CONVERSATIONAL CAPACITY

The ability to engage in constructive, learning-focused dialogue about difficult subjects, in challenging circumstances, hierarchy, personalities, locations and across tough boundaries.

It’s a vital competence for both personal and collective performance.

PERSONAL PERFORMANCE: A person with high conversational capacity makes every conversation or meeting smarter because they’re in the room. A person with low conversational capacity – even if they have high intelligence and good intentions – often has the opposite effect.

COLLECTIVE PERFORMANCE: A team with high conversational capacity can perform well, remaining on track even when dealing with their most troublesome issues. The performance of a team with low capacity, by contrast, can be derailed by a trivial disagreement. In this sense, conversational capacity isn’t just another aspect of effective teamwork – it defines it. A team that can’t communicate about its most pressing issues isn’t really a team at all. It’s just a group of people who can’t engage with each other effectively when it counts.

VIDEOS

WELCOME

Intro to Conversational Capacity session

 

AWARENESS

Focus on awareness – catch it, name it, and tame it

 

MINDSET

Focus on mindset – remembering what matters in the conversation and that we can all learn from other perspectives – specifically the “what are other people seeing about this issue that I am missing?” question.

Skill Set

Focus on skill set – position, thinking, test, and inquiry – how do you sharpen your behavioral acumen to align your mouth with your mindset? 

Mind the Gap, Close the Gap

Focus on patterns of conversation – pay attention to how do the patterns serve the purpose of the conversation and work towards closing the gap – how people are communicating with each other what they are communicating with each other to achieve. 

Conversational Code of Conduct

This is a behaviorally specific document that reflect our values, supports our strategy, and reinforces our culture. 

How can we all get on the same page about how we agree to engage with each when something important is at stake? Let’s not leave it to chance that people understand how we are trying to communicate and interact with each other.

 

Positive Feedback

Focus on making positive feedback a regular practice. The impact of sharing thoughtful, positive feedback with concrete examples is simple yet so powerful. Explaining what worked and creating a dialogue with the intention of learning is beneficial to an entire organization. 

RESOURCES

The Conversational Capacity Workshop Materials

Workbook PDF