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What’s Your Magic Wand Move?
A Lucid listening-tour practice: sort who would push back on you, rebuild trust with the rest, then ask one question that surfaces friction, ambiguous decisions, and where process gets in the way.
What’s your magic wand move?
That may be one of the best questions I’ve ever asked as a leader.
Seven years into leading product at Lucid, I went on a listening tour.
I had an aspiration for our team: I wanted everyone, regardless of title, to feel comfortable engaging anyone - including me - with a hard question, disagreement, or constructive pushback.
I believed we had that kind of culture. Then I tested my assumption.
I sorted the roughly 100 people in my organization into five buckets based on one question:
**Would this person feel comfortable pushing back on me?**
Bucket 5 was people where I knew the answer was yes. We had a track record of candid conversations.
Bucket 1 was people I barely knew.
The exercise was a wake-up call.
By my own assessment, nearly half the organization might not have felt comfortable having a hard conversation with me.
So at our next all-hands, I told the team what I had discovered and what I planned to do about it. Over the next few months, I was going to spend time with the people on the lower end of the scale - not because anything was wrong, but because I wanted to build the relationships and trust that made candor possible.
One employee commented:
“I’ve never been so happy to be sorted into a bucket.”
I eventually had dozens of one-on-one conversations.
The agenda was simple:
Let’s get to know each other.
What has your experience at Lucid been like?
**If you had a magic wand and could change anything about Lucid, what would you change?**
That third question was magic.
Patterns started emerging almost immediately.
I learned where we had created unnecessary friction.
Where decision rights were ambiguous.
Where people didn’t feel as empowered as I thought they were.
Where our systems and processes were getting in the way of talented people doing great work.
After seven years of growing and leading that organization, these were some of the most useful and actionable insights I had ever received about my team.
And there was another benefit: I knew these people better.
Engagement surveys have their place. But there’s something different about sitting across from someone, building a little trust, and then asking:
**“What’s your magic wand move?”**
You might be surprised by what you learn.
What’s a question you use that unlocks insights about your organization?