Before we start to speak about
meaningful conversation in teams, we have to think about conversation as a tool
for learning. Because everybody in the team should know that through listening
and good conversation can he/she learn something new.
Team
learning is the systematic ability of team members to raise their “collective
IQ”. That is, a team which has acquired this capacity for special type of
learning, f. e. has tools for seeing the bigger picture of what is going on in
its part of the systems, and can communicate that to other parts of the system.
Or the team has mastered the disciplines of listening to another, inquiring
about underlying assumptions, and of slowing conversations down in order to
reduce errors, establish shared vision and achieve results faster.[1]
For sure
there are many assumptions, which should help us to create meaningful
conversations in teams. On the beginning
we should create team which is based on respect, ability to share, healthy
climate, equality etc. But we as leaders are still the most important part of this
process. Even in today’s workplace, the power of
provocative questions is underrated. It’s ironic really, since all brilliant
answers start with questions. To have more meaningful, productive conversations
and get better answers, we need to ask better questions. [2]
That means great questions are more than half of our success to create
meaningful conversation.
To support
our questions we should create attractive workplace for our discussion (maybe
we should even refresh the team with new members who can refresh our
discussion). Not only you, but also the team should be creative. Creativity is
the part when you (thanks to your questions) and the team (thanks to their
active participation) think about new ideas. After that you can start with
innovation, it’s the part of implementation of new ideas. It means to be
innovative you need meaningful conversation as a first step. Don’t forget that this
conversation should be effective, logical, on the end also concrete and
everybody should understand what are you talking about and on which goals are
you now focusing. Conversation can be meaningful
only if everybody who takes part in it understand why, what, with which aim are
you talking about it. Everybody should feel that this conversation is needed
even for him/her and also should agree with the conversation (on the beginning - I want to talk about it, and on the end - I agree with our team result/standpoint etc.). Otherwise could happened that our first successful and meaningful conversation could be the last one, because nobody has then motivation to do it again. These sentences also say, that meaningful conversation is
really necessary for our organizational development.
Hi Thomas, I liked your idea of conversation is a means of learning. Just like our last in-classroom class, Bruce mentioned the importance of networking, I totally agree with that, we receive innovative ideas through talking with people of different professional field, personality, age, culture, and experience. Respect, equality and healthy climate is the base for team conversation, I also like to invest my idea of that the quality of the conversation. As adult learning, we tend to more interested in the dialogue which is rich and with useful information. So when we talk, and even before we talk, think about if our idea will bring value to the audience and how it will benefit them.
OdpovědětVymazatHi Emily, thank you for your feedback. I agree with all ideas that you have mentioned, because it' s completely true. I am just thinking about the way how to motivate people to think about it and reflect it into their work.
Vymazat