with the business issue at hand. You disarm them talking about something they’re not expecting, but in a genuine way. Then you build out from that to talking about the business issue. I’ve always found that incredibly powerful.
I think if you’re attuned to what’s going on you pick up things and build that ability to remember something about somebody. I learnt it from politics [at 18 he was national vice chairman of the youth wing of Britain’s Liberal party] asking, How is so and so? You build that rapport.
Paul Quinn: There’s a story about Napoleon surveying his troops, that he’d walk along the rows of soldiers and discreetly ask the local platoon leader about one of the soldiers he was about to pass—maybe randomly pointing out the third soldier from the aisle, second row. And the platoon leader would whisper, “That’s Deveraux, sir. From Barbizon. Pig farmer. Three children and one on the way.”
And when Napoleon approached that soldier he’d greet him and ask about his wife, the baby they were expecting, the pig farm in Barbizon. It not only made an impression on that soldier but on all the soldiers within earshot. Stories like that one spread throughout the troops and strengthened their loyalty to Napoleon.
Allan Biggar: That’s a fabulous story. It doesn’t even matter that it was slightly contrived, but the fact that he thought to do it is good enough. And I think that is so, so powerful.
Is Asking Weak?
Paul Quinn: We’ve talked about the power of asking to engage, and how important that can be for leaders to model. Let’s talk about asking for help or information. I’m being general here, but these are areas that many men are not comfortable asking. What are your thoughts on that?
Allan Biggar: Boys are brought up and educated to be strong and tough. Men find it very difficult to ask for help or information because there’s a presumption that you’re supposed to know, and if you don’t that’s perceived to be a sign of weakness. So, men don’t ask. I’ve seen that in business where the male CO who’s climbed the slippery pole to that position is expected to know the answer, expected to know what to do, and believes that he’s expected to be that. He’s therefore often completely blind to what’s going on and doesn’t want to ask.
I think part of the problem of asking in general is a perception that asking is weak, when asking is in fact strong. But I think there are many situations when asking for a thing is easier than asking for information or clarification, which are seen as weakness. And that’s just not right.
Paul Quinn: Brexit is now a very famous example of what happens when people are reluctant, or simply unwilling, to ask for information. Google revealed that the number one searched question in the UK immediately following the Brexit vote [which won by a 52-48 percent margin] was, “What does it mean to leave the EU?” And the second top question in the UK was, “What is the EU?” Both questions asked after the fact!
Allan Biggar: And if we had asked more questions about what people actually wanted rather than taking a position and assuming we want to leave the EU and don’t want to be part of this. Really, [should we or shouldn’t we leave) was too simplistic a question.
What wasn’t asked in the Brexit negotiation was a whole lot of questions about, “Well, is this about standard of living or immigration or health care or other issues around it?” So, I think the failure of our leadership in the UK to ask has led to a very fractured and difficult Brexit. Not asking leads to a failure to engage, so it’s almost self-defeating.
Don’t Rock the Boat
Paul Quinn: What keeps people from asking challenging questions in corporate environments?
Allan Biggar: It takes a lot of chutzpa. People don’t like to ask the difficult questions. Nine times out of ten, in the corporate environment whether you’re in management or an employee or even a board director, there’s a whole agenda at play having to do with reward and responsibility and position. And that very often outweighs people’s sense to ask the difficult question. Good corporate governance is supposed to embed this ability to ask the right questions and drive it.
But it’s incredibly difficult. Especially if your role, your position, your career is tied up with being liked and not rocking the boat, not making yourself difficult, not being the outsider. To ask the tough questions you have to be incredibly self-aware and confident. And at the end of the day, you must be prepared to be the person who everyone dislikes.
Paul Quinn: In the corporate arena, doesn’t asking and pursuing certain questions expose the questioners or the companies to legal liability?
Allan Biggar: Oh, yes. That’s why the lawyers will quite often say, Oh, don’t ask that. And that takes away so much time and energy from people. They’re fatigued to ask questions [for fear of legal complications]. Cleary, inside the big pharma companies in the U.S. people were raising concerns about the addictive nature of opioids.
But those voices were not being heard. Why? Because of the overriding profit drive. They’re thinking, I don’t want to raise questions because I don’t want to get fired, or I’m the chief executive and I’m rewarded by carrying on and making money. I’m not going to ask questions that might fundamentally affect what we’re doing. As a result, you get the health care disaster that it has become.
Paul Quinn: So, not asking often comes down to self-protection.
Allan Biggar: I [work with] a lot of people who have crises. Nine times out of then they come to me and say they have a communications problem. In most cases, my response is to say, No, you don’t have a communications problem–what you have is a problem. A communications problem derives from the problem.
And that’s generally a pretty awkward conversation, because they don’t want to face up to that. They have an issue which they [mistakenly] see as an issue with perception, media, or communication. They’re being attacked, they feel vulnerable, or feel they might be exposed.
Paul Quinn: And does asking them for the truth, or to accept the truth, ever make them resentful toward you?
Allan Biggar: Sure. I have been asked to leave. I’ve been told, No, we won’t be hiring you. And the email and the phone will go quiet.
Paul Quinn: Which could make it tempting in that situation to not rock the boat.
Allan Biggar: When I looked out over the four floors in London and the 200 staff whose mouths I had to feed because I was the chief executive of the company and I had to bring in new business, was I tempted at times to say, Let’s just go ahead and do this and don’t ask too many questions? Yes. So, I’m not saying I’ve always played by the same standards that I’m now talking about. Because life and business are a whole heap of compromises. Sometimes you just have to do that.
But I guess I always had a bit of backbone because I developed this quite challenging persona. I’m not a confrontational person, but I’ve kind of prided myself in asking difficult questions and not being afraid to say things.
Today I do a lot of work with startups and high net worth individuals. The high net worth people trust me, I think, because I behave completely normally around them, I’m not a sycophant to them, and I tell them if they’re taking the piss or they’re wrong. And they like that, because they don’t often get that.
Paul Quinn: What is the key to asking tough questions?
Allan Biggar: You have to have a lot of belief in yourself. But that’s a very difficult thing to have. I don’t think our upbringing or education is always very helpful in those matters. A hamstring for me was always a doubt in myself. I came from a very working-class family. I had this quite idyllic childhood of being brought up on this huge country estate in Northumberland, not quite Downton Abbey but not dissimilar. We were the servants. We lived in the lodge house at the gate and the big house was up the road. My mum was a cleaner in the house and my dad was a gardener.
My first suit was a Saville Row tailormade suit, but it wasn’t mine and my mum literally took it out of the garbage bin from a neighbor’s house. She washed it, ironed it, and darned it, and that was my first business suit. I then had the crazy career and went on to be the chairman of the biggest global PR company in the world. But through all that I was always doubting myself, maybe I’ll get caught, found out, I’m not good enough.
Paul Quinn: There has been a lot written about what’s called imposter syndrome, where competent people feel the things you just mentioned—the fear of somehow not deserving what they’ve accomplished, and a sense of shame at the core of it.
Allan Biggar: Shame is the single most toxic emotion. It’s just debilitating. It destroys life and leads you down the wrong route, whether personal shame or corporate shame. Bad decisions are always made in an emotional state and shame is the worst. But most shame is in your own head. It’s rarely based on what other people actually think about you, but you have this whole mind construct about what you are and who you are.
Mind Reading
Paul Quinn: Mind constructs, yes. One of the areas I cover in my book is our habit of mind reading people instead of asking them what they’re thinking or feeling or wanting. We fill in the blanks with our assumptions.
Allan Biggar: That’s a huge problem, isn’t it? My dear friend, a professional therapist, told me something that has stuck in my mind. I was babbling about something that happened and at the end of it he asked, “Of all that you’ve just said, how much of it do you actually know and how much have you made up?”
And I said, Actually I only know this bit and I’m making up the rest! I often refer back to that and ask myself, Ok, Allan, what do you know and what have you made up? Instead of making all this up, why don’t you just ask?
Paul Quinn: Right!
Allan Biggar: Just last night there was a business project I was working on, and I’d spent all day thinking about what somebody else might do. It got to 5:30 in the evening and I picked up the phone and asked them what they were going to do. And it completely changed my view of how things were! It was not what I thought. All that wondering was really all just bullocks, wasn’t it? And I’m reasonably aware of this kind of behavior. So, I guess if you’re not self-aware of it you’ve got no chance at all, have you?
Paul Quinn: Yes, we assume more than we ask, but we’re rarely aware of it.
Allan Biggar: Because you’re living in a world in which you’ve constructed at least half of it in your head and you’ve made all sorts of assumptions about people and things and behavior and what to do. And you apply that to organizations and governments and groups and that’s what they do. People don’t ask the questions and therefore people become set in their ways and make lots of assumptions. There has to be a better way to do this.
Paul Quinn: Were you a high achiever in school?
Allan Biggar: In local school, I was neither in the top or bottom but kind of in the middle. When I was 14, I had my own gardening business cutting grass and was always busy doing stuff, and so school sort of passed me by. When I took my O-level exams at 16 I failed all of them entirely. I went back that summer to see my teacher in school, a wonderful teacher, Mrs. Simmons, the tiny, quite intimidating head teacher. And she said, “What happened, Allan?”
I didn’t have a good answer. My parents weren’t academic at all, and I lived a very isolated life in the country, so I didn’t really see other people. And now, I didn’t know what to do.
She said to come back and redo the year, and so I arrived back. I sat in the library for six months and worked with her and retook all my exams and got straight A’s. And that’s because someone had sat and paid attention to me. She asked me the right questions and cared about the answers and gave me the opportunity to learn. I suddenly became very interested in books and in all sorts of things. She literally changed my life.
Asks That Change Lives
Paul Quinn: There’s a similar story in my book about someone whose life changed dramatically after being asked, What happened? It can be a very powerful, pivotal question. Has the situation ever been reversed, where you posed a single question to someone that changed their life?
Allan Biggar: Yes. There was a young lady who worked for me. We were doing a professional review and she was going through all the usual predictable answers to things. And I just instinctively felt, this isn’t where she wants to be. I asked her, What do you want to do? She was literally taken aback by my question; her whole body moved back and she was slightly flustered and speechless. I said, Tell me what it is.
She told me she was intimidated because I was her boss and she thought I was going to fire her. I asked her to trust me to answer the question. And she did. She was profoundly unhappy in the support-admin world and wanted to be client-facing.
Paul Quinn: How did things turn out for her?
Allan Biggar: She went on to an extremely successful career as a senior communications director in a very large company, and credits that simple intervention—when somebody actually asked her—as the opportunity to move to something else.
Paul Quinn: Is there a quality in people that make others want to give them what they ask?
Allan Biggar: Being kind is really important. I don’t mean soft and mushy lovey-lovey kindness, but kindness in that you are respectful and generous and understanding and empathetic with somebody. Being kind is a bloody good thing to be.
I know there are plenty of leaders who are arrogant asshole types and some of them obviously succeed, but I think an awful lot of other people like that don’t succeed. When I’ve gone wrong in my career is when I’ve stopped asking questions, stopped doing the right thing and perhaps being aggressive and difficult and macho. That’s always failed. I’ve always achieved far more by being kind and generous and open, even against people who are complete assholes.
Becoming Curious
Paul Quinn: How about the connection between curiosity and asking? If you’re curious about a person or the possibilities in a situation, you’ll ask.
Allan Biggar: There’s a video with Mr. Rogers that is my go-to happy place. It just clicks my brain and wires into me about how I think about things, which probably sounds mad.
In the video, Mr. Rogers says “You can grow ideas in the garden of your mind.” And I find that such a fantastic image of planting ideas. One of the lines is it’s good to be curious. It’s fantastic and energizing to be curious.
Just Imagine where you could have ideas, where you could ask questions, you could be curious about things and imagine making them grow. People like Elon Musk must have the sort of brain that thinks, What if? Why don’t we reengineer a car? But most businesses suck that out of you because they don’t want curiosity. They pay lip service to creativity and ideas. Some people are wired to be completely freaked out by asking those questions, because they feel they should already know. I’m the opposite. I love not knowing. I love asking, What if we do this…?
Allan Biggar can be reached at Allan Biggar & Company.
Paul Quinn is author of a book-in-progress about the power of asking, which features portions of this content. As founder of See The Potential LLC, he helps leaders and influencers across many industries create and deliver presentations that engage and reward their listeners from start to finish.
This story was punctuated by my own affirmations of its wisdom. I’m enjoying these excerpts very much. Thanks Paul.