Changeworksblog.com

the art of conversation

In business, we gain trust, collaborate, learn and increase our collective wisdom through conversation.  But how many conversations are truly productive?  How much time have you or do you spend in meetings where issues aren’t resolved, understanding is not gained and actions fail to materialise?  How many such meetings degrade into a competition about who can get their opinion over in the most persuasive way?

 I overheard a conversation between a marketing director (MD) and a product development director (PDD) recently.  It went something like this:

MD: “You know our new targets for increasing sales in the next quarter? Well, my in my revised marketing plan I recommend a series of high profile webinars, linked to trial offers of the products, to do this. What do you think?”

PDD: “We tried webinars in my previous company and they failed miserably.  And the trial offers will undermine brand values and hit margin. So I really don’t think that will work.  In my revised development plan I have outlined a proposal for upselling the new X product to existing large blue chip users, that way we retain our premium brand image.”

MD: “But you will never attain the targets we have been set with that plan.  The market is too niche.  My plan is more about volume and we have much more chance of hitting those tight targets.”

PDD:  “Well its my brand that you are working with here and I won’t recommend your plan to the CEO.  It’s just too risky.  He will also be worried about the financials behind it.”

And on it goes.  Two people clearly stating their opinions but making some not-so-obvious mistakes to get to true collaboration and thereby missing the opportunity to reach a solution that is bigger than the sum of the parts.

There are some common, yet often hard-to-spot blocks, to productive dialogue and conversation which I mentioned in the previous post.  So how do we turn such conversations around to accelerate business performance and success?

We engage in the dance of conversation.  By balancing advocacy (clearly stating our own opinions and thinking without being attached to them – quite zen really) with inquiry (staying open and curious to the others point of view and ideas even if they are in conflict with ours). 

Here’s a few things to consider:

• Build rapport and stay in rapport when you are disagreeing – if you are able to develop deep rapport, it is amazing what difference it makes
• Undertand how thoughts and emotional state affect our behaviour and non-verbal communication – manage your own state to stay in dialogue even if the other person is annoying or irritating you
• Recognise the logical levels of change and tap into higher motivating levels to work in a more powerful way with the other person (i.e.’chunk up’ to find commonality in beliefs and values or purpose)
• Use language skilfully – recognise any assumptions or inferences that you are making and stick to the facts.  What is missing or what are you ‘not seeing’ ? What are you generalising or distorting?  What conclusions are you jumping to? Go back and just stay with the facts.
• Help others see where you are coming from by sharing your thinking with them clearly – clearly reveal how you came to your conclusions (based on fact). Encourage them to challenge your thinking – welcome and embrace this, as it is only through staying open to challenge that we get to a higher level of reasoning
• Aim for reciprocal inquiry : Actively listen to the other person (i.e. don’t just listen for the gaps in their conversation so that you can get your next point in!) and use questions skilfully to elicit and fully understand the other’s point of view:
  • “What data have you used to get your plan?”, “how are you seeing this differently to me?”, “how did you reach your conclusions?”, “Remind me what your overall purpose or goal is here”

Of course, Changeworks Communications has much more to share about this.  Our three day ‘ABC’ course, “Achieving High Performance through Accelerated Business Conversations” is part of our Embodied Brand (TM) programme.  And teaches you how to have powerful conversations that will change the way you work.

I work on the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’s Internal Communication group and we are running the following event in London. Changeworks will be there to record the event and post an update and outline of key points on this site … but it would be great to see some of you there:

Do leaders really understand internal communication? Do internal communication practitioners really understand the challenges that leaders face? Do we even speak the same language?

As we face a dramatic economic downturn – with many organisations restructuring, consolidating their operations and laying people off – what role will internal communicators play in helping their leaders respond to these difficult challenges?

If you happen to be in London on Thursday 22 January and are free during the late afternoon/early evening, why not come along to our next CIPR Inside event to find out the answers?

Organised and hosted by my committee colleague, Hill & Knowlton’s Scott McKenzie, ‘Leadership Communication and Authenticity’ aims to explore the role leaders play in creating a conversation culture inside their organisation, how they establish an authentic voice internally, and the nature of their relationship with professional communicators.

This will be a free-ranging session with experienced practitioners and business leaders on our panel. A facilitated discussion will draw out key themes and issues, before these are hotly debated in open forum. The debate will be followed by a Panel Q&A and then networking drinks.

The event will take place at Hill & Knowlton’s offices (20 Soho Square, London W1A 1PR) from 1600-1830. Tickets cost just £25 + VAT (£28.75) for CIPR members; £35 +VAT (£40.25) for non-members. To reserve your place simply email ciprinside@ntlworld.com now.

Podcast

Changeworks Blog

The crunch has come. A hurricane of market winds blow around us and perhaps no-one knows when they will die down and what devastation they will leave.  Whilst positive social change may come of this in that capitalism becomes less ‘selfish’, it certainly seems that Oliver James is right and our materialistic society is making us ill, physically and mentally (and perhaps giving the economy IBS – my interpretation!).

Listen to Oliver James, author of ‘Affluenza’ and ‘The Selfish Capitalist’, who talks about how our social fabric might change on Radio 4′s Today Programme today.

For communicators we need to understand the concerns of employees, because what people think about, affects their attitudes and behaviours; and many people are feeling worried, poor and scared at the moment.  A recent IPSOS-MORI poll, on a base of 2,000 people, showed that nearly half the public believe that the economy is the most important issue facing Britain today. Employees are worried. They may feel that they are in the firing line, or that they are suddenly forced into more of a parent-child relationship with their employer, or simply feel suddenly poor (loss of bonuses, no pay rises). All of these feelings will leave people feeling unmotivated, despondent and they will start to look for escape routes and lifeboats.

This will have a direct impact on performance, so it becomes even more important to communicate with employees. I recently interviewed Stephen Welch is head of media and communications consulting at Hay Group , Hay Group’s research highlights the appalling state of strategic communications in most organisations and Stephen gives some advice on how to keep people motivated particularly in tough times.

Hay Group research also showed that half of leaders in organisations today destroy value through their leadership style. Whilst part of this is about communicating, it is largely down to the coercive or pace setting approach to leadership which predominates our Western approach to leadership yet is not effective in managing capacity in the long term. 

Leaders need to be able to communicate, or rather to facilitate dialogue and communication that energises employees towards a shared, even co-created, vision. Managers who adopt more of a coaching style and get employees’ input into the direction of organisational strategy, are leaders who can add value to their organisations.

If you’re striving to be the kind of leader people willingly follow, you’ll soon discover a purely intellectual approach to leadership won’t get you the results you desire.

In my experience successful leaders know how to influence the emotional experience of their counterparts in a generative manner, and there’s no better way to do this than by communicating with your whole self. Having your body and your intellect, communicating the same message, so that what you say matches what you do.

Becoming an embodied leader can be developed and trained for, in the same way a pianist runs through scales in preparation for a concert and a ballplayer spends time in the batting cage before a game. Through practice you’ll discover wisdom is manifested through your body and movement, as well as through your verbal communication.
 
My colleague Charlie Badenhop* recently shared his concept of embodied leadership with me, and I believe you’ll find value is what he has to say-

You exude ‘embodied leadership’ when–

1. You are in touch with your body and your emotions, and gently but freely express what you feel and believe to be so.
2. You do your best to stay in touch with the emotional experience of your counterparts.
3. You realize your model of the world is not “the truth” and your opinions are not to be impulsively acted upon.
4. You regularly solicit the opinions of others and ask them to correct you whenever they think it would be helpful.
5. You are comfortable being at the center, more so than being at the top.
6. You are comfortable accessing your intuition, as an alternative source of wisdom, and invite others to do the same.
7. You desire to collaborate rather than being in command.
8. What you think and feel matches your actions.
9. You bring your “whole self” with you to work every day, and recognize that emotional expression is crucial for everyone’s health and well-being.
10. You recognize the onset of seeming conflict, as a positive signal, alerting you to the need for a shift in relationship.
11. You’re able to transcend logic and verbal language, to get to the heart of the matter.
12. You understand that in a healthy system, emotion and logic tend to balance each other.

 ”Here is the very heart and soul of the matter of leadership:
If you seek to lead, invest 50% of your time (attention) leading yourself- your own purpose, ethics, principles, motivation, conduct.
Invest at least 20% leading those with authority over you and 15% leading your peers – Use the remainder to induce those you “work for” to understand and practice the theory – If you don’t understand that you should be working for your mislabeled “subordinates,” then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny -  Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same.
All else is trivial.”
Dee Hock, founder and CEO Emeritus Visa International

* Charlie Badenhop is an Aikido sensei, composer, consultant and coach. He’s an American who has lived and worked in Japan for more than 20 years. To find out more about his work, I urge you to look at http://www.seishindo.org

I found Stephen’s post (below) to be a welcome challenge to accepted wisdom. Our brains are highly efficient and look for patterns and the short path to understanding. Sometimes this means that it is easy to become entrained, through habit and pattern, into accepting rather than challenging the status quo.  And how fantastic is it when someone does challenge you, when someone argues or comes into conflict with you? I generally look on such conflict as a highly positive signal and embrace it. Usually it means that there is new learning here.  Consider how leaders in organisations would truly benefit from this frame on conflict. And conversely, consider the reality of this. Many leaders discourage challenge and conflict out of insecurity perhaps, fear even.  But surely this is to the detriment of organisational success.

I lecture at a leading University on a professional postgraduate marketing Diploma; my specialism takes me into the realm of strategy, culture, business orientation and analysis and evaluation of business performance and strategic options.  The theory is clear: have a clear mission i.e. goals and strategy of where you want to be and how you are going to get there. Make your strategic intentions clear, but as Stephen alludes to, not blinkered by too narrowly defined vision. The leadership vision may capture employees minds but perhaps not their hearts.

Components of Mission

(diag compliments of Hooley et al from ‘Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning’)

This requires a looser style of communication, a more collaborative approach that taps into the  social networks that are the powerhouse behind organisational communication. But it is a braver and rarer type of leader who is comfortable letting go of the command-and-control style of communications leadership. All well and good to have a well-founded strategy, but how many of these strategies have you seen fail? For me, its a lot. The virtuous relationship between the 3 components of strategy, leadership and culture is critical in successful implementation of strategy and organisational change. Leadership and culture are intimately related.  More often than not, culture operates at an unconscious level, and at an unconscious level these two elements influence and drive each other.

Culture, strategy and leadership

But culture can be consciously adapted and shaped. Both as part of my lecturing work and as part of organisation facilitation sessions around culture and organisational change, I use a very effective simulation exercise.  (I have the great Judith DeLozier, one of the founders of NLP, to thank  for this). This exercise brings to life how culture is essentially collections of behaviours. Of course these behaviours are influenced by values, beliefs, structure, norms, processes etc etc, but it is the behaviours themselves which are the biggest influencing factors in culture and certainly the most visible elements. During the exercise, delegates have a direct experience of how behaviour shapes culture; and also how it serves strategic intention, for better or worse. Through raising awareness of the power of behaviour, delegates can then start to work on the ‘intention’ gap and the behavioural change required to move to a better way of working.

Perhaps through a more ‘embodied’ style of leadership (more next week) a platform for a more collaborative culture can be developed. I have certainly seen this in a few organisations i have worked for and with.  One example is at Briggs Equipment, where CEO Richard Close, effected cultural change almost overnight and is co-creating a market oriented company.  Click here to hear a recent podcast that I did as part of internal and external comms programmes with Briggs Equipment.

As you know, I am up for a challenge. Argue with me, take me to task. Comment on this post or email me on sue@changeworksblog.com.

Next post – Embodied Leadership.