Engaging a Room is The Essential Communication Skill
Dan Kuss (00:00)
If you're having a conversation with someone who has high communication skills and they haven't mastered it yet, ask them to begin the story in the middle. Just because you have communication is a very high strength doesn't mean you know how to use it well yet. Communication doesn't mean you're going to know how to naturally adapt it to the situation.
Brad Eather (00:18)
Hello and welcome to the Creative Business Podcast, the podcast exploring where creativity meets commerce. I'm your host, Brad Eather, a marketing specialist helping commercial services build digital marketing functions that support their business. Remember, the best way to support us is to hit subscribe.
In business, we often leave creativity to marketing, but when a team is disengaged or a manager is struggling to align their workforce, the most valuable form of creativity is the ability to lead a group of people outside their comfort zone. But how do we give leaders the structure to lead with courage, communicate with impact, and facilitate the harder conversations required to move a team towards a definitive outcome? My guest today is an expert in leadership development who believes that while one-on-one coaching is powerful, the real impact happens when you can move a room. Welcome to the show, Dan Kuss.
Dan Kuss (01:20)
Hey Brad. Nice to be here, mate. Thanks for getting my last name pronounced correctly.
Brad Eather (01:24)
I'm glad I did get it right. Dan, you work at a very specific intersection of people and performance. I was wondering if you can describe what you believe makes a good communicator and what that link is between people and performance.
Dan Kuss (01:42)
Hmm. Good question. So first thing that comes to mind really is clarity, right? Communication, as we know, is one of our most powerful tools, if not the most powerful, and therefore we need to be very careful and I guess aware of how we use it. If we don't get clear on what we want to say before we want to say it, we end up confusing people, giving the wrong instructions. As I've been teaching a lot of lately, when you have a lack of clarity, people don't take ownership, and if they don't take ownership then they don't know what to do and who owns it, and this becomes a capacity problem. So really we've got to start with that tool of communication.
Brad Eather (02:28)
What do you believe makes an efficient communicator?
Dan Kuss (02:35)
I would say, well, depending on your strengths, right? As you know, you and I know, some people are better at it than others. Some people are more talented naturally at communication. But what makes an efficient communicator would be really knowing what you want to say in advance and then getting to the point, sticking to the point. And I think we're going to skip right to the end of this conversation by saying also that you need to also ask a lot of questions. Check that the other person heard it.
Brad Eather (03:03)
I've been to one of your classes, The Art of Presentation and Facilitation, I think it was called—
Dan Kuss (03:11)
Mm.
Brad Eather (03:11)
—and was really struck from what was an eight-hour day, how engaging it was from beginning to end, which is why I really got excited about having a conversation with you. Although the podcast format is quite different, I can assure you that when you're placed in a room with 30 people as I was in your workshop, it is incredibly intimidating, especially when you've only got a few moments to prepare. I'm wondering where do you find leaders like myself when I was going into your workshop—where do you think that they're falling down when they come to seek some sort of help with their presentation or facilitation tools?
Dan Kuss (03:55)
Hmm. Again, it always comes back to your previous question. So a lack of clarity about what they want to say, a lack of—and as you would remember—a lack of preparation, right? I gave you guys not very long to prepare, but if you're not put under pressure, you're not going to do much. So they haven't been taught proper techniques, they haven't practiced enough, they beat themselves up, you know, imposter syndrome, "I'm never going to be any good at this." Language, again, communication with ourselves, equally, if not more, powerful and concerning than the language we use with others.
Brad Eather (04:31)
I—
Dan Kuss (04:31)
Did that answer your question?
Brad Eather (04:33)
Yeah, yeah. You've obviously synthesized your thinking to a point where quite often when I'm interviewing guests they go on elaborating for quite a while, which is an interesting dynamic. I like how direct it is. I suppose one of the key takeaways that I had from your workshop was a fundamental understanding that there is a difference between presenting and facilitating. I'm—
Dan Kuss (05:02)
Mm.
Brad Eather (05:02)
—relatively familiar with the presenting aspects. Doing a podcast is a method of presenting. But facilitating was something that I found challenging. Facilitating a conversation one-on-one feels quite natural, but when there's a group of people and you're trying to get people to get ideas out, that is a true technique. How do you describe the difference between presentation skills and facilitation skills?
Dan Kuss (05:28)
Do you want me to elaborate a bit more than the last couple of answers? Is that what you—
Brad Eather (05:32)
Yeah.
Dan Kuss (05:33)
My form of communication is generally straight to the point, right? So the difference between presenting and facilitating—well, while everyone's listening to this and probably Googling or ChatGPTing it to get an even better answer than you or I have—in my own words, it would be presenting is almost one way, right? "I'm here to sell you something, I'm here to educate you on something so you can make a decision."
Whereas facilitation, on the other hand, if we were to go back to the core of the word, facile, right, French word for easy, means we make it easy for people to understand something. So rather than being a one-way monologue where I don't know whether something landed with you or not, facilitation is that process of asking you questions and then getting you to demonstrate it back to me, maybe, right? Which is what we spent a lot of time doing in that workshop. Here's an idea: How could you apply the idea, write it down, and now you get up there and do it.
Brad Eather (06:28)
I want to shift the conversation a little bit now that we've got an understanding of this facilitation towards leadership. Because when we look at the current landscape, there's a hell of a lot going on in terms of change, and these leadership skills talking about communication and facilitation are becoming increasingly—you have to be on point to get your point across. Within the sea of information, people get distracted easily. Creating momentum and direction within the business is challenging. What do you think some—
Dan Kuss (07:02)
Mm.
Brad Eather (07:03)
—of the most significant challenges are for leaders at the moment navigating this time?
Dan Kuss (07:09)
Yeah, well, I mean you've touched on a good one there: maintaining people's attention. I think again, if it comes back to not being very clear on what you want to say, not being very engaging, not articulating your point very well—and you know what, here I'm hearing a lot more of is wasting people's time. You know, death by meeting is a big one these days. So if you begin to develop a reputation for not being clear about what you want, not listening and maybe bouncing it back to your audience so that you demonstrate you heard them, and wasting people's time, I think that's going to build a lot of resistance for people being open to hearing you in the future.
Brad Eather (07:54)
I suppose that your argument would be that preparation is part of the answer to that when you're coming into meetings. How would you—
Dan Kuss (08:00)
Yeah. Again, yeah.
Brad Eather (08:02)
How would you coach a leadership team through an organization to prepare for those meetings, or even just the structure and flow of their routine throughout a month so that they can prepare for meetings and know what they're going to say?
Dan Kuss (08:19)
Mm. Okay, well let me start at agenda, right? I think every meeting needs to have an agenda. You will drive people nuts if you don't get in there and have an agenda. And then secondly, have someone who can chair that agenda so you stay on track. There's always going to be people that want to speak up more than others, bring their personal problems into the meetings. Those that are a bit shy or new or introverted or have been shut down aren't going to say much, so there's an instant limit to the amount of value you get out of that meeting.
Brad Eather (08:53)
I suppose if I was an employee—
Dan Kuss (08:57)
Mm.
Brad Eather (08:57)
—working my way through an organization trying to aim for career trajectory—which I believe you work with a lot of people that are aiming to climb the career ladder and become better communicators. That's right, isn't it?
Dan Kuss (09:11)
Yeah, yeah. And admittedly, their apparent goal was not to become a better communicator, but they learn, you know, by coaching and analysis, that that's part of what they might need to do. But no one's ever come to me and said, "I want to climb the ladder and therefore I need to be a better communicator." That rarely happens.
Brad Eather (09:31)
Hm. 'Cause I suppose a lot of people would be finding themselves in a position where they feel more than capable in their job role and—
Dan Kuss (09:41)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (09:42)
—now they want to push themselves and challenge themselves harder, and the only way to do that is to move into a leadership role. What do you think the main—what's the main challenge that people have when they are going from what I'll call a technical contributor within the organization—
Dan Kuss (10:06)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (10:07)
—to a position of leadership?
Dan Kuss (10:10)
Yeah. Good question. The biggest problem we see, and most people I talk to see, is that you go from an individual contributor, perhaps a very talented one—I see this a lot with engineers—to a manager of very talented individual contributors. The thing that got them that opportunity maybe was their ability to solve a problem, the ability to solve problems better than maybe other people in that team. But if that's what their passion is, if that's what they love doing, if that's their playground, if they are inherently great at analysis and problem solving, you put them into a team management position and they're not getting the chance to stretch those legs. So that cup pretty quickly becomes empty.
I was working with one particular group of engineers who had been promoted to management positions, and they were all having similar problems of almost, you know, like something's missing, feeling a bit depleted and empty because they're spending their days in meetings managing other people—the other people that are doing the work that they actually miss doing. So that's a skill that they need to learn. They need to learn to step away from the doing bit and refocus on creating the environment for the people that they now manage to do that work instead.
Brad Eather (11:33)
Do you think that that's—well, it's obviously not a natural progression. Is it something that can be taught, or is promoting someone who ends up in a role that feels empty—is that the right decision?
Dan Kuss (11:48)
Gosh, I have to be careful what I say here. I think it depends. People do things most naturally the way they are wired. So if someone is wired to jump in quickly to solve a problem because they think they're the best suited to it, then they're going to struggle more to step back one level and let others do the work while they create the environment for it.
That said, you can teach them the skills, right? Like people come to that workshop that you and I did on facilitation and presentation skills, and you can teach them the skills. But if they don't have a strong enough motivator or incentive to put those skills into practice, they're going to revert back to the old habits and behaviors. So the environment will pretty quickly teach them or tell them if what they're doing is working or not.
Brad Eather (12:35)
I think this is probably a pretty good part of this conversation to dive into the CliftonStrengths that you use. Do you want to describe to the audience what CliftonStrengths are and how you use them in your practice?
Dan Kuss (12:49)
Yeah, yeah. So CliftonStrengths is a—I'll call it a technology or a platform or a system for determining what people naturally do well. It identifies your natural talents and then gives you a system and a language to turn those natural talents into useful, productive behaviors. I have been teaching this since 2017 and I find that it's a great way to coach people when they need help understanding why they do the things they do, and then what dials they might need to turn up or down to be able to get to the next stage, next level, next part of their career, to build better relationships, etc., or whatever the goal is when they came to see us.
Brad Eather (13:39)
It's funny, 'cause when I did the—I hadn't done the CliftonStrengths assessment personally prior to your workshop.
Dan Kuss (13:45)
Mm.
Brad Eather (13:46)
I did it and one of my strengths was Learner. Which, in hindsight, thinking about it—I mean this podcast has been going on for two years now. But without a doubt, the primary motivator for me continuing on a podcast that's now on episode 23 or 24 is my inherent desire to continue learning. And that is something that I think has been really helpful to understand. Especially when I'm looking at myself, but also recognizing how accurate it is that I can trust the tools, and actually, if I'm—I personally haven't really worked with anyone where I've had access to information at that level to find out where they're at. But I can see—
Dan Kuss (14:33)
Mm.
Brad Eather (14:33)
—how it would be such a powerful tool to be able to contextualize what their strengths are and how they can leverage that to move them in the direction that they want.
Dan Kuss (14:43)
Yeah, and I mean thank you. What have you learned so far about yourself, pardon the pun, about knowing that you have Learner as a talent?
Brad Eather (14:53)
I think that—trying to remember the strength that came underneath it, but it was quite well-balanced in terms of my ability to learn something and then immediately put it into action is obviously much—
Dan Kuss (15:11)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (15:12)
—higher than a lot of other people's. So I don't like sitting on information. I like immediately—
Dan Kuss (15:19)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (15:19)
—putting it into action. And I think that's being an entrepreneur, so to speak, is why I get motivated to get up every day. And it's really helped me to understand my motivators and potentially why I wasn't motivated in other roles.
Dan Kuss (15:37)
Yeah, and maybe the connection there is what motivates you to do this work is because you get to keep learning new things. Whereas perhaps in other roles there was a bit of a ceiling, maybe it was monotonous continuous work, and that could have contributed to it.
Brad Eather (15:52)
It's funny. I've had quite a few conversations recently, particularly one about neurodiversity and the ability to pay attention, and—
Dan Kuss (16:03)
Mm.
Brad Eather (16:04)
—I felt especially at school—and I haven't been diagnosed with anything—but I got very bored very quickly if I wasn't interested in something.
Dan Kuss (16:14)
Mm.
Brad Eather (16:15)
But I love reading, and I love reading a very wide variety of books and topics. And through the process of exploring this idea of creativity, I apply creativity very much through correlating different ideas from very different ways of thinking into something that I'm applying myself to today. Whether that's history or—you know, something that I really like doing is making metaphors that make people understand things better. And history is a great one—
Dan Kuss (16:48)
Mm. Love that.
Brad Eather (16:50)
—one to leverage. So you could be learning about something in ancient Roman times or Greek philosophy that's immediately applicable to today. So yeah, I do think that's—I've lost my train of thought now, but that's where we were. Yeah.
Dan Kuss (17:05)
Woo! Let's go, Communicator! I would say—
Brad Eather (17:07)
Ha ha.
Dan Kuss (17:08)
What you were trying to describe before was that you've got a natural tendency to want to put what you learn into action, right? And so the thing about Learner is someone who has a high Learner talent enjoys the journey of learning, the process of learning, rather than the destination. So you can learn a new skill, get a micro-certification, but you get to the end of it and then you want to do it again.
Brad Eather (17:34)
Mm.
Dan Kuss (17:35)
And for you, it sounds like you learn something and you want to go, "Cool man, what's the usefulness? What's the utility of this thing?" So you go and start tinkering with it.
Brad Eather (17:44)
Yeah, absolutely. Spot on.
Dan Kuss (17:46)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (17:47)
To dive back into this conversation about leadership and think about maybe some of the CliftonStrengths that we've just covered in a little bit more detail: How would you apply them to two situations—leaders operating within a small business environment as opposed—
Dan Kuss (18:08)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (18:08)
—to a leader that's in an organizational structure? Are there different modalities to how you view leadership?
Dan Kuss (18:15)
Well, there's two parts. Let me go with the leadership in general part. So, if you're leading a small team, you have less impact than you might if you were leading a huge team with a department. And if you're the CEO of a large organization, then your leadership is dependent upon your visibility and the town halls and the way you speak and the culture that that generates, but also how you interact with the people directly underneath you.
So this saying is quite often taken the wrong way, but I love the concept of "a fish rots from the head down." If leadership isn't doing a good job, it trickles down through the layers. Therefore, we've got to start at the top and make sure that leadership's doing their job well there. They're communicating well, they've got clarity on what they need to do, people have got the resources, etc.
And if you want to weave strengths into that, the more they understand about their strengths, and the more people understand other people's strengths on their team—on the exec team and their ultimate leaders—the better they can interpret what they mean and contextualize what they're doing.
So let's go back to your example for a moment. If you have this itchy trigger finger to put things into action that you learn, if you're the CEO of the company, you might keep rolling up going, "Hey, I had this idea last week and I want to get it cracking." And everyone's going, "Whoa, hang on. What happened to the quarter's strategic plan that we had? Why are you suddenly turning these things upside down just because of something you learned the other week?" Now that they know that about you, they can go, "All right, Brad, hold your horses, buddy. Great idea, stick it in the parking lot, we'll swing back around to it next strategic quarter," for example.
Brad Eather (19:58)
It's interesting, in a conversation on a previous podcast with Kate Russell about conflict in the workplace, she was describing as well this idea of coming in as an external consultant and dealing—
Dan Kuss (20:12)
Mm.
Brad Eather (20:13)
—with that rotting from the head. And she also mentioned that having trust within that senior leadership team to both manage up and down—there's a great through line there which I think is really apparent. Do you think that it's important to be able to have trust within an environment to be able to manage up and say, "Hang on a second, hold the horses"?
Dan Kuss (20:35)
Yeah, okay. So trust is definitely a part of that. People, as we know, buy from people they know, like, and trust. People follow people they know, like, and trust. And if I don't trust your motives as my leader, I may be less willing to comply. Therefore, the more trust you have with everyone around you, the more chance you've got of getting these initiatives you're bringing along with you.
But at the same time, if there's trust going both ways, they therefore feel psychologically safe to go, "Brad, WTF? Why are you rolling out this new thing when it's not what we planned?" So trust is part of the glue that will allow it to happen.
Brad Eather (21:21)
Am I missing a trick here when we're talking about communication with regards to your core skillset? Is there more to the conversation that we should be exploring that isn't necessarily about communication, but just from a leadership perspective, particularly with regards to your coaching? What are some of the things that you're seeing that you'd like to talk about?
Dan Kuss (21:45)
Hmm. One of the things I see a lot of, if we're talking about leadership and communication, we'll come back to the first thing we spoke about, which was a lack of clarity. So a lot of the work I'm doing is helping teams get clear on initiatives, job roles—my god, position descriptions are rarely up to date these days. So how do you hold someone accountable to a position description that is outdated and has no real KPIs? It's difficult to have a great management conversation with someone when you're not clear on what the goal is and they're not clear what the goal is. Therefore, that communication piece doesn't have as much cut-through if we don't know what we're supposed to be aiming for. Does that make sense?
Brad Eather (22:30)
Yeah, absolutely.
Dan Kuss (22:31)
Hmm. And it's a big piece of work, right? If I said to your organization, let me say you're a private school and there's been no review of position descriptions for five years, good luck trying to have those accountability conversations at the end of the year with people where you may need to have some kind of an intervention. It's hard to do when job roles have skewed off the path or you've loaded things on top of their role which isn't documented.
Brad Eather (23:00)
It's—
Dan Kuss (23:01)
Mm.
Brad Eather (23:01)
It's funny because the word communication can be interpreted in so many different ways. But what I'm—
Dan Kuss (23:07)
Mm.
Brad Eather (23:07)
—what I'm hearing there is that when you say clarity, what you're talking about is organizational clarity, and that goes all the way down from onboarding a job role and the expectation of that person within the organization all the way to the top. So it's not just about teaching leaders how to communicate effectively, it's about getting the communication channels clear so that everybody can have a better understanding about where they fit.
Dan Kuss (23:35)
Yeah, yeah, and not just the communication channels, but also the guardrails around the topic, and clarity on all the components that might need to be had in that conversation. Otherwise, it's wishy-washy. You know that old saying, "a wishy-washy brief gives you a wishy-washy result," right? If we're not clear on what we're supposed to be talking about. And even you and I in this chat have gone off track a little bit, right? Let's be honest. So pulling ourselves back and having that candid conversation and resetting, sometimes taking a pause and saying to that person, "All right, okay, we need to gather more information so we can be more clear on what we're supposed to be talking about here," and then coming back.
Brad Eather (24:19)
And I appreciate you saying that we've gone a little bit off track, because prior to this conversation I sent you a talk track, and to be fair I very rarely keep on top of the talk track.
Dan Kuss (24:30)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (24:31)
But it really did highlight the structure of clarity. The podcast format—I personally like to view everything as a structure, a format, a medium within itself, whether that be a podcast or a resume. They're all different mediums and they serve different purposes in how you communicate information within them. That's my personal lens on communicating information. But you, as the wonderful communicator that you are, paused all of a sudden and did slow down your pacing and things that really illustrated what communication is. Anyway, thought it worth highlighting.
Dan Kuss (25:20)
Communication again, and if we go back to this strengths idea, right? Just because you have communication as a strength, maybe in your top 10, top 5—and for everyone listening, if you Google CliftonStrengths, you'll find out a bit more about it. There's 34 talents and everyone has a little bit of all of them, some of them are at the top. So just because you have communication as a very high strength doesn't mean you know how to use it well yet, right? And one of the Gallup coaches once said to me, "If you're having a conversation with someone who has high communication and they haven't mastered it yet, ask them to begin the story in the middle."
Because just because you have communication doesn't mean you're going to know how to naturally adapt it to the situation. Let's say you came to me in that workshop for facilitation skills and you said to me, "Dan, good to finally meet you. You look familiar. What university did you go to?" And I go, "Man, well, actually I've lived in this area for a long time. First I went to Burnside Primary and then after that I went to Pembroke School." And you're going, "What the freak, mate? It's not what I asked you." You know what I mean? So we have to be able to stop and go, "Ooh, don't blabber. Stay on point. What's the point I want to make? He asked me about the university. Okay, cool, go." So that's sometimes why I pause, to make sure I don't make that mistake of completely going off track.
Brad Eather (26:42)
How much do you think being a good listener plays in being a good communicator?
Dan Kuss (26:48)
Mm, good point. Yeah, well, you know that old saying, "Two ears and one mouth, use them in that ratio." I think to tie communication back to leadership, the best leaders are the ones that do the most listening, because the best leaders surround themselves with people that are smarter than them. Therefore, they need to be constantly listening to what they're saying so they can go and use that in some kind of leveraged way. So definitely listening and, as I said earlier, asking a lot more questions and then shutting up and listening to the answer.
Brad Eather (27:23)
The parallels that I draw when it comes to questioning always come down to sales. Quite often in a sales conversation, a bad sales conversation is always the one where you let the talking get out of hand. What do you think salespeople could learn from the skills that you teach?
Dan Kuss (27:46)
Hmm. It's interesting you say that because I have an opportunity coming up in December at a national sales conference to weave strengths into that. My response to your question would be that you can help someone understand more about themselves so they then are more aware of how they might approach a sales situation. Part of the success of selling is to match and mirror the person you're working with, the prospect—and I hate the word prospect because we are people—but you need to match and mirror them to some degree so that they feel comfortable enough with you to continue that conversation. The faster you can get a read on what kind of a person you're dealing with—whether they need a lot of information, whether they want to get straight to the point, or is their body language suggesting that they've tapped out 'cause you're waffling—that's going to give you a much greater chance of success in that interaction.
Brad Eather (28:45)
On the flip side, salespeople quite often find themselves in a position where they're presenting information to a large group of people. A realization that I had while talking about presentation and facilitation was that those situations can be facilitated rather than a presentation. Have you had any thoughts about that leading into your opportunity at the end of the year?
Dan Kuss (29:14)
Yes, it comes back to how long have you got, right? If I've got 30 minutes to impress a new thing upon you and your audience, there might not be a lot of time for questions and to then facilitate the answers. But I think in the situation you're describing, the more questions you get to ask, the better chance you have of creating an environment for a sale.
This is why, back in the old days of department stores, the sales team would know enough about the product and hopefully know enough about selling to ask the customer great questions: "How long have you been in the market for this? What do you want to use it for? Is this the first time you've looked at a product like this?" Those are questions, right? So you can calibrate where that person's at, instead of just rattling off 42 features of a product that no one gives a shit about. They just want to turn it on and watch TV.
Brad Eather (30:08)
'Cause from a presentation that I went to yesterday, half an hour proceeded with "Does anybody have any questions?" and it was absolute crickets on several occasions. I feel like when you deliver a presentation and leave room for that questioning in between, you build the environment where you're more likely to get people thinking and therefore engaged to ask questions at the end.
Dan Kuss (30:43)
So my thoughts on that would be, in my experience, you always want to ask questions on the way through. Don't tell people to save questions to the end because they've forgotten what the question was. And as you've learned in our workshop, how you frame the question is more important than what the question is. So if I put my hand up and everyone's sitting there busting to go to the toilet and it's the end of this sales session and I say, "Does anyone have any questions?", high chance they're going to go, "Nah," crickets. But if you ask an open-ended question, which begins with what word? Do you remember?
Brad Eather (31:19)
Is it "what"?
Dan Kuss (31:22)
No. It starts with an H, and you can edit this bit out if you have to. Come on, Brad. It was only January. Come on.
Brad Eather (31:30)
Is that "How"?
Dan Kuss (31:35)
Yeah, that's it. People listening are going, "Dude, it's 'How'." Exactly. So then if you were to turn around at the end of that little sales pitch, or even halfway through, and say, "How many of you would love to be able to experience this feature?" boom, a few hands are going to go up. Awesome. Okay, off you go with the next question. All of a sudden you've got some movement in that audience instead of everyone sitting on their hands.
Brad Eather (31:58)
One last observation that I found really powerful that I think more people should use in their presentations is the idea of enrolling people at the beginning. Please, you'll give a better explanation, but the idea of enrolling is having two questions before you start the presentation that enroll the audience.
Dan Kuss (32:15)
Yeah, so the two enrolling questions is the idea that you want to get everyone in the room engaged at the start. So two enrolling questions might be: "How many of you have ever stood at the front of a room and wished you'd done more preparation?" Some people put their hand up. The next question might be: "How many of you would like to walk out of here today feeling more confident that you can handle any situation that comes up in the workplace?" Boom. Even the confident people will probably put their hand up.
Then you can always ask the third question, which might be around: "How many of you feel like there's absolutely nothing you can learn from today and are wondering why you're here?" Right? And that's the people who have been told to come to this workshop and they don't know why. That way you've caught everyone and now they're listening.
Brad Eather (32:58)
It's great advice. Dan, thank you so much for being on the podcast. As we finish with every episode, I'd love to hear it: What is your definition of creativity?
Dan Kuss (33:07)
Hmm. My definition of creativity is finding ways to solve problems that are useful. And that's in a work context. So, you know, I have Creativity/Ideation in my top five strengths, and so I love to come up with new ways of doing things, but there's not always a need for a new way if the existing way is not broken. Hence I think creativity in business, in entrepreneurship, is productively solving problems that maybe other people can't.
Brad Eather (33:42)
In true form, Dan. Very clear and succinct answer. I love it.
Dan Kuss (33:44)
Bro, I can elaborate if you want. 'Cause some people are going to go, "God, that sounds like work." Well, yeah, let's look at it from a personal side. Creativity can also just be self-expression, self-indulgence. Baking a cake, right? There's so much value in that, right? Mastering your recipe, designing the way you're going to restyle your house. Those are all forms of creativity, but unfortunately—or fortunately—I tend to think of, "Well, what can I do with that?" because I'm always trying to do more. There you go. See, I took it out of the workplace for a moment.
Brad Eather (34:23)
Well, it's been a true pleasure having you on the podcast. Dan, where can people find you if they'd like to get in touch?
Dan Kuss (34:31)
LinkedIn. If you look up Dan Kuss (D-A-N K-U-S-S), you'll find me on LinkedIn. strengthsacademy.com.au—strengths with an 's'. That's probably where you'll find out most about the work that I do and the strength stuff that you and I have spoken about today.
Brad Eather (34:45)
Well, thanks for joining us on the Creative Business Podcast. If you've enjoyed the conversation, you can help us grow by making sure that you're subscribed. And until next time, stay creative.
