A cure for conversational blind spots

Three decades ago, I began my first experiment in Conversational Intelligence®. The corporation Union Carbide hired me to work with 17 high-powered sales executives in danger of losing a bid for a key contract. My job was to figure out how they could raise their game and beat the other seven competitors.

For two weeks, I had them role play potential conversations with “customers” and charted what they said. The patterns were clear: The executives used “telling statements” 85 percent of the time, leaving only 15 percent for questions. Additionally, almost all the questions they asked were actually statements in disguise.

The exercise showed they were talking and talking to bring their counterparts around to their point of view, all the time thinking they were still conducting good, productive conversations. Having observed thousands of executives in similar, real-world situations—from prospecting to performance reviews, business development to innovation—this is a common problem.

Master your natural impulses

People often think they’re talking to each other, when they’re really talking past each other. They carry on monologues, not dialogues.

There’s a biological explanation for this. When we express ourselves, our bodies release a higher level of reward hormones. The more we talk, the better we feel.

Our bodies start to crave that high, blinding us to the conversational dynamics. While we’re being rewarded, the people we’re talking to might feel cut off, invisible, unimportant, minimized and rejected, which releases the same neurochemicals as physical pain.

Feeling rejection sends them into a fight-or-flight response and releases the corticosteroid hormone cortisol, which floods the system and shuts down the prefrontal cortex, or executive brain, letting the amygdala, or limbic brain, take over. To compound conversational challenges, the brain disconnects every 12 to 18 seconds to evaluate and process. This means we’re often paying as much attention to our own thoughts as we are to other people’s words.

These are natural impulses, but we have to learn to master them because clear, two-way, compassionate, non-judgmental communication is necessary in leadership. It’s how deals get done, projects get run and profits get earned.

Recognize your blind spots

Stop assuming that others see what you see, feel what you feel and think what you think. This is rarely the case. Your blind spots make you fail to recognize that emotions, such as fear and distrust, change how you and others interpret and talk about reality.

You think you understand and remember what others say, when in reality you only remember what you thought about what they said. Don’t underestimate your propensity to have conversational blind spots.

Start paying attention to and minimizing the time you “own” the conversational space. Share that space by asking open-ended discovery questions so you stay curious. For example, you might ask, “What influenced your thinking?” Then listen non-judgmentally to the answers and ask follow-up questions.

Through coaching, the Union Carbide sales team noticed when they were making assumptions, interpreting incorrectly and jumping to conclusions. They started asking discovery questions and paying close attention to their customers’ answers, which expanded their frame of reference and gave them new insights into needs and opportunities. The executives presented themselves as conversationally intelligent partners, not sales people—and they won the contract!

Don’t get hooked on being right

When you’re in a tense 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 try 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, cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building and compassion shut down. The amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over.

The body makes a chemical choice about how to protect itself. In this case, it wants to protect us from the shame and loss of power associated with being wrong. As a result, we are unable to regulate our emotions or handle the gaps between expectations and reality.

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
Appease—make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him

These harmful responses prevent honest and productive sharing of information and opinion. I find that the fight response is by far the most damaging to relationships. Unfortunately, it is also the most common, partly due to another neurochemical process.

Break the pattern

When you argue and win, your brain floods with different neurochemicals—adrenaline and dopamine, making you feel good, dominant and even invincible. It’s a feeling that we want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again and become addicted to being right.

Many successful leaders suffer from this addiction. They are skilled at fighting for their point of view, which is often right. However, they are unaware of the dampening impact their behavior has on the people around them.

If one person is getting high off his or her dominance, others are getting drummed into submission, experiencing the fight, flight, freeze or appease response, which diminishes collaborative impulses.

Fortunately, there’s a hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. Activated by human connection, it opens up the networks in our executive brain, 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 those spikes of cortisol and adrenaline.

Three exercises to try today

Here are three exercises to do at work to cure your addiction to being right:

1. Set rules of engagement. If you go into a meeting that could get testy, start by outlining rules of engagement. Have everyone suggest ways to make it a productive, inclusive conversation and write the ideas down for everyone to see. For example, you might agree to give people extra time to explain their ideas and to listen without judgment. These practices will counteract the tendency to fall into harmful conversational patterns. Afterwards, consider how you and the group did and seek to do even better next time.
2. Listen with compassion. 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 compassion for them. And when you do that for others, they’ll want to do it for you, creating a virtuous circle.
3. 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.

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