The CEO's Secret Weapon: Improving Conversational Capacity for Better Outcomes

What if I told you that there are tools that can make every conversation better because you are in the room??

Most people I work with are interested in having more effective and productive conversations but worry that means you have to be the smartest and loudest person in the room. It does not! With intention and a specific set of abilities, how you participate in conversations can improve them every single time.

Craig Weber helped me understand how this is possible. He is on a mission to empower people, striving to make their workplaces and communities a better place, and helping people and teams improve their performance by treating dialogue as a discipline. He’s the author of the bestselling book?Conversational Capacity: The Secret To Building Successful Teams That Perform When The Pressure Is On, and he and his people have worked with teams from a remarkably diverse range of organizations.

A Vistage Worldwide, Inc. speaker for over twenty-two years, he has received the prestigious Vistage International Speaker of the Year Award, the Vistage Lifetime Achievement Award, the TEC (Vistage) Canada Speaker of the Year Award, and the Vistage Top Performer Award.?

My groups?always appreciate it when I bring Craig to speak because he gives powerful and actionable steps for making our organizations healthier, more engaged, and more adaptive. He offers takeaways that provide benefits on a personal level and in business applications.

?CONVERSATIONAL CAPACITY

Craig defines conversational capacity as a constructive learning-focused dialogue about difficult subjects and challenging circumstances, that happens across tough boundaries. It is the ability, both individually and collectively, to stay purpose-driven, rather than ego-driven, under pressure.

The greater your conversational capacity, the more you can overcome personality conflicts and access the true intellect of each person participating in the conversation. It is also true that the greater your responsibility as a leader, the more you need this capacity, and inversely, the harder it is to have.

The two factors that make conversational capacity more challenging for leaders are that nothing lowers conversational capacity more predictably than the presence of authority and the nuances of one's personality.

Think of it this way:

• ?You can measure the health of your business by how well negative information flows up the chain of command.
• The greater your authority, the more every behavior you display will be amplified and hit harder.

An established hierarchy is a difficult set of boundaries to work across effectively in any social system. Still, it is possible to balance candor and curiosity with intentional effort.

Quick takeaway: Identify areas of business and/or your personal life where you can engage with more candor and curiosity. These are the spaces where increased conversational capacity has the greatest potential to benefit you.

BUILD IT!

If you want candid and curious conversations, it is necessary to develop skills in three domains of practice:

1. awareness
2. mindset
3. skill set

Awareness (emotional):?Recognize when emotional reactions create imbalance and act more intentionally. This discipline allows you to identify when you are being triggered and make conscious choices about how to respond.

Being unaware can lead to situations where intention and behavior are not aligned, either because of minimizing or maximizing behaviors. Both behaviors are deep-seated reactions to perceived threats (physical or social) and make it nearly impossible to act on our intentions.

The essence of the flight/freeze pattern of behavior (minimizing) is that we behave in a way that sacrifices progress and effectiveness for comfort and safety.

This pattern of behavior affects a significant portion of the population. A study twenty years ago revealed that

“Eighty percent of U.S. doctors and half of nurses surveyed said they had seen colleagues make mistakes, but only ten percent ever spoke up.” (source)

Silence stems from our desire to maintain peace and not create controversy. Little has changed between then and now.

The essence of the winning pattern of behavior (maximizing) is that we behave in a way that sacrifices progress and effectiveness for “winning”—being right and getting our way. This defines much of our social and political interactions and is extremely damaging to team dynamics and business success.

Our reactions are influenced by genetics, family of origin, and cultural background, and no one person is all one pattern of behavior or the other. The key to awareness is understanding under which circumstances we move toward minimizing or maximizing.

The core competence at the awareness level is about strengthening your ability to stay in the sweet spot under pressure and to catch yourself quickly when initially triggered. You have more emotional discipline/control when you catch it earlier and label the emotional reaction.

Psychologists call this act, name it, and tame it.

Quick takeaway: Notice when you get triggered and develop awareness and emotional control. A simple practice is keeping a “trigger journal.” What was the trigger? How did I let it affect my behavior? What would be a better way to respond the next time I feel triggered??

?Mindset (cognitive): Set aside an emotional reaction and refocus on what matters. This discipline allows you to value differences and learn even when you are in uncomfortable situations.

Awareness allows for a mindset that helps you stay focused in a conversation. The essential mindset for conversational capacity is learning, thinking clearly, and making smart choices. This requires valuing a variety of perspectives and leaning into differences.

Craig wrote an article on the value of diversity.

“High conversational capacity transforms how we react to people with different perspectives and information because our bias for learning leads us to see them as opportunities to expand our awareness and learn, not petty nuisances to be avoided or attacked. Rather than cave in or argue when someone shares a different point of view, we get curious: What can their perspective teach me about how I am looking at this issue?” (source)

The core competence at the mindset level is to lean into curiosity and ask questions about what is missing from the conversation, either from your point of view or from the perspectives of others.?

Quick takeaway: Cultivate intellectual humility! Craig has created a journaling exercise where he intentionally and consistently writes down his errors in perception and encourages you to do the same. The more humble you are, the less attached you are to your current perspective and the more cognitive flexibility you can have in listening to and adopting other perspectives.

Skill set (behavioral):?Align your mindset with your actions. The skills you need to develop will vary Depending on your behavioral tendency (minimizing or maximizing).

Candor skills are the antidote for the minimizing reaction (flight/freeze). Curiosity skills are the antidote for the maximizing reaction (win at all costs). The idea is to replace habitual behaviors with new skills so conversations can be more inclusive, participatory, and effective.

For those who normally minimize behavior (withdrawal, don’t engage, avoid), there are two candor skills:

1) state your position clearly

2) share the thinking behind the position—what evidence do you have for that reasoning and the process of how you are interpreting it.

For those who normally maximize behavior (win at all costs, I’m right), there are two curiosity skills:

1) test positions by encouraging others to share views that contrast with yours and seek out what may be missing.

2) inquire into the views of others and actively explore their thinking, especially when their views differ from your own.

CONCLUSION

Conversational capacity allows you to actively contribute to a meeting on content and/or process. It is the key to sustained team productivity and effectiveness and essential for personal and professional growth. I highly recommend reading Craig’s book and for those of you in Vistage, booking in his workshops.