conversation matters

Six Ways Leaders Kill Conversation

 

A conversation among team members can yield critical new ideas as well as strengthen the relationships among team members. As one member builds on, supports, or challenges the ideas of others, new understandings and solutions can emerge. However, often leaders, quite unintentionally, act in ways that kill or significantly limit the conversation among their team members. Here are a few of those inadvertent killers:

1. Standing in the front of the room while everyone else is sitting  
2. Making a comment or response after each team member speaks
3. Wearing a jacket when everyone else is in shirtsleeves  
4. Pretending you don’t have a position on the topic under discussion (when you really do)
5. Holding a conversation in the boardroom
6. Asking a question without giving team members time to think about a response

1. Standing in the front of the room while everyone else is sitting. If you stand while team members are sitting, they will address their comments to you rather than to each other. If you’ve been standing to make announcements and are now ready to have a group conversation, then draw a chair up to where everyone else is seated.  Sitting behind a desk has the same deleterious effect as standing; all comments will be addressed to you. When you are ready for the group to have a conversation move your chair out from behind your desk and join the group as a member of the conversation.
2. Making a comment or response after each team member speaks. Even innocuous responses you make, for example, “ok” or “I see,” will keep returning the focus of the group to you. With each response, you affirm that you are the person whose opinion matters most. If you want conversation to flow between team members, those team members will have to look at the others when they talk, not at you.
3. Wearing a jacket when everyone else is in shirtsleeves. The difference in clothes is like a signpost that says, “I am of higher rank than you.” Conversation is most effective when it is egalitarian, that is, opinions are not judged not by rank, rather by the value they bring to the discussion. Wearing your “rank” makes it more difficult for team members to judge your view on the basis of its value rather than your position.  
4. Pretending you don’t have a position on the topic under discussion (when you really do). When you raise a topic for your team to discuss, it is more effective to state your position; then adding to it an indication that you are open to other ideas, for example, “This is just my first thinking on the topic”, or “I’m interested in hearing what I might be missing.” If you don’t state your own position team members will spend their time surreptitiously trying to detect what you really think. Of course, you can only offer such assurance if it is true.  If you do hold a view that you are unlikely to change, then don’t call for a conversation about it, just inform team members of what you've decided.  
5. Holding a conversation in the boardroom. Space matters. If you regularly use the boardroom for staff meetings during which you are primarily asking for reports and making announcements, then choose a different room to hold conversations.  We are all creatures of habit, and our bodies and minds associate certain spaces with specific behaviors, like returning to the same spot for every team meeting. If team members are accustomed to just listening in the boardroom, and you want to have an active conversation, change the room the team meets in, then team members won’t be cued to behave the same way they do in the boardroom.  
6. Asking a question without giving team members time to think about a response. Silence always feels awkward; your tendency is probably to start talking again when you don’t hear an immediate response to your question. Realistically, team members need time to think about their answers. After you ask your question, let them know they have time to think about what they want to say, for example, simply saying, “I’ll give you a few minutes to think” and then staying quiet for a minute or two.  Alternatively, saying, “Take a couple of minutes to write a note or two about your thoughts before we start.”  Everyone making their own notes before anyone responds has the proven advantage of producing a greater variety of responses – which is very much to the good! Use your watch to check that at least two minutes have lapsed. Without checking your watch 30 seconds of silence can seem like two minutes.

SharePoint Can’t Learn

I am just back from KM World and was amazed that so many of the presentations were about how some organization has implemented SharePoint.  SharePoint has become so ubiquitous that, at KM World, Knowledge Management seems to have become equated with implementing SharePoint repositories and communities!

I want to push back a little on that. Learning in an organization happens when teams or workgroups take the time to think together about what is occurring within their purview and then to consider what needs to be changed or strengthened – when they have human-to-human conversations aimed at improving their own work. Only after they have reflected together and figured out what they need to do next, is it useful to seek out the ideas of others. A document in a SharePoint repository or a question/response on a community forum can certainly spur the imaginations of team members about what might be possible. But help is most useful when a team has identified a problem. Without the first step of reflecting on what is needed, documents are just “nice to know.” A document in a repository is not knowledge any more than a book on a shelf is knowledge. Knowledge is created and resides in the minds of human beings.

Even when a document in a repository is a good match for a team’s need, a second kind of human-to-human conversation is required for learning to take place. A team does not learn from reading a document about what some other team has done. The successes of others have to be translated to fit the tasks and culture of the receiver’s environment. Copy and replace never works!  When the receivers of new ideas function within a context that is different from the one the document was written about, translation is required.

Although the receiving team can do some translation on its own, they lack the knowledge of the reasoning behind the actions of the other team, for example, what they tried that did not work, what they thought about but did not execute on and why. There is so much more a team knows than they can put in a written in a document or an online response to a question. (We know more than we can write!) Translation is most effective when it is a conversation between those that wrote the document and those that want to use that knowledge. Through conversation the receiving team can learn what conditions made the other's success possible, for example, the level of team experience, size of the team, management support, time frame, and culture. Human-to-human dialogue is invaluable in figuring out how to modify what the originating team did so that it could work in a different environment. Joint translation is a learning process that significantly benefits the receiving team. But, as often, it is also learning for the originating team because in explaining what they did, they come to a more complete understanding of their own work.

At the next KM World, it would be great to hear presentations on how teams figured out what they learned from a project and how they thought through what changes they needed to make on the next project, based on that learning; how often they reflected on what they were learning and who they involved in those discussions; in what ways those reflections changed the way that they worked.  It would be great if KMer’s focused on innovations in learning from experience, rather than just getting reports into SharePoint. It would be great to find out how a team talked through what they hope to learn on the next project, as well as the outcome they wanted to achieve. That way they could continually improve their work processes and get better at what they were doing.  It seems like we have become so focused on “sharing” that we have forgotten that KM is primarily about learning.   SharePoint Can’t Learn, only humans can.