Edgar H. Schein > Quotes

“Most of my important lessons about life have come from recognizing how others from a different culture view things.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“we do not think and talk about what we see; we see what we are able to think and talk about.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“Questions are taken for granted rather than given a starring role in the human drama. Yet all my teaching and consulting experience has taught me that what builds a relationship, what solves problems, what moves things forward is asking the right questions.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“In airplane crashes and chemical industry accidents, in the infrequent but serious nuclear plant accidents, in the NASA Challenger and Columbia disasters, and in the British Petroleum gulf spill, a common finding is that lower-ranking employees had information that would have prevented or lessened the consequences of the accident, but either it was not passed up to higher levels, or it was ignored, or it was overridden. When I talk to senior managers, they always assure me that they are open, that they want to hear from their subordinates, and that they take the information seriously. However, when I talk to the subordinates in those same organizations, they tell me either they do not feel safe bringing bad news to their bosses or they’ve tried but never got any response or even acknowledgment, so they concluded that their input wasn’t welcome and gave up. Shockingly often, they settled for risky alternatives rather than upset their bosses with potentially bad news. When I look at what goes on in hospitals, in operating rooms, and in the health care system generally, I find the same problems of communication exist and that patients frequently pay the price. Nurses and technicians do not feel safe bringing negative information to doctors or correcting a doctor who is about to make a mistake. Doctors will argue that if the others were “professionals” they would speak up, but in many a hospital the nurses will tell you that doctors feel free to yell at nurses in a punishing way, which creates a climate where nurses will certainly not speak up. Doctors engage patients in one-way conversations in which they ask only enough questions to make a diagnosis and sometimes make misdiagnoses because they don’t ask enough questions before they begin to tell patients what they should do.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“Help in the broadest sense is, in fact, one of the most important currencies that flow between members of society because help is one of the main ways of expressing love and other caring emotions that humans express.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“we must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“Minimize inappropriate encouragement.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“If a client insists on getting a recommendation from you, always give him at least two alternatives so that he still has to make choice.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“All groups and organizations need to know how they are doing against their goals and periodically need to check to determine whether they are performing in line with their mission. This process involves three areas in which the group needs to achieve consensus leading to cultural dimensions that later drop out of awareness and become basic assumptions. Consensus must be achieved on what to measure, how to measure it, and what to do when corrections are needed. The cultural elements that form around each of these issues often become the primary focus for what newcomers to the organization will be concerned about because such measurements inevitably become linked to how each employee is doing his or her job.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership

“Organizational analyses that show separate boxes for “culture” and “strategy” are making a fundamental conceptual error. Strategy is an integral part of the culture.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership

“When you are giving feedback, try to be descriptive and minimize judgment.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“Our wants and needs distort to an unknown degree what we perceive. We block out a great deal of information that is potentially available if it does not fit our needs, expectations, preconceptions, and prejudgments.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“Share your helping problem. More often than I care to admit I have found that when I was supposed to be helping someone, I suddenly did not know what to do next. When this happens, the best thing to do is to say to the client, “At this point I am stuck—I don’t know what to do next to be helpful.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“Gratuitous telling betrays three kinds of arrogance: (1) that you think you know more than the person you’re telling, (2) that your knowledge is the correct knowledge, and (3) that you have the right to structure other people’s experience for them.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“The dilemma in U.S. culture is that we don’t really distinguish what I am defining as Humble Inquiry carefully enough from leading questions, rhetorical questions, embarrassing questions, or statements in the form of questions—such as journalists seem to love— which are deliberately provocative and intended to put you down.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“Telling is only an investment if you know for sure that what you are telling is of value to the other person. That is why it is safest to tell only if you have been asked, rather than arrogantly deciding on your own to tell somebody something.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“The point is that no matter what you do or don’t do, you are sending signals; you are intervening in the situation and therefore need to be mindful of that reality. Unless you are invisible you cannot help but communicate, so your choice of communication should be based on what kind of intervention you intend.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“Remember that the person requesting your help may feel uncomfortable, so make sure to ask what the client really wants and how you can best help.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“we know intuitively and from experience that we work better in a complex interdependent task with someone we know and trust, but we are not prepared to spend the effort, time, and money to ensure that such relationships are built. We value such relationships when they are built as part of the work itself, as in military operations where soldiers form intense personal relationships with their buddies. We admire the loyalty to each other and the heroism that is displayed on behalf of someone with whom one has a relationship, but when we see such deep relationships in a business organization, we consider it unusual. And programs for team building are often the first things cut in the budget when cost issues arise. The”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“In building the helping relationship, encouragement—via positive reinforcement—certainly seems appropriate. But if it is not sensitively handled, such encouragement can quickly become patronizing and insulting. My”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“Check out your own emotions and intentions before offering, giving, or receiving help.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“Everything You Say or Do Is an Intervention that Determines the Future of the Relationship”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“Saying to oneself that one should ask more and tell less does not solve the problem of building a relationship of mutual trust. The underlying attitude of competitive one-upmanship will leak out if it is there. Humble Inquiry starts with the attitude and is then supported by our choice of questions. The more we remain curious about the other person rather than letting our own expectations and preconceptions creep in, the better our chances are of staying in the right questioning mode. We have to learn that diagnostic and confrontational questions come very naturally and easily, just as telling comes naturally and easily. It takes some discipline and practice to access one’s ignorance, to stay focused on the other person.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“Leadership” is wanting to do something new and better, and getting others to go along.”
― Edgar H Schein, Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust

“Though helping is a common social process, it is not the only social process. Our relationships with others have many other functions. In order to offer, give, and receive help effectively, we also need the ability to shift from whatever else we were doing and adopt a readiness to help or be helped. It is part of our social training to be prepared to help and to offer help when the ongoing situation suddenly makes helping an imperative or at least an option. But this impulse to help or seek help can run counter to what else is going on.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“Telling puts the other person down. It implies that the other person does not already know what I am telling and that the other person ought to know it.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“We know that negative reinforcement or punishment works well for behavior that should be eliminated. And we know from feedback theory that the best kind of feedback is descriptive because the client can then make the evaluation. These are valid guidelines but they don’t solve some of the subtle issues that can arise in the relationship.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“When our true intentions are something other than providing help, such as getting a job done or beating someone in a game, we are most prone to falling into the traps described throughout this book.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

“Don’t we all know how to ask questions? Of course we think we know how to ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questions are just another form of telling—rhetorical or just testing whether what we think is right. We are biased toward telling instead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solving culture in which knowing things and telling others what we know is valued.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling