by Craig Weber
• First, to help you build your personal conversational capacity.
• Second, to build a healthier and more productive workplace by doing work that makes a difference.
The first step is to start looking for opportunities to do this. Is there a relationship, process, or activity that is pivotal to your team’s performance but isn’t working as well as it could? There you go. Is there a problem in need of attention or a conflict to be resolved? If so, there’s another opportunity.
Your goal is to find a place you can initiate a conversation that sparks an improvement in your team, workplace, or community and to use that work as practice to build your conversational discipline. Then, once you’ve identified an issue you’d like to address, the next step is to plan for how to engage it effectively. What follows are a few suggestions for how to do just that. (You may have already identified opportunities for practice, but if not, don’t fret. In the next chapter, we’ll go into even more detail about places to look.)
Three Options
I’m asking you to identify places where there’s a gap between how things are currently working and the potential for greater performance. When you find such a gap—like Steve did in Chapter 1—you’re immediately faced with a question: “What will I do about it?”
You have three basic choices:
1. Put up with it. Live with it. Suffer it. Complain about it, perhaps, but don’t take action to address it. Maybe you’ll get lucky and someone else will take care of the problem, or it’ll just magically disappear on its own.
2. Walk away from it. Quit. Bail. Move on. “I’m sick of all this nonsense. I’m outta here.”
3. Do something about it. Adopt a constructive and responsible orientation and engage the problem, and use that work to expand your conversational competence.
When you choose the third option, in the pages that follow I’ll share four ways to dramatically increase your odds for success:
1. Collaboratively designing a way forward.
2. Putting together a “Conversational Game Plan.”
3. Following the “Basic Discipline” of Conversational Capacity.
4. Facilitating conversations.
What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.
—DAVID BOWIE
Collaboratively Designing a Way Forward
To help you get started, let’s revisit a simple approach I’ve helped many clients employ to improve a wide range of issues: from meetings, decision-making, strategy, and change, to customer service, interpersonal relationships, team dynamics, and management behavior. Collaborative design, the form of inquiry I first introduced in Chapter 13, is the process of cooperatively working through a problem and mutually designing a way to address it. It’s a simple way to structure a conversation about almost any sort of constructive change. I encourage you to consider it as you take what you’ve learned in this book and start applying it to issues that matter.
Guess or Ask
As I pointed out earlier, when you’re making important choices you have two basic options: guess or ask. When you guess, you take unilateral control of the choice, making it based solely on your perspective. When you ask, however, you’re deliberately designing the best way to achieve the goal by allowing the perspectives of others to influence and shape your ideas and decisions. If your mind is a workshop in which you’re producing smart, intelligent, well-informed choices, then collaborative design is a powerful part of your process.
If you decide to improve the working relationship between your team and another team in the organization, for example, you can either guess how to improve the relationship and unilaterally impose your solution, or you can ask others for their ideas, input, suggestions, and concerns and then collaboratively design a way forward. This basic choice is true for all sorts of decisions:
• When deciding how to provide useful feedback to someone, you can either guess or ask.
• When trying to improve your working relationship with a colleague, you can either guess or ask.
• When deciding how to manage your people so they consistently bring their best work to your team, you can either guess or ask.
• When trying to figure out how to provide outstanding customer service, run better meetings, orchestrate change, resolve conflicts, bolster innovation, improve a “baton pass” between people or groups, or generate more trust, you can either guess or ask.
More Of? Less Of?
If you adopt a collaborative approach, you can start by stating the problem you’re facing and a basic goal, and then pursue the best ways to bridge the gap between the two. A simple inquiry you can use to start off the conversation is this: “What do we need more of and less of to get from point A to point B?”
One team, for example, engaged a challenge this way: “Our meetings receive a steady stream of harsh complaints in our monthly employee survey. They’re seen as a big waste of time. So here is what I’d like to explore as a team: What do we need more of and less of in our meetings so they’re half as long and twice as effective?”
They then used the discussion about that question to practice the skills. They started with a conversation focused on the first part of the issue: “What about our current meetings limits their effectiveness?” before moving on to a conversation that focused on solutions: “What changes would help us meet our goal of meetings that are half as long, yet twice as impactful?”
You can adopt the same approach when you raise an issue. Start with the “more of and less of” frame. Then make suggestions if you have them, taking care to explain and test the thinking behind your suggestions. If others disagree or have different views, inquire to learn more about how they’re viewing the situation.
The collaborative approach can be challenging. There are often conflicting perspectives, messy conversations, and hard feedback to digest. But if you’re driven by the need to make the smartest choices possible, asking is the obvious way to go. As one client once put it: “You can either collaboratively design the solution with the people that matter or you can just dumbass it.”
Remember, it’s not about consensus decision-making, or accepting every idea or opinion. It’s about helping make decisions that involve others with more than just your limited perspective as the guide. You’re seeking input, not taking directions.
It’s Not as Obvious as It Seems
You may think this approach is obvious, but it’s far less common than you’d think. Managers often define what makes a good manager—based on the books they’ve read, the classes they’ve taken, or the way they’ve been managed in the past—and then, with good intentions, they impose their definition of a “good manager” on their team. But while their management approach might make perfect sense to them, it may not make sense to the people they’re managing. The managers are then baffled when they receive critical remarks about their management style in their 360-degree feedback. One manager complained to herself: “This ungrateful team wouldn’t know good management if it fell from the sky and hit them on the head.”
Phil provides another example. After receiving feedback that he was too soft on the business, he unilaterally imposed his solution on his team. With the best of intentions, and in a way that made perfect sense to him, he guessed how to solve the problem. It wasn’t until after Steve helped him see how his unilateral approach was creating more problems than it solved that they were able to collaboratively design a more integrated approach to their predicament.
What Are We Doing to Drive You Nuts?
To give you a better feel for what this looks like in practice, here’s an example of the approach being employed in an exceptional way. A program director for an aerospace contractor put together a two-day offsite with their customer, the U.S. Air Force, to improve a strained working relationship. For years, the program had enjoyed a banner relationship between the contractor and their customer, which was held up as a shining example for other programs to emulate. But due to management chan
ges on both sides, things had devolved to the point that the relationship was artificially polite on good days, and acrimonious and argumentative on bad ones. “Both sides are using the contract as a weapon,” the program director told me. He wanted this two-day workshop to help turn the situation around.
Ten people from the aerospace firm and an equal number of officers from the Air Force attended the session. On the morning of the first day, after brief introductions and opening remarks, the program director began the hard work: “As we’ve noted, we’re really hoping to use these two days to improve our working relationship. We know we’re frustrating you. We don’t mean to do it. It’s not part of our strategy. We don’t start every day by trying to figure out how to make our relationship worse. But we know we’re doing it just the same. So to kick-start the process of improvement, we’d like to ask the Air Force a simple question: ‘What are we doing to drive you nuts?’”
There was silence at first, but slowly the officers began to share their concerns. The aerospace team followed up with clarifying questions, such as “Can you explain how that plays out on your side of the fence?” The aerospace team captured key details on flip charts. When the officers realized the executives were genuinely interested in their feedback, the momentum grew, and soon they had several pages of issues to address. After categorizing the topics, they broke into smaller groups to address the details, while working hard to stay in the sweet spot.
On the morning of the second day, a colonel asked if he could have the floor. “We were taken aback by what happened yesterday,” he said. “We came to this event prepared for a fight. We expected you to throw complaints in our face, and we came armed with a big list to throw right back at you. When you went to the board and asked us, ‘What are we doing to drive you nuts?’ that really surprised us. We talked in the bar last night and decided we’d like to ask you the same question: ‘What’s the Air Force doing to drive you nuts?’” The Air Force officers captured key responses on flip charts, and then broke into smaller groups, repeating the same process from the previous day.
At the end of the two days, we conducted an evaluation to see how people felt about the offsite. The biggest complaint? There was not enough time to work through all the issues. There was such low defensiveness and such open and constructive dialogue that they scheduled an additional day the following month to work through the remaining issues. This simple but powerful process—coming together to collaboratively design a way to move forward in a more healthy and concerted way—became a regular part of their program management best practices, and it helped to restore some of the old shine to their working relationship.
Creating a Conversational Game Plan
Okay, you’ve identified an issue you’d like to address, and you want to collaboratively design a solution. The next step is to put together your conversational game plan—how you’ll use the concepts and skills you’ve been learning to structure and facilitate your conversations. To do that, I encourage you to work through the same five-step process that Steve and his partners used to prepare for his conversation with Phil:
1. Identify your conversation. What is the conversation I need to have to address this issue? And with whom do I need to have it?
2. Identify your objectives. What are my goals for this conversation? What’s the problem I’m trying to solve? What is the ideal outcome I’d like to achieve? What do I want to accomplish?
3. Identify your intentional conflicts. What intentional conflicts, or “binds,” will I experience in the conversation? How, for example, might my need to minimize (min) or “win” (or both) make it difficult for me to stay in the sweet spot? What are the potential triggers I need to watch out for? In conversations like this in the past, what has led me to be less effective than I intended to be? (Here are two examples: “I want to be candid in my discussion with my boss, but I’m worried that she’ll react defensively and I’ll back down.” Or, “I want to bring up this issue and work it through with my colleague, but I’m concerned that I’ll trigger my need to ‘win’ and spark an argument.”)
4. Plan out the conversation. Given your responses above, think through the structure of the conversation by considering these questions:
a. What is my position on the issue? How can I explain it in one or two clear, concise, compelling sentences?
b. How can I explain my thinking so that the other person (or persons) can see how I’m making sense of the issue? Why do I think what I think? What examples can I provide to illustrate my position? What evidence do I have? How am I interpreting that evidence? Why do I feel so strongly about this issue? What is at stake?
c. How will I test my view so that others see I’m holding it like a hypothesis rather than a truth? How hard will it be for this person to challenge me, to openly disagree, or to share another way of looking at the problem, and how can I test in a way that makes it more likely they’ll do it?
d. What are possible reactions to my test, and how will I use inquiry to help others get their views on the table? How will I lean into their reactions, especially where they differ from mine, or are not what I expect? What might be two or three realistic responses I can expect from the person, and how will I use inquiry to respond productively?
5. Role-play the conversation. Practice it. Take it for a test- drive. Like astronauts who prepare for a spacewalk by practicing their moves in a neutral buoyancy simulator (or as President Franklin Roosevelt would probably call it, “a big swimming pool”), you can prepare for your conversation by practicing your moves in a role-play. Ideally you do this with a partner or two. But if that’s not possible, mentally simulate the conversation in your head. Imagine the back and forth. Picture yourself enacting your game plan in a focused, disciplined way.
6. Reflect and assess. What did I learn by working through the previous five steps?
• “I keep forgetting to inquire when the other person disagrees with my assessment.”
• “My mind tends to go blank when someone asks me a question that I’m not ready for, so I probably need to keep some notes about my basic view in case I get lost.”
• “What did I learn? I need more freaking practice. That’s what I learned!”
Priming the Conversation
Before you jump into the conversation by stating your position, it’s often helpful to provide a little context so you don’t catch other people by surprise, and perhaps make them unnecessarily defensive in the process. To do this you can prime the conversation by describing the issue you’d like to discuss, what you hope to get out of the conversation, and whether or not they’re is interested in having the conversation. If they’re willing to have the conversation, you can next describe any bind you’re experiencing. In this way, you’re setting a clear context for the discussion and making it far less likely others will misinterpret your intentions. You’re collaboratively designing how you’ll address the issue in the most constructive way possible.
Here’s an example:
• I’d like to talk about the meeting yesterday and provide a little feedback about how you handled it. Is that something you’re interested in talking about? If so, is this a good time?
If the answer is yes, respond with this response:
• My goal here is to be honest and provide some useful feedback so you can make some informed choices about how to move forward. If I come across in a way that’s not helpful, please hit the pause button. That’s not my intention.
If the answer is no, respond with this question:
• Would you be willing to talk about this issue at a later time? If not, is there something about the issue, or about me, that makes you reticent to discuss the matter?
To help you think about how you might set up a specific conversation by providing some context, here’s a simple template:
• To start things off, I have a perspective I’d like to share with you and then get your reaction, especially if you see things differently. Does that work for you?
&nb
sp; • I would like a conversation with you about _____________________. I think it is important because _____________________.
• My intention is to spend a little time exploring our views around this issue so we can make some smart choices about how to address it.
• I do feel like I’m in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, I’m eager to explore how we each see this issue, especially where our views differ. On the other hand, I’m concerned about _____________________.
Once you’ve decided on a way to monitor and manage the concern, kick off the conversation with your position and follow the basic discipline. If at any point the conversation starts to move in an unproductive direction, you can harken back to the primer:
• I feel like we’re falling into the trap we discussed before we started. We’re starting to argue and lose curiosity. Let’s hit the pause button like we agreed and talk about where we are, how we got here, and how we can get back on a productive track.
Having the Conversation: The Basic Discipline of Conversational Capacity
The key now is to stay in the sweet spot as you engage in the conversation, or if you leave it, catch it and quickly regain balance. To do this, here is what the basic discipline looks like when it all comes together.
Catch It, Name It, and Tame It
• Catch it. Having cultivated your personal awareness, you’re monitoring your emotional and mental reactions in the conversation. You quickly notice when your min and “win” reactions threaten to separate your behavior and your good intentions.
• Name and tame it. Labeling the emotion helps to “brake” the reaction and gives you more control, so as soon as you catch it, name it and tame it: “There’s my minimizing tendency tugging at me again.” Or “There’s my ‘win’ tendency telling me to argue the point. That didn’t take long.” Remember, just labeling your emotional reaction has a dampening effect that makes it easier to manage.
