How often are you in a meeting and someone says something that either makes you shut-down, or respond in anger or with a clear intent to prove why they are wrong? At that moment, you are definitely out of the sweet spot. Your conversational capacity has hit its outer limit.
Your ability to have difficult conversations and stay in the sweet spot (where you are open to the opinions of others while being candid about your views) is a skill that can be learned. Craig Weber spent a morning with one of my Vistage companies addressing this with the team, and stretching
their conversational capacity.
Weber describes conversational capacity as “the ability to have open, balanced, learning-focused, evidence-based dialogue in difficult circumstances”. He describes the sweet spot as candor balanced by curiosity. “When we trigger out of the sweet spot, we either let go of candor, and we don’t speak up, or we lose curiosity and get arrogant”.
Oh, how often does that happen for you?
Are there issues you can’t discuss with in your team, or your family?
Are there unproductively discussed issues that boomerang back, or stop being discussed?
Weber described building your conversational capacity as a martial art. We can learn to shape the discourse.
The first step is to pay attention to when you get triggered to up your awareness. Did you trigger out of candor and go into flight mode? Or, did you trigger out of curiosity and go into fight mode? What will you do next time?
One way to see your own patterns in to keep a trigger journal. What was the trigger? How did I behave? What will I do next time? Weber believes that labeling a tendency will help you to brake sooner – before you trigger out.
That is just the first step. If you want to learn more, you can read his book. Guess what the title is? Yup, Conversational Capacity.
Pay attention this week to staying in the sweet spot. Remember this isn’t easy, but as Weber says, “Why do we have smart people and dumb teams?” See what you can do to increase the conversational capacity of your team this week.
Image courtesy of http://www.errolallenconsulting.com