Learn to Talk WITH People, Not AT Them

by: Judith Glaser

0

Tweet

Hit a wall? So many ambitious and talented leaders plateau and even regress once they “reach the top” of the ladder, mountain or organizational structure they’ve been climbing. There’s a simple reason this can happen, and it sometimes come down to conversation.

Top leaders still face new mountains to climb – engaging a broader audience of potential partners – both inside and outside the company to make change happen. While some top leaders tend to be great talkers, and are natural pitchmen for their visions and strategies, many plateau when it comes to connecting deeply. They’ve learned to talk at people, not with them, and it can hold them and their projects back.

To reverse course, you must tap into Conversational Intelligence, a framework for knowing which conversations trigger different brain activities for constructive communication. Research has shown that engaging conversations trigger the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a section that enables trust and good judgement, reducing fears and threats. This opens the door to more innovative and creative results with others, now and in the future. When people co-create – they feel ownership for the results; they feel more accountable, they are willing to work harder to bring the ideas to fruition and they produce higher levels of productivity at work. Through co-creating conversations, we can connect with others in healthy and productive ways, something vital for mutual success.

Leaders looking for their next step would do well to remember the word “aspire” has a Latin root: “to breathe.” To achieve more, ideas need to flow freely and to fuel us. We can then breathe in a coherent, collaborative way we aspire together, and our capabilities increase.

To ensure you’re engaging in co-creating conversations, apply these four tips.

1. When you meet someone new. Say, “I’m so glad I met you!” Or “You look familiar!” Our brains are designed to be social. The need to belong is more powerful than the need for safety. Feeling rejected activates our fear networks and increases the level of cortisol, which moves us into protective behaviors. A sense of inclusion reduces protective cortisol levels while increasing oxytocin and promoting bonding.

2. When you brainstorm with a diverse group. Say, “thank you” or “That’s a great point.” Reaching out to connect and appreciate others’ perspectives, even if you don’t agree, elevates trust, or feeling like a friend, thus creating a larger framework for thinking together. Make sure to appreciate others’ contributions, comment on how their idea has helped you, and let them know how much you appreciate their thinking. Appreciation reshapes our neural networks, activating a larger framework of neurons in our brain that enables higher levels of seeing, hearing, and thinking broader and bigger.

3. When you want to persuade someone. Say nothing – at first. Put yourself in your listener’s shoes. Empathy activates the mirror neuron network located in the prefrontal cortex or Executive Brain. When we mirror each other, we can see and experience the world through each other’s eyes. This activates higher oxytocin production, which facilitates bonding, collaboration and co-creation and elevates trust and openness. We become comfortable sharing what is really on our minds.

4. When you need to solve a difficult problem. Say, “Tell me your thoughts,” and listen to connect. When we are uncertain, both the distrust and trust networks are activated at the same time. We more easily fall into groupthink to be safe in the crowd, or we close up for fear we will look weak. Make it safe to be transparent about what you are uncertain about. Don’t penalize those who speak up – encourage them to share. Conversational Intelligence is the ability to master the power of connection to enhance your relationships and gain better business and personal results.

Remember, Conversational Intelligence helps you become smarter at navigating your social highway. It’s not about how smart you are, but how open you are to learning effective conversational rituals that prime the brain for trust, partnership, and mutual success. Entrepreneurs who put relationships before tasks can build bridges for connection that lead to real greatness.

> Read more from Judith.

Tags: Conversation, Conversational Intelligence, Creating We, Judith Glaser, co-creating conversations

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Communication >

5 Success Factors in Changing Organizational Culture

by: Judith Glaser

0

Tweet

Culture transformation is an advanced leadership skill. The primary way to change a culture is to use your Conversational Intelligence to create an environment that infuses energy and commitment into relationships, teams, and the whole organization. Too often we get stuck in habit patterns of ‘talking about’ change but not creating change.

The more we talk about change, the more we talk about all the problems and challenges that can emerge — and we fall into negative mindsets which trigger “fear hormones” and “threat networks” in our brains. No wonder change is so difficult. By the time we are ready to take action we are frozen in place.

You can shift the way you think about change by following these factors that most successful leaders use to navigate their journey:

1st Success Factor: The first skill is be the change for transforming the culture. Realize you have the power, influence and the ability to see and understand the culture in which you work, and to see how you can play a role in transforming it into a healthier, more inspiring, and thriving culture. Transforming culture can mean a culture that is so powerful it transforms itself or it can mean that you play a role in activating the culture transformation.

>>Call to Action: Envision how you can play a catalytic role in transforming your culture. Envision how you can be accountable for co-creating transformation in your culture by the way you show up at work everyday. When you put skin in the game, you become the change that transforms the culture.

2nd Success Factor: The second skill, embrace the opportunity, is the ability to step out of your Comfort Zone and rather than allowing fear of the unknown paralyze you, embrace the opportunity with excitement and enthusiasm. Your shift in focus will create positive ripple effects on those you influence. By fully stepping out of your comfort zone and into a new opportunity – you are activating your ability to transform yourself, and also to inspire courage in others.

>>Call to Action: Embracing opportunity both ‘encourages’ others and ‘inspires courage’ in yourself and others. By seeing transformation and change as a way to grow you have an influence on how you experience the challenge in a positive and less fearful way.

3rd Success Factor: The third skill, create space for conversations, is the ability to intentionally open up opportunities for feedback-rich conversations one-on-one, within teams and across the organization. By opening up space for and creating Conversational Journeys, you create an environment in which employees have room to learn, grow, and be nourished by new ideas and energy.

>>Call to Action: Creating spaces is a call to action you need to take every day to open the space for more innovative, generative, and catalytic conversations to take place in your relationships and teams. This space ‘signals our brain’ that we can share and discover around new ideas we’ve never talked about before.

4th Success Factor: The fourth skill, practice Co-creating Conversations ® is a core to Conversatioanl Intelligence. In the previous steps, you learned to recognize and release old baggage filled with toxic experiences that negatively undermine and denigrate relationships, and replace them with new meanings that positively uplift and inspire relationships – empowering a new sense of optimism and effectiveness.

As a leader, you can begin to have “co-creating conversations.” Co-creating conversations are conversations that have the ability to release the past and open space for the future with others. a psychological state of being that is powerful and transforms us.

>>Call to Action: Co-creating conversations means opening the space for new energy for co-creation with others. This is a space where you and others are open to think about what you don’t know, what you don’t know you don’t know, and to explore possibilities that you never thought about before.

5th Success Factor: And, finally, there is the fifth skill of shaping stories. Having moved from a place of understanding, to challenging, to stepping out and releasing, to opening space for Co-creating Conversations, you have now mastered the most proactive and intentional skill of shaping the story of your team’s collective success. This is what visionary leader and organizations do. It’s work you do with others, no on your own in isolation. And what you co-create together are “shared stories for success” that envision and make possible the fulfillment of WE.

>>Call to Action: Shaping stories, is a call to action to realize how you shape the stories impact how the future unfolds. Reflect every day in a conscious way on how you shape stories so that they are winning, inclusive, and appreciative. These conversations have the ability to reframe your view of the world, give you and others hope for the future, and that enable you to see the best outcomes for all of us. Both meanings have the power to transform.

How You Label Determines How You See
Empowering your team to work in concert to achieve your organizations goals and strategies requires flexibility of thought, agility of mind, and speed of response. Most of all, it requires you to break out of old conversational habits and negative patterns of communicating and view the impact you can have on your business in totally new ways.

Use conversational intelligence as a way to break from the past and create the future. Rather than thinking about situations as problems, think of them as challenges and opportunities, and communicate this point of view in your conversations with others. Until you challenge yourself to change old thinking and old conversational habits, you will see little change from yesterday to today. Once you do – you will find you become a catalyst for change where ever you go and you will discover new energy appears around you for tackling big challenges and achieving the desired results and targets regardless of their size and difficulty.

Read more from Judith here.

Tags: Creating Culture, Judith Glaser, Transforming Culture

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Cultural Transformation is a Leadership Skill Everyone Can Learn

by: Judith Glaser

0

Tweet

Culture transformation is an advanced leadership skill. The primary way to change a culture is to use your conversational intelligence to create an environment that infuses energy and commitment into relationships, teams and the whole organization. Too often we get stuck in habit patterns of talking about but not creating change.

The more we talk about change, the more we talk about all the problems and challenges that can emerge, resulting in negative mindsets, which trigger fear hormones and threat networks in our brains. No wonder change is so difficult. By the time we are ready to take action, we are frozen in place.

However, you can shift the way you think about change the same way successful leaders do to navigate their own journeys.

> 1st Success Factor: Be the Change for Transforming the Culture

The first skill is to be the change for transforming the culture. Realize that you have the power, influence and ability to see and understand the culture in which you work, and how you can play a role in transforming it into a healthier, more inspiring and thriving culture. Transforming culture can mean a culture that is so powerful it transforms itself, or it can mean that you play a role in activating the culture transformation.

Call to Action: Envision how you can play a catalytic role in transforming your culture. Envision how you can be accountable for co-creating transformation in your culture by the way you show up at work every day. When you put skin in the game, you become the change that transforms the culture.

> 2nd Success Factor: Step out of Your Comfort Zone

The second skill, embrace the opportunity, is the ability to step out of your comfort zone and, rather than allowing fear of the unknown paralyze you, embrace the opportunity with excitement and enthusiasm. Your shift in focus will create positive ripple effects on those you influence. By fully stepping out of your comfort zone into a new opportunity, you are activating your ability to transform yourself and inspire courage in others.

Call to Action: Embracing opportunity both encourages others and inspires courage in yourself. By seeing transformation and change as a way to grow, you influence how you experience the challenge in a positive and less fearful way.

> 3rd Success Factor: Open the Space for Conversations

The third skill, create space for conversations, is the ability to intentionally open up opportunities for feedback-rich conversations one-on-one, within teams, and across the organization. By opening up space for and creating conversational journeys, you establish an environment in which employees have room to learn, grow and be nourished by new ideas and energy.

Call to Action: Creating spaces is a call to action you need to take every day to open the space for more innovative, generative and catalytic conversations to take place in your relationships and teams. This space signals our brain that we can discover and share new ideas we’ve never talked about before.

> 4th Success Factor: Practice Co-creating Conversations

The fourth skill, practice co-creating conversations, is a core to conversational intelligence. In the previous steps, you learned to recognize and release old baggage filled with toxic experiences that negatively undermine and denigrate relationships, and replace them with new meanings that positively uplift and inspire relationships. This empowers a new sense of optimism and effectiveness.

As a leader, you can begin to have co-creating conversations. Co-creating conversations are conversations that have the ability to release the past and open space for the future with others — a psychological state of being that is powerful and transforms us.

Call to Action: Co-creating conversations means opening the space for new energy for co-creation with others. This is a space where you and others are open to think about what you don’t know, what you don’t know you don’t know and to explore possibilities that you never thought about before.

> 5th Success Factor: Shaping Stories 

Finally, the fifth skill is shaping stories. Having moved from a place of understanding to challenging, then stepping out and releasing, and finally opening space for co-creating conversations, you have now mastered the most proactive and intentional skill of shaping the story of your team’s collective success. This is what visionary leaders and organizations do. It’s work you do with others, not on your own in isolation. What you co-create together are shared stories for success that envision and make possible the fulfillment of WE.

Call to Action: Shaping stories is a call to action that allows you to realize how you shape the stories’ impact on how the future unfolds. Reflect every day in a conscious way on how you shape stories so that they are winning, inclusive and appreciative. These conversations have the ability to re-frame your view of the world, give you and others hope for the future and enable you to see the best outcomes for all of us. Both meanings have the power to transform.

How You Label Determines How You See

Empowering your team to work in concert to achieve your organization’s goals and strategies requires flexibility of thought, agility of mind and speed of response. Most of all, it requires you to break out of old conversational habits and negative patterns of communicating and view the impact you can have on your business in totally new ways.

Use conversational intelligence as a way to break from the past and create the future. Rather than thinking about situations as problems, see them as challenges and opportunities, and communicate this point of view in your conversations with others. Until you challenge yourself to change old thinking and conversational habits, you will see little change from yesterday to today.

Once you do, you will find you become a catalyst for change wherever you go, and you will discover new energy appears around you for tackling big challenges and achieving the desired results and targets regardless of their size and difficulty.

>> Read more from Judith.

Tags: Change, Conversational Intelligence, Judith Glaser, cultural transformation

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

How Better Listening Can Improve Your Conversations and Your Leadership

by: Judith Glaser

0

Tweet

For a leader, listening is perhaps the most important skill of all. As a leader, we must learn to listen while navigating along with the person speaking toward a common destination – mutual understanding.

Whether your talents are in sales, systems engineering, administration, technical support, or leadership, listening to connect with others – requires a new and powerful form of deep listening.

When having a conversation you can improve your precision listening skills by asking questions that will help you gain more insight from the speaker. By intentionally navigating through a conversation, we can move from making assumptions to gaining clarification of meaning and intent – and it happens by asking the right questions.

Judith Glaser, CEO of the Benchmarking Institution and Chair of the Creating WE Institute, has developed examples of these navigational-listening questions that will guide your next important conversation.

You can download these questions along with other practical helps for your next conversation here.

A recent release of our SUMS free book summaries also spoke directly to this topic.

Conversational Intelligence, also by Judith Glaser, advances the theory that the key to success in life and business is to become a master at “Conversational Intelligence.” It’s not about how smart you are, but how open you are to learn new and effective powerful conversational rituals that prime the brain for trust, partnership, and mutual success.

Download a copy of this free summary here.

Tags: Active Listening, Conversational Intelligence, Judith Glaser, Listening, sums

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Communication >

3 Tips to Leverage Your Capacity for New Ministry Ideas

by: Judith Glaser

0

Tweet

Suppose you’re invited to participate in a brainstorming session. The facilitator says that “every idea counts” and invites you to propose as many ideas as you can in the next 15 minutes. You feel rushed. You suppress ideas you think won’t get support. You narrow your own limited list of ideas, offering just a sample to the group. The facilitator posts yours and your colleagues’ ideas, inviting everyone to vote for which is best. Of course, not everyone is on board with the winning idea and while some give in, most aren’t sure about the new direction the meeting has taken.

Therein lies the rub. Our tried-and-true ideation processes can actually dampen the creativity companies are working so hard to create. To promote real innovation, we need to stop giving lip service to new thinking, get away from the need to reach consensus and instead nurture approaches that truly forge new ground.

The resistance to change and real innovation is natural. It’s driven by some deep-seated forces that we need to recognize to foster new thinking.

• Force #1: Need for inclusion and connection: When we are brainstorming with others, the need to agree, feel included and to think the same way others do. Real innovation requires divergence and expanding our ideas into the far recesses of our brain that may be less comfortable or familiar.
• Force #2: Being Right: Thinking the same thoughts repeatedly lulls us into a sense of comfort. Thinking we know the “correct” answer reinforces feelings of intelligence and good judgment. We may not even realize we are in a repetitive loop, or experiencing status quo thinking. Instead, we feel good that we got it right.
• Force #3: Mental Grooves: Thinking repetitive thoughts etches “grooves” into the brain. The brain then reinforces what it knows, perhaps at the expense of what is new and novel. Along these well-trodden paths, brain structure serves to link learning to behavior in predictable ways. Yet getting into those parts of the brain forges new connections—both at the idea level and at the level of the brain tissue itself.

To up our innovation game we have to think differently. We rarely pay enough attention to leveraging our capacity to form new ideas, test, refine, and advocate for new concepts. Here are 3 tips to do just that:

>> Tip 1: Prime your brain with trigger words. We need to prime our brains to freely generate and express ideas, not suppress them. So, state the problem or challenge you are working on. Find trigger words related to your challenge to get your juices flowing. Sleep on it, watch a movie, and go to a park. Give the body something to do while the mind wanders freely. Then put yourself to work.

If you’re in a group, consider listing trigger words in two columns on a white board and asking colleagues to look for connections between the words that otherwise wouldn’t be obvious. Invite people to generate as many ideas as they can for a few minutes, and then conduct your brainstorming session with your brains primed to think differently.

Related: Break Out the Office Cake. It Could Change Your Company.

>> Tip 2: Think of the worst idea. Remove the fear of making mistakes, feeling stupid or safe or receiving negative feedback. No idea is a bad idea. In fact, research shows that what appears after ‘the worst idea’ can become a trigger for the best ideas no one has thought of before.

Related: Stop Having the Same Conversation Again and Again

>> Tip 3: Let it flow. Don’t wait for inspiration or settle for perfect solutions. Instead, generate a wealth of ideas with others. When you’re inclined to stop, or judge your ideas, keep going. Don’t get caught in your usual patterns and instead open up your mind to a ‘non-judgmental’ state where your ideas and others’ ideas can connect. If you are feeling anxious, uncomfortable, or lost in uncharted territory, know you are on the right track.

Related: Read This Before Your Next Hard Conversation

Remember: Most innovative ideas come through experimentation and discovery. Prime your brain and set the stage for the most amazing new novel and exciting ideas to emerge. In the process you’ll learn to learn to trust innovation instincts – yours and everyone else’s.

> Read more from Judith here.

Tags: Judith Glaser, brainstorming, ideas, ideation process

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

The Science Behind Effective Ministry Leadership: 3 Tips to Help You Navigate the Crossroads of Results & Relationships

by: Judith Glaser

0

Tweet

Effective leaders shoulder a lot of responsibility. They are responsible to shareholders for financial results. They are responsible to clients for quality and service. And they are responsible to employees for guidance, support and recognition. Mangers are presented with a leadership crossroads when asked to balance external expectations with anticipated results. It can be stressful; even the best of us sometimes shift from coaching and supporting to anger, judgment and blaming.

But there’s a better way for leaders to deliver results and strengthen relationships than exerting tighter control, conveying disappointment, or taking over projects that have failed to meet targets. How?

Get closer to your team, engage it in problem solving, be transparent, and share your concerns.

The Science Behind Effective Leadership

Anger activates our fear networks and releases the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol, which blocks access to areas of the brain that govern advanced thought processes like strategic thinking. Fear engages the amygdala, the primitive part of our brain responsible for memory and emotional reactions, which triggers a “fight or flight” response. A leader whose actions provoke fear in others may unwittingly shut down team members’ creative and strategic capacities.

Healthy relationships serve to release oxytocin, another hormone and neurotransmitter. Unlike cortisol, which closes neural pathways, oxytocin opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex. Cortisol enables leaders to successfully manage the expectations, motivations and efforts of all stakeholders and to co-create optimal solutions. That allows teams to experiment with new ways of doing business—and to grow together.

So, the next time you find yourself having to decide between results at all costs or aligning your energies with others on the road to mutual success, consider these leadership tips:

• Manage disappointment by seeking to understand shortcomings without judgment and by enlisting your team in collaborative problem solving.
• Set goals and expectations with your team. Discover where they want to go and make sure they have an opportunity to weigh in on the plans and commitments they are going to be held responsible for. Make it safe for people to be honest—to freely share their thoughts, concerns and perspectives.
• Allow others to shine. Hang back, listen up, and let others jump in to take the lead. You might be pleasantly surprised!

Leaders that are guided by both their heads and their hearts—and the energy and aspirations of their team—are more likely to optimize outcomes, even in the face of tough challenges and underperformance. It’s not rocket science, it’s neuroscience.

Choose the constructive response the next time you find yourself at a leadership crossroad between results and relationships.

Tags: Judith Glaser, Leadership Engine, Results, Staff Leadership Roles

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Check Your Ministry Blind Spots: 7 Ways Your Mind Blocks Out Reality

by: Judith Glaser

0

Tweet

Many of us act as though we all see the same reality, yet the truth is we don’t. Human Beings have cognitive biases or blind spots.

Blind spots are ways that our mind becomes blocked from seeing reality as it is – blinding us from seeing the real truth about ourselves in relation to others. Once we form a conclusion, we become blind to alternatives, even if they are right in front of their eyes.

Emily Pronin, a social psychologist, along with colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross, at Princeton University’s Department of Psychology, created the term “blind spots.” The bias blind spot is named after the visual blind spot.

Passing the Ball

There is a classic experiment that demonstrates one level of blind spots that can be attributed to awareness and focused-attention. When people are instructed to count how many passes the people in white shirts make on the basketball court, they often get the number of passes correct, but fail to see the person in the black gorilla suit walking right in front of their eyes. Hard to believe but true!

Blind Spots & Deniall

However, the story of blind spots gets more interesting when we factor in our cognitive biases that come from our social needs to look good in the eyes of others.
When people operate with blind spots, coupled with a strong ego, they often refuse to adjust their course even in the face of opposition from trusted advisors, or incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

Two well-known examples of blind spots are Henry Ford and A&P:

▪ Ford’s success with the Model-T blinded him to the desires of his customers. That gave the fledging General Motors an opportunity to capture a winning share of the automobile market with a broader range of models and options.
▪ A&P stuck with the grocery chain’s private label products even as their customers defected en masse to supermarkets that carried the national brands they saw advertised on TV.

Recovery

The good news is that companies can recover from denial; even when they seem permanently wedded to their histories, their philosophies, or their belief systems. IBM, which had been caught up in its own “bureau-pathology,” learned to conquer arrogance and overcome its history and culture, under the leadership of Louis Gerstner.

Intel, DuPont, and Coca-Cola, are more examples of corporations caught in denial traps when launching new products. They demonstrated that when corporate management has strong convictions, or worse yet, hubris about their points of view, they can become blind to their customer’s needs – needs that are right in front of their very eyes.

Seeing the real truth is an art and a science. When we get the balance right between what we think is true and what is really true – we are managing our blind spots with integrity, and wisdom.

Fortunately, these well-known brands did not live in denial very long. It was only a passing phase, and they recovered from it by revisiting reality with an open mind. Blind spots explain why the “smartest people in the room” (as Enron’s top executives were famously called) can sometimes be very dumb. They do not see the light – they are not open to changing their minds.

The Power of Coaching to Dissolve Blind Spots

Denial and Blind spots are one of the primary reasons why Executive Coaching is so vital for leaders, and why peer coaching is equally important for employees to practice. Coaching can effectively uncover and deal with blind spots and denial and give the decision-makers a fresh perspective on how to handle executive challenges.

Coaching can also help individuals gain a broader and more ‘realistic perspective’ about situations and themselves. Executive, Team and Organizational Coaching can help leaders calibrate with the world around them, giving them reality checkpoints that position them to navigate the real world with wisdom and insight.
From time to time, we all need a wake-up call to be sure that we do not allow ourselves to confuse our denial maps with the actual territory.

Check Yourself

Here are 7 Common Blind spots:

1. Denial of Reality – Feeling so strong about our own beliefs that we deny the beliefs of others, or deny facts right in front of our eyes.
2. Control – Seeing ourselves as being more responsible for things than we actually are, or having more control over things and events than we truly do.
3. Made-Up Memories – Making decisions based on memories that did not happen. Often we confuse our imaginations, or our dreams, with reality.
4. Reality Distortions – Distorting reality to conform to preconceptions.
5. Know it All – Thinking that we know more than what we really do. (We simply don’t know what we don’t know.)
6. Listening Only to Validate What We Know – Failure to listen to others.
7. Undervaluing What We Do Know – Listening too much to others, and allowing others’ beliefs to talk us out of our beliefs; or in some cases cause us not to trust our instincts.

Neuro-tips: Removing Blind Spots

Tip #1 – It Takes Thought to Learn. The brain does not always allow us to hear all the facts if they do not fit our prior understanding of a concept. To learn new facts, you must be actively open to accepting opposition.
Tip #2 – Effectively Working Together. Partners who were considered controlling were perceived as critical and rude, and their advice was generally rejected and not trusted. When the same partners showed appreciation, a feeling of rapport and trust developed, creating a deep ‘WE-centric’ bond.

Read more from Judith here.

Tags: Judith Glaser, Leadership Barriers, Leadership Engine

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Leadership >

Connection Trumps Conflict: 3 Exercises to Improve Your Leadership Communication Skills

by: Judith Glaser

0

Tweet

I’m sure it’s happened to you: You’re in a tense team meeting trying to defend your position on a big project and start to feel yourself losing ground. Your voice gets louder. You talk over one of your colleagues and correct his point of view. He pushes back, so you go into overdrive to convince everyone you’re right. It feels like an out of body experience — and in many ways it is. In terms of its neurochemistry, your brain has been hijacked.

In situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. So we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him).

All are harmful because they prevent the honest and productive sharing of information and opinion. But, as a consultant who has spent decades working with executives on their communication skills, I can tell you that the fight response is by far the most damaging to work relationships. It is also, unfortunately, the most common.

That’s partly due to another neurochemical process. When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right.

Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing. Your goal as a leader should be to spur the production of oxytocin in yourself and others, while avoiding (at least in the context of communication) those spikes of cortisol and adrenaline.

Here are a few exercises for you to do at work to help your (and others’) addiction to being right:

• Set rules of engagement. If you’re heading into a meeting that could get testy, start by outlining rules of engagement.  These practices will counteract the tendency to fall into harmful conversational patterns. Afterwards, consider see how you and the group did and seek to do even better next time.
• Listen with empathy. In one-on-one conversations, make a conscious effort to speak less and listen more. The more you learn about other peoples’ perspectives, the more likely you are to feel empathy for them. And when you do that for others, they’ll want to do it for you, creating a virtuous circle.
• Plan who speaks. In situations when you know one person is likely to dominate a group, create an opportunity for everyone to speak. Ask all parties to identify who in the room has important information, perspectives, or ideas to share. List them and the areas they should speak about on a flip chart and use that as your agenda, opening the floor to different speakers, asking open-ended questions and taking notes.

Connecting and bonding with others trumps conflict. I’ve found that even the best fighters — the proverbial smartest guys in the room — can break their addiction to being right by getting hooked on oxytocin-inducing behavior instead.

Tags: Attention, Judith Glaser, Staff Development

| What is MyVisionRoom? > | Back to Communication >