Taking Conversation to the Next Level

An article in this month’s Training & Development Magazine suggests that there are five levels of conversation and urges readers to consider where they spend most of their time on the conversation continuum.*

The levels of dialogue presented in the article are:

• Monologue – When one person claims the airspace for storytelling, lecturing, or expounding, drowning out other voices.
• Transaction – A back-and-forth conversation that remains on the surface, generally related to a transaction, e.g. "How are you doing on that project?" A"re you free to pick-up Owen after school tomorrow?" "Have you written that report yet?" Sounds to me like a lot of close-ended questions occur at this level of conversation.
• Interaction – A useful information exchange that still simply skims the surface. When you leave an interaction feeling like the other person still might not know what you meant or might not be feeling good about it, it’s often because it was this level of conversation. An example given in the article is when an employee is meeting with her manager for feedback on her performance. The meeting starts late and is rushed. After the manager talks about the employee’s results and asks her how she feels about them, she says she really doesn’t know but she does understand why she had the results she did. The meeting ends with the manager saying, “So, you’re okay with the feedback. Great.”
• Collaborative engagement – Where deeper insight and reflection take place because there is more trust and people are more willing to be vulnerable, e.g. “I yelled too much at my kids when they were little, too.” “Really? But you always seem so calm and together. What did you do to stop yelling so much?” “Well, I learned to warn the kids in advance when I needed their cooperation and I learned to take a time-out myself when I needed it.”
• Dialogue – When shared understanding emerges and mutual learning takes place.

 As your coaching exercise for this post (and mine, too), I suggest one or more of the following:

• Pay attention to your conversations this week. What level of conversations are you having? Maybe that’s all you do this week. Just noticing the trends in your conversation is an important exercise all on its own.
• Challenge yourself to have at least one conversation at a higher level this week.
• Notice what needed to happen for that higher-level conversation to take place. Did you have to devote more time to the conversation? Did you have to make more eye contact? Did you have to turn off your phone? Did you ask more questions?
• Notice how that higher-level conversation made you feel and the impact it had on your relationship with the other person / people involved.
• Decide what you want to do about your conversations  as a result of this challenge and what you notice while doing it.

All the best,

~ Sophie

* “A Little More Conversation” by Lois J. Zachary, T&D, October 2012.

QUOTES

• “The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.”  ~ Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection
• “Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.” ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
• “It was impossible to get a conversation going; everybody was talking too much.” ~ Yogi Berra
• “Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory” ~ Emily Post