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.

Viral Change is an innovative and highly effective approach to managing change in organisations. At Changeworks we are currently using it alongside internal communication programmes, and viral communications especially, to help organisations more quickly realise a vision of success. Whilst ‘big splash’ internal communications can serve to act as a frame for change, often this approach alone won’t effect sustainable cultural change.  A viral change based process can work as a stealth weapon, working effectively in the background with no big company wide launch, to change behaviour and hence culture.

Essentially, a small set of non negotiable behaviours are defined and a process to encourage and spread these behaviours is adopted. These behaviours are imitated, endorsed by a small network of people, and this spreads new ways of doing things, quickly and effectively. Its strength lies in peer to peer networks, supported by dialogue and conversation, to create sustainable cultural changes and spread an internal infection of success. Viral Change is closer to infection of ideas or behaviours than to the traditional rational appeal and cascaded down initiatives of change.

The concept of Viral Change was pioneered by author and speaker, Dr. Leandro Herrero, an organisational consultant who specialises in organisational change. I recently met Leandro at the Chartered Instute of Public Relations Internal Communication conference, and interviewed him about some of the key things to consider when implementing Viral Change programmes.

You can read more about Viral Change on Wikipedia or visit Leandro Herrero’s Viral Change Blog.

Changeworks Blog will be focusing on the processes and ‘management’ (ah ah!) of Viral Change and related considerations over the course of the next month.

This is one of a series of regular guest posts that I am running at Changeworks Blog. Today’s post is from Stephen Billing and provokes thought as to the effectiveness of vision for driving behavioural change.

Guest author: Stephen Billing, Management Consultant, New Zealand. Stephen is a facilitator of organisational change. He has significant experience in implementing dramatic change keeping business performing as usual. He helps his clients to be successful in restructuring, changing company culture, introducing new technology or new ways of working, and developing leaders, development of sales and sales management capability, and people development and training.
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Developing a sense of vision is seen by many as a key leadership task. It is commonly thought that a clear vision will drive behaviour if people buy into it. A vision is said to help people to tap into a higher sense of purpose and bring inspiration that will guide their behaviours and their ‘discretionary effort’ in support of the company’s goals.

It is also thought that employees can align their behaviours to a shared vision and this will lead to better results for the company. Some also say that if you have a vision, employees will synthesise this into their own personal vision that is in harmony with the organisation’s vision and their behaviours will then align with the company’s vision.

Famous gurus like Tom Peters and Peter Senge along with many others advocate that a shared vision has an almost mystical ability to motivate employees – to galvanise them – to bring not only their skills to work but also their hearts and minds, if not their souls.

In terms of tapping into the discretionary effort of employees, it is thought that individuals who are committed to a vision beyond their self-interest find they have energy not available when pursuing narrower goals. Organisations that tap this level of commitment will then be able to access from their employees more energy for achieving the company’s goals.

I might be going against the advice of A list gurus and common managerial thinking, but I have to say that I think that shared vision is overrated as an explanation for successful organisations. More often than not, creating a shared vision simply enables the senior managers to feel satisfied that they are following ‘best practice.’ In other words, everyone else is doing it so we should too.

It does not take much to realize that the actions of employees are driven by much more complex and individual things than the organisation’s vision, such as their individual backgrounds, their interactions with others in the organisation and their own intentions. Not to mention the specific situation they find themselves in at the time. The leader’s vision, whether or not it is created through a process that has wide involvement from the employees, can not become a ‘shared vision’ and drive employees’ behaviour. As a leader, you can only interact with a limited number of people during your day. Even when you do large-scale road shows to present your vision, your speech amounts to an intention, a provocation to your staff, and you cannot control how they will respond, what themes from your presentation they will take up and which themes will be ignored.

Further, the most important conversations in the organisation are not those that occur in the presentation’s formal (and intimidating) large group arena, or through the other official channels you provide. The most important conversations are those the most senior people can not control – those that happen in the cafeterias and around the water coolers. The Chief Executive’s speech about the vision is only one of many things that influence the important everyday conversations through which employees make sense of their world as people working in the organisation. The things that are important to particular employees cannot be controlled by the CEO, whether it is family obligations, peer opinions, their manager’s influence or their personal values.

The vision represents an ideal, what George Herbert Mead called a cult value. The vision is an abstraction that can only have meaning as it is taken up in everyday situations. So employees are daily negotiating what the ideal might mean as they choose between, say, spending time to help the customer in front of them or hurrying on to the next customer to meet their targets for number of customers assisted.

Rather than waste time and money paying consultants to help you come up with beautifully articulated vision statements, leaders should discuss with people what their intentions are, what they want to achieve. And then encourage them to tell you about their everyday experience as they grapple with your intention. Listen and observe their responses closely. Then respond accordingly.

You may feel this is risky because you won’t have control of where the conversation goes. You are right, you won’t have control of the conversation – the employees may say difficult things that you find hard to hear. They may say things that are plain wrong from where you stand.

The reality is that even with the most well crafted vision statements and well planned change initiatives, 70% of them fail.

So don’t worry about it – you weren’t in control anyway.

by Stephen Billing, Management Consultant, New Zealand

Blog: www.changingorganisations.com

Whilst managers are important in the communication of change and in modelling behavioural change, they also play a criticial role in opening up dialogue within the organisation.  Managers do not always have the coaching skills to open up coaching conversations, even less so to encourage those crucial conversations (instead of shying away from them). If managers can be coached to open up such organisational conversations, dialogue, involvement and engagement will follow soon enough.

Coupled with this, viral change is an innovative and highly effective new approach to managing behavioural change in organisations.  Essentially, a small set of non negotiable behaviours are defined and a process to encourage and spread these behaviours is adopted. These behaviours are imitated, endorsed by a small network of people, and this spreads new ways of doing things, quickly and effectively.  Its strength lies in peer to peer networks, supported by dialogue and conversation, to create sustainable changes and spread and internal ‘infection’ of success.

The approach, masterminded by Leandro Herro, relies on the organisation behind the org chart.  75% of work conversations occur in the social networks and collaborative space that are active behind the scenes.  And relies for its ‘infection’ on the small number of people who have LOTS of connections (we all know one of those).

Coupled with use of metaphor, storytelling, logical levels of change and other tools, this is truly a powerful way of changing culture in a positive (and almost fun) way within a few months (honestly).

You can find out more at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations internal comms conference.  Go to our facebook event:
http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=37381415459

Or the CIPR’s event page: www.cipr.co.uk/internalcomms

Watch and listen to Leandro Herrero on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pNsgyFJNYU

Or visit Leandro’s blog: http://www.viralchange.net/

And let’s open up debate, argument, dialogue, share you approaches, thoughts to open up conversation about this topic.  Email me on sue@changeworksblog.com or simply post a comment.

When companies communicate their vision it can be somewhat one sided. The vision is pushed down the communication hierarchy in the traditional ‘command and control’ style. And often generalisations and nominalisations abound. For example: ‘To be the global partner of choice for the automotive components industry’, ‘to achieve customer service excellence’.

If they are lucky, and remember to communicate this message at least five times, organisations will at least have a chance of employees recalling the statement. But quite often this becomes a mantra, present in the headspace but empty of meaning or action.

The vision, if properly bought in to, will drive behaviour. And changing individual behaviour is the only way we change organisations. Ultimately we need vision statements to be absorbed into the ‘muscle memory’; it needs to be the fuel that drives the engine. Through a somatic connection to the intellectual understanding of the vision statement, a powerful vision statement will drive the right behaviours. It will run like the printing through seaside rock, running right through the individual; part of their core.

By getting employees to hear the message, picture the vision through their own filters and interpretations and feel the connection to its meaning we will tap into a higher level of purpose and this will help to organise beliefs, values and guide behaviours.

Communicating the vision in this way will make the vision come to life in employees across the whole organisation. Then people will live and breathe and behave the vision.

In communicating the vision leaders need to bypass their own filters and get out of their individual ‘maps’ of the world, and second position the employees. Also, by allowing a certain looseness in interpretation of the vision, letting go of control to some extent, employees will synthesise a vision of their own.

Essentially the communication of vision, and the ultimate purpose which is to change behaviour, is purposeless unless that communication has been allowed to be loose enough to pass through the filters of each individual for interpretation and absorption into the somatic/muscle memory.

There are some fun and highly effective ways to do this too. Contact sue@changeworksblog.com to engage in conversation!

or visit our web: www.changeworkscom.co.uk