Stretch Collaboration - It’s a choice. But there is no point if you’re addicted to being right.

Adam Kahane's book "Collaborating with the Enemy – How to Work with People You Don't Agree with or Like or Trust" has a title that seems to elicit a "tell me more" response whenever I mention it to people. They have invariably encountered situations where they've needed to work with people they don't see eye to eye with, nor trust, and they're conflicted about how to feel empowered and function effectively within that dynamic. It's clearly a prevalent challenge within the world of work.

Given my focus is on cultivating trust in my clients’ businesses, you can imagine the double-take required when I encountered Adam’s perspective that trust is not a pre-requisite for what he refers to as ‘stretch collaboration’. Stretch collaboration goes beyond the conventional approach of working towards an agreed plan, instead working together when you don’t agree and there is no plan, including with people you perceive as enemies. On the surface, the concept of trust not being a prerequisite seemed to fly in the face of so much of the research on the impact of trust on performance, let alone the mission of my business. What I soon realised, however, is that stretch collaboration is the most potent form of working together and it necessitates all participants to exercise a high degree of Conversational Intelligence®. For brief context, Conversational Intelligence, also known as C-IQ, is a neuro-scientific framework for building trust - the human platform from which great conversations emerge – including in conflicted relationships.

Whilst Adam’s background was in the corporate world as an expert solving multi-faceted problems, his thinking on stretch collaboration stemmed from experiences far removed from the boardroom in some of the most complex socio-political situations imaginable. He participated in collaborations during South Africa's transition to democracy, and foundational discussions amongst enemies in Columbia, that many years later culminated in relative peace. We’re rarely dealing with such significant issues at work, yet collaboration in complex uncertain situations can feel just as pressured.

Adam's teachings have expanded and enriched my thinking about collaboration and the way I work with my clients. It's helped me work with the skeptics who think that striving to shift cultures from being I-centric to WE-centric - from having power-over to power-with dynamics - is just too idealistic - and soft. For me, Adam's experiences and principles of stretch collaboration ground the principles of Conversational Intelligence in hard realities and reinforces the pragmatic application of the neuroscience that underpins it.

So, this article is for the brave and the skeptical. It's about collaboration beyond idealistic consensus-driven methods to collaboration within complex and ambiguous terrain. And it starts with a principle shared by stretch collaboration and Conversational Intelligence: your effectiveness is nullified if you're hooked on being right.

Addicted to Being Right | Enemyfying

How many times have you worked with people who are inflexible in their view, insisting that their approach is right and any alternative approaches put forward are inadequate or wrong? Most likely, many times. And how many times have you taken this stance yourself? I suspect we’ve all been guilty of being hooked on the ‘rightness’ of our thinking at some stage in our work life.

As Judith E. Glaser, the creator of Conversational Intelligence wrote in her HBR article about how our brains get hooked on being right “When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It's a feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we're in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right.”

When it comes to effective collaboration this dynamic is an obvious block. It can trigger the primitive fight, flight, freeze or appease response in other people, decreasing the likelihood of them being able to utilise the capacities of their executive brain, let alone co-create something of value.

Adam Kahane describes the strongest form of this addiction as enemyfying: “thinking and acting as if the people we are dealing with are our enemies – people who are the cause of our problems and are hurting us.” The energy or force of this depends on how important what we're working towards is to us, and what is at stake. Enemyfying falsely reassures us that we’re not responsible for the problems with the collaboration – the other(s) are the problem. There's a simplistic or even psychologically childlike quality to enemyfying, akin to the playground dynamics of goodies and baddies that I watch my six-year-old son navigate. But in the terrain of work, the impact can be far from simple.

I have witnessed many of my clients – and friends - fall into the dynamic of enemyfying at some point or other. I too have been guilty of enemyfying. My most salient episode was within a leadership team I was part of, at a time when the business was going through significant change, navigating new ownership, different leadership and a not yet clear strategy in the face of market disruption. Sound familiar?

Both the business' purpose and culture were highly humanistic, which you've no doubt gleaned is a strong orientation of mine. I placed considerable value on the people-centred culture, so when new members joined the leadership team with different interpersonal styles I felt that what was important to me - and for the business - was being threatened. I started to build in my mind a case that this different style was negatively impacting people, and I concluded that this was just not ok. We (read "I") were right, and they were wrong – not about the business strategy, we were mostly aligned there - but about the culture that would enable that strategy.

I'll jump to the end of the story and share that enemyfying this peer was in no way helpful - it's not an empowered state to influence from. I had fallen into the #1 conversational blind spot - assuming everyone thinks like me – and as such was disconnected from my own C-IQ. I was in denial that I needed to collaborate with this person, that they were there to stay regardless of their interpersonal style, nor whether I agreed with, liked or trusted them. We've probably all had experiences that we'd like to relive in a different way, and utilise the professional capacities we normally operate from. This was one of mine.

Thankfully I recalibrated in time to halt escalation of the conflict, and once my C-IQ kicked in we tentatively moved forward, but not before I unsuccessfully attempted to seek allies for my cause. It would have served me well to be cognisant of the foundational principle of stretch collaboration during that time: recognising that collaboration is a choice.

To collaborate or not to collaborate, that is the question

With so much emphasis on collaboration in the business world, it might not feel like we're given much of a choice. But there is always a choice. The options as Adam describes them are:

Collaborate – when you want to change the situation you're in and you think you can only achieve that if you work with others

Force – when you think you need to change the situation and that you (alone or with colleagues) know best what needs to be done and can impose this on others

Adapt – when you think you can't change the situation so you find a way to live with it

Exit – when you think you can't change the situation and you're no longer willing to live with it.

Unfortunately people often unconsciously choose from these options. In their most reactive form, they somewhat mirror the responses of our primitive brain: fight (force), flight (exit), freeze (internal exit) or appease (adapt).

Those who have a more conscious presence, however, are empowered to consider the opportunities and risks associated with each option. And as we live in a world that doesn't fit within neat categories, if you reflect on your own experiences you'll probably realise that you've used a combination of all four at different times, even with respect to the same situation.

If collaboration emerges as the best option, and it's with people you don't agree with or like or trust, then you will need to stretch your mind and your practice beyond what you would typically think or do in conventional collaboration, and certainly beyond what is familiar and comfortable.

Conventional collaboration versus stretch collaboration

One of the most potent stories of stretch collaboration Adam shares in his book is his experience with the project 'Destino Columbia' in 1996. The now president of Columbia and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Juan Manual Santos had, as a young politician, initiated the project that saw all parties representing the violent conflict that had plagued the country since the 1960s, come together to discuss possible scenarios for the country's future. The meetings included military officers, guerrillas (attending via teleconference), paramilitaries, activists, politicians, businesspeople, trade unionists, landowners, peasants, academics, journalists and young people. As you can imagine, trust was certainly not a precursor for this collaboration.

As the story goes, however, even from this precarious base, thin strands of trust did begin to take root. Within my work, we encourage collaborative groups to co-create their 'terms of engagement' to represent how they will work together. It’s a basic practice for cultivating trust. For Destino Columbia, one such term emerged during the initial meeting when it was observed that the fear of retribution some of the participants felt in their first ever conversations with guerrillas – even though they weren't physically in the room - was a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm of the country. To contain this fear, one of the guerrillas promised that they would not kill anyone for anything said in the meetings. Now that's a powerful term of engagement!

In 2016 when Juan Manuel Santos received his Peace Prize, he acknowledged how these foundational discussions from 20 years prior contributed to the country's path to peace. As you can imagine, there was nothing conventional about this collaboration and it's worth reading Adam's book just to read this story (although I recommend you don’t miss the other great stories). His point in sharing it was to highlight the shortcomings of conventional collaboration in our increasingly complex world and to frame his concept of stretch collaboration:

"Conventional collaboration assumes that we can control the focus, the goal, the plan to reach this goal, and what each person must do to implement this plan (like a team following a road map). Stretch collaboration, by contrast, offers a way to move forward without being in control (like multiple teams rafting a river)."

Here are the three dimensions or 'stretches' that evolved from Adam's experiences with such complex and unconventional collaborations, and how I’ve made sense of them through the lens of Conversational Intelligence.

Conflict + Connection | The "I" within the "We"

"For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate." - Margaret Heffernan

The first stretch involves how we relate to the people we're collaborating with, within the polarities of engaging with them versus asserting ourselves.

Even within the frameworks of Conversational Intelligence that aim to shift cultures from being "I-centric" to "We-centric", people are encouraged to express their views rather than risk false consensus or groupthink. By allowing people to express the "I" within the "We" we go beyond their surface level map of reality and instead get to see the terrain.

Both Adam's concepts and C-IQ acknowledge that connection and conflict are not binary options when it comes to collaboration, instead, they're equally valid and valuable aspects of the one spectrum. We need both, and the first stretch is to not only allow both but to learn to read and adapt when the signals are showing that a move towards the opposite pole is required. In Adam's words, it's about working with the generative sides of each pole (engaging and asserting) and recognising the signals when you're moving towards the degenerative sides (manipulating and imposing). And that requires high levels of both E.Q. and C-IQ, expressed in the form of conversational agility.

Experimentation | Co-creation

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.” - Joseph Campbell

The second stretch involves how we advance the work of the team. Synonymous with C-IQ, stretch collaboration is about co-creating the way forward and letting go of the need to know the route.

I witnessed this stretch in action when I was working with an executive team in a highly political industry that was facing closure. There was no certainty and no established strategy they could follow. All they could do was experiment with possible new strategies and be agile as both external events and their own collaborative efforts evolved. It was an ideal scenario for them to practice what we refer to in C-IQ as Level III conversations – conversations based on the dynamics of sharing and discovering to explore unchartered territory. There was plenty of application of the C-IQ essential of asking questions for which you have no answer within these Level III conversations, as there was no right or wrong answer.

And even though there was a fair serving of dislike and distrust amongst the team, they also practiced the C-IQ essential of listening to connect. Adam similarly emphasises the different ways of listening required in stretch collaboration – drawing on Otto Scharmer's "Theory U" - as a way to listen for possibility rather than for certainty. In C-IQ terms, listening to connect rather than judge, accept or reject, is the type of listening that enables the experimentation required for stretch collaboration.

For this executive team, these essential C-IQ practices provided both the lubricant and the glue for the agile approaches and the design thinking methods we deployed along the way. I continue to see the effects of applying these conversational essentials when members of other collaboration teams approach a situation from different perspectives.

I didn't feel great at the conclusion of my work with this team though, as we didn't get the Hollywood movie ending of high trust. But as Adam writes: "success in collaborating doesn't mean that the participants agree with or like or trust one another; maybe they will and maybe they won't. Success means that they are able to get unstuck and take a next step." Thankfully, that is something we did achieve, for many steps.

Stepping in to the Game | Being Open to Influence

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

The final stretch is to shift our focus from trying to change what others are doing on to what we ourselves are doing. As co-creators we are part of the situation, not apart from the situation.

Adam describes the need here as one of balancing ourselves: not allowing our focus on what others are doing to completely distract us from what we need to be doing, nor placing ourselves at the centre of the situation and overestimating our 'rightness' and value.

In the personal example I shared above I was out of balance. I was both distracted by the behaviour of my peer and self-centred about the value of my humanistic perspective. My emotional intelligence and C-IQ required regulating to get me back in to balance.

Collaborating with people you don't agree with or like or trust is not easy. It will definitely stretch your professional capacities. The self-regulation required for each of Adam's three stretches and to elevate your C-IQ for complex unconventional collaboration takes creativity, courage, and commitment. What I've observed in myself and in my clients is that it also requires compassion, especially self-compassion. If you can have compassion for yourself as you experiment your own way forward - knowing that your primitive brain is always primed to move you into protective behaviours – then you’re less likely to be ruled by this primitive brain, and more likely to be able to learn and adapt, utilising the capacities of your executive brain and heart brain. I've seen the toughest and strongest of clients expand their awareness and grow their influence by developing compassion for themselves. And as you grow in self-compassion, you’re also more likely to develop compassion for others, and in so doing, lessen the hold of any addiction to being right.

With thanks to Adam Kahane for the extraordinary work you do in the world, and the stretch in thinking and practice that you offer to others.

Can You Be Too Compassionate as a Leader?

I was asked this question at a recent leadership breakfast and I’d be interested to know what your initial reaction to the question is.

Perhaps you, like me, had an intuitive response paired with a healthy dose of curiosity as to what prompted the question.

As we unpacked this leader’s context, we realised her question stemmed from a belief that compassionate leadership is at odds with having the ‘difficult’ conversations she knew she needed to get better at, and because of this belief she was at risk of rejecting the favourable aspects of her leadership.

Both this conversation and the high level of interest in my recent LinkedIn post on the power of compassion, have prompted me to again reflect on what compassionate leadership is, and what it is not.

Compassionate leadership in a nutshell

The three broad aspects of compassionate leadership include having and showing empathy for what others are feeling, seeking to understand what they are thinking (which can only happen with deep listening), and being motivated to benefit others as an end in itself (rather than a means to an end).

Compassionate leadership is not about perpetuating the so-called ‘friendly-culture’ or ‘nice-lady’ syndromes where people are nice to each other but don’t share what’s on their mind, let alone give meaningful feedback.

In Conversational Intelligence® we describe this as demonstrating care and candour. Both are vital for building trust and having the effective conversations that are essential for high performance.

I really like the way Brené Brown expresses this same concept: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

More on compassionate leadership

The formative concepts of compassionate leadership are attributed to the field of mindfulness pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn. This Positive Psychology article on using compassionate leadership in the workplace includes thorough descriptions and practical strategies if you would like to know more.

There is even an HBR Assessment that you can do entitled “Are you a Compassionate Leader?”. It maps where you are across two scales: wisdom vs. ignorance and compassion vs. indifference and then offers practical strategies for you to implement, depending on your result.

Out of curiosity I took the survey twice. The first time I answered modestly and scored in quadrant 2, very close to the HBR.ORG average (moderate compassion and moderate wisdom) and the second time I channelled a leader with extremely low emotional intelligence (moderate indifference with low wisdom). Interestingly, both responses recommended being kind to yourself as a practical strategy, sighting self-compassion as the starting point for compassion. This absolutely resonates with the themes from hundreds of coaching conversations with my clients over the last few years.

My two-fold response to the opening question “Can you be too compassionate as a leader?” probably remains the same: my silent answer is no, provided it includes providing meaningful clear feedback, and my conversational response is “Can you share with me where your question is coming from?”.

I’m interested to know what your responses to the question are and how you would evolve the question itself. Perhaps it’s something along the lines of “How might I ensure that my compassionate leadership enables the performance of my teams?”. That inquiry is less binary and makes room for care and candour to co-exist.

Trust and Distrust - They’re Not Mutually Exclusive. How to Cultivate Trust in Strained Working Relationships.

How many times have you heard someone say of a person, team or organisation that there's no trust... and that's the end of the story? The weight of distrust hangs heavily in the air and you're left with the sense that you're unlikely to hear the happy ending of a good relationship, thriving business, or positive culture for this particular tale. 

But low trust or a perceived absence of trust is not the end of the story. Part of our extraordinary capacity as human beings is that we can prime for trust, even in the face of distrust. Trust and distrust can co-exist. Here's how we know this.

Trust is associated with the reward system of our brain and takes place in the positive, social part of our brain. It feels good to trust and we tend to cooperate more when we feel trust. As a species, we’re wired for this, and it's vital for functioning work environments.

Distrust, in contrast, is associated with the brain area of uncertainty, and resides in the more primitive parts of our brain linked to fear and strong negative emotions. It's quick to activate and we tend to withdraw from social interaction, including conversation and information sharing. This is clearly dysfunctional in work environments.

Now here's the twist in the story of trust/distrust that I found amazing as I immersed myself in the field of Conversational Intelligence® with Judith E. Glaser:

According to Associate Professor Angelika Dimoka, a neuroscientist at Temple University's Fox School of Business, the trust networks in our brain can be activated at the same time as our distrust networks - even with respect to one relationship. So trust and distrust are not binary. They actually co-exist.

What all of this means is that trust is not necessarily something that is broken, never to be repaired. It’s not the end of the story. We can re-activate trust in strained relationships.

This twist in story does come with a challenge though: because distrust exists in the more primitive part of our brain, it's quicker to activate than the other cognitive areas of our brain, including where trust resides. But in a complex world of work it's also costly and unhealthy to let it reign. That's why it's important to minimise feelings of distrust and cultivate feelings of trust.

How do we do this?

Here are five steps that will set you on your path to a trust/distrust story with a better ending:

1) Remember that our brains are built to trust. We all experience psychological or emotional pain throughout our lives, but the vast majority of humans continues to live in connection with others despite this. We are remarkably adaptive, especially when it comes to meeting the core human need for connection.

2) Consider your intention in the relationship/situation, aligned with your values. Think about how you want to behave and the impact you want to have at work.

A common intention amongst my clients is to have positive working relationships based on respect. They're motivated to treat people how they would like to be treated.

One client however, had been in a heightened distrust state for some time, so his stress levels were elevated from always being in protect mode and his wellbeing was being impacted. His intention was more self-oriented - to stop the downward relationship spiral for the sake of his own wellbeing - but it provided ample motivation for him to find a way to partner with those he had experienced low trust with.

3) Increase transparency and decrease uncertainty by seeking to understand other's maps of reality, and in the process contain distrust.

An executive team I worked with were in a highly political and critical business situation, with the utmost uncertainty: would the business continue to exist or not. Stress levels were understandably high and with no CEO on the team, each executive was viewing the situation and possible future states through their own lens. They were operating from their unique protective behavioural styles, some more destructive than others.

By facilitating a high transparency conversation that revealed each executive's view, a broader map of reality emerged. I still recall one leader's comment: "I feel better just having heard all of that". That simple statement actually revealed something essential for him to be able to continue to lead effectively: his distrust networks had quietened so he was able to operate from the executive part of his brain. That is, he was able to access his wisdom, insight, strategic thinking, empathy, foresight, and complex decision-making capacities. As you can imagine, those capacities were in high demand for this team!

But transparency is not something you can demand. It comes from how you approach the trust cultivating conversations, and the next two steps will help you with this.

4) Apply the Conversational Intelligence® essential: listen to connect, rather than judge, accept or reject.

So often we are listening to someone with an expectation of what they'll say, we have a bias, or we're thinking about what we'll say next. Listening to connect takes the focus off ourselves and on to others. After all, we know our own map of reality, it is others' maps of reality we're trying to understand to decrease uncertainty and minimise distrust.

When I share this C-IQ essential with clients I often observe a shift in them as they ponder what it means. Their breathing slows, their shoulders drop and there's a softening in their eyes. It’s like I'm witnessing the physical transformation that accompanies brain activity moving away from fight/flight networks towards trust networks where the capacities I mentioned above reside.

5) Pair listening to connect with the C-Q gem I shared in my last article: ask questions for which you have no answers.

I’ll conclude with one more gift from my favourite book from many years ago, Margot Cairnes' "Approaching the Corporate Heart". You have responsibility for 50% of every relationship you are in.

As you navigate your various relationships at work, may your 50% be focused on using your extraordinary human capacity to cultivate trust, so that you, your relationships, and your business can be a story of flourishing.

Leadership Lessons From the Playground

I’ve been reflecting on the overlap between my role as parent and my role as an Executive Coach and the leadership and Conversational Intelligence® growth opportunities that have appeared in both. Here are five leadership lessons that my son, my clients and I have learned as we have unpacked their stories of challenging dynamics in both the playground and in the corporate world.

Story 1: the playground collision

It was a Friday afternoon near the end of Term, and my six-year old son and I were enjoying the relaxed social atmosphere in the natural setting of his school playground. It was a rare break from my son’s usual after-school-care routine, and whilst he was tired from a term filled with activities, he was relishing the freedom of an early end to his day. 

The children had created a whole world of imaginary landscapes in the oversized sandpit for their stick-people characters to carry out very important missions: the goodies chasing and catching the baddies in all manner of gum-nut or clay pot vehicles. The game was important to my son – he was invested in it - and for the most part the children who had joined him were complementing his ideas within this six-year-old version of a smooth flowing workplace. Or so it had seemed.

Just as my son was running over to his school bag to add another exciting element to their imaginary landscape, he collided with another boy who was also running at full speed. The strength of reaction from both boys was such that all heads turned in their direction and I felt that sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach, wondering what the extent of their injuries would be. 

It turned out that the physical injury was mild – nothing more than a sore shoulder and chest. It was the instantaneous psychological interpretation of the collision that had caused the strength of reaction and was now causing the pain. As I extracted the story of what had taken place from my loudly sobbing son, his strongest emphasis was on “HE DID IT ON PURPOSE”.

Story 2: the work collision(s)

Fast forward several months and the environment is very different, but the context and dynamics are amazingly similar. The setting is a business with an audacious mandate undergoing significant and rapid change. The players are two very different Executives who are invested in achieving their business objectives and are giving their all to produce results in their best way possible. They collide, again and again, not physically of course, but in their views of what the best way possible means. The budget and resourcing implications of their different approaches adds to their reactive behaviours, because for both Executives, achieving the results is important to them.

There are other similarities between this story and the playground episode: the strength of these Executives’ reactions to each other impacts everyone around them, including creating a chasm between their working teams and tension at their peer level. Whilst their collisions are far removed from the sandpit, the stories they hold on to are similar: they are stories of goodies and baddies, with a major theme being assumed ill-intent from the other. 

Lesson 1: You are not a mind-reader - how you interpret other people’s intentions is a choice

I have struggled with my son’s insistence that ‘they did it on purpose’ when he has challenges with his classmates, because I can see how much it adds to his pain. In my attempts to assist him I have reminded him that he is not a mind-reader and can therefore never know what someone is really thinking. He’s taken that on board, as he does, and now he responds differently with “it feels like they did it on purpose”. I can’t and don’t want to argue with that, because now he’s owning and expressing what’s happening for him, which seems to be a step towards empowerment in navigating these conflicts.

With my clients it’s a slightly more sophisticated conversation as we explore the impact of assuming ill-intent on themselves and on the situation. Typical questions I ask are:

·       How does assuming ill-intent help you in this situation?

·       How will you approach the situation holding this assumption? 

·       What would be different about your approach if this assumption was not true?

My intention here is to loosen their hold on their story so they can use their discernment in a more empowered way. We all face times at work when someone’s intentions are not positive or constructive, and the challenge as a leader is to discern what that means for our approach to the situation, without expending all our energy and giving away our personal power to our perceived opponent.

Many of you will be familiar with the concept of MRI or ‘Most Respectful Interpretation’. It invites us to consider the most generous assumption we can make about another person’s intentions or what that person has said. Given we are not mind-readers, we have a choice in how generous we are with our interpretive assumptions.

A playground example is when a friend told my son for two days in a row that he would play a game with him the next day, but as each day arrived, he still didn’t play that game. My son’s interpretation was “John (not his real name) is a liar”. Have you ever tried to explain to a six-year-old that changing your mind about something doesn’t make you a liar?

The corporate example I’ve seen play out recently is with a Leader who has a reflective thinking style. He will agree to a course of action in a meeting, but later reflects on the conversation and the business implications. He then goes back to the relevant parties and puts forward a revised approach the following day. The MRI is that more elements have come to light, so the actions needed to change, versus the less favourable judgement that the Leader has recapitulated. This leads me to the next lesson…

Lesson 2: You have responsibility for 50% of every relationship you are in

The book “Approaching the Corporate Heart’’ by Margot Cairnes was my favourite book 20 years ago. A key message that stayed with me and has turned out to be a central theme in much of my coaching this year is this: we are all responsible for 50% of every relationship in which we’re involved. 

There are so many aspects to this responsibility, some more obvious than others. Clearly, how we behave and communicate, including in response to another person’s reactions to our words and actions, feature strongly in our 50%. Being conscious of these aspects are core to leveraging your Conversational Intelligence®. Perhaps less obvious aspects are the assumptions we choose to make about another person’s intentions and whether we choose to prime for trust, even in the face of distrust.

As I wrote in a previous article, neuroscience has shown that the trust networks in our brain can be activated at the same time as our distrust networks - even with respect to one relationship. Trust and distrust are not binary - they actually co-exist. 

Children seem to be better at living with this dual nature of trust. I’ve witnessed my son’s ‘trust resilience’ as he navigates sometimes strained, sometimes harmonious play with certain classmates by moving in and out of certain games.

The invitation for leaders then, is to tap into this extraordinary capacity of human beings as part of their 50% contribution to work relationships, including the strained ones. They can only do this if they’re prepared to let go of their binary stories of ‘goodies and baddies’…

Lesson 3: Getting stuck in your own story will not help you

This first two lessons are intertwined with this third lesson and draws on a model from Conversational Intelligence® referred to as the ‘Ladder of Conclusions’, featured in Judith E. Glaser’s book “Conversational Intelligence – How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results”. 

When we have a conversation with someone, the first level through which we process the conversation is chemical: we have instantaneous bio-reactions that trigger judgements within .07 seconds! This reaction can either increase the stress hormone, cortisol - and activate our protect/fear networks - or it can increase the production of oxytocin - the hormone of connection - and activate our trust networks. 

We move up a rung on the ladder by labelling our interaction as good or bad, depending on how the conversation made us feel, and we judge the person as friend or foe. 

Moving up the ladder to the level of thought, we put words to our feelings to make meaning of the interaction. At this level we can at times be making stuff up, or story-telling. 

We then draw from our past experiences and pull in other beliefs we have about the situation or person to affirm our thoughts. Our beliefs are closely aligned to our values, so at this rung we’re tuning in to what’s important to us and consequently, what’s at risk.

Once we reach the final rung of conclusions, we've essentially made up our mind and we're no longer able to listen to other’s perspectives. We set out to prove we are right. 

So, the next time you walk away from a conversation with a friend or foe mindset, there’s a chance you’re sitting near the top of your ‘Ladder of Conclusions’. What I coach myself, my son and my clients to do when we recognise this, is to seek to come down the ladder and look for insights for ourselves, whilst opening ourselves up to understand what might be behind the other person’s words or actions. In your next conversation with this person you then go back to the most important essential practice in Conversational Intelligence®…

Lesson 4: Listen, really listen

Listening is a bit like common sense, we all think we have it, or do it well, but in reality, we rarely question just what it is and how we stack up against the norms. Nor do we receive feedback from others as to the impact we have on them through our listening. 

Common ineffectual listening habits include listening to answer, listening with an expectation of what the other person will say, listening through a bias, or worst of all, pretending to listen. These listening styles tend to create distance between people and can even activate cortisol, the stress hormone mentioned above.

The most effective and impactful way to listen is to ‘listen to connect’. Listening to connect - rather than judge, accept or reject - takes the focus off ourselves and on to the other. It's about connecting to the other person’s perspectives or 'world' and exploring their world. It goes beyond listening to understand - which is more about listening to confirm what you know - and enables a more agile, emergent and deep connection with people. 

Lesson 5: Frustration and anger are clues as to what YOU need to do differently

Whilst Lesson 4 is about how you listen to others, this lesson is about how you listen to yourself. It also draws on many of the principles contained in the other lessons. 

Both the playground and the work stories involve people who are actively participating in their respective worlds. They’re working on things that they want to achieve, and when their desires are not met, or are seemingly thwarted, they feel frustrated, which in turn leads to anger. 

As David R. Hawkins wrote in his book ‘Power vs. Force – The Hidden Determinants of Human Behaviour’, anger can lead to either constructive or destructive action. The latter is expressed as resentment and revenge, “exemplified by irritable, explosive people who are oversensitive to slights and become “injustice collectors”, quarrelsome, belligerent, or litigious”. Does that sound familiar?

However, as David writes, “anger can be a fulcrum by which the oppressed are eventually catapulted to freedom.” 

I believe that to access the opportunity of this fulcrum and take constructive rather than destructive action, we need to listen to what our anger is revealing to us about what’s important to us. If we’re able to do this, preferably through a compassionate lens, we’re more likely to access multiple empowered choices. As we intentionally come down our Ladder of Conclusions, we may recognise that we’ve exaggerated the importance of our desires, or, we may get a clearer view of the gaps between our own and other’s maps of reality. From this view, we’re in a better position to take constructive action to close those gaps. 

Whether in the playground, or at work, leadership provides an ever-generous opportunity for growth. If we can take responsibility for our 50% of relationships by assuming MRI, releasing the hold on our stories, and listening - to ourselves and to others - we're more likely to be a Conscious Presence in the sphere that we’re in.

Relationship Over Task: A Central Pillar for Effective Collaboration

The business and social case for active collaboration is well researched and widely accepted, but reality often falls short of the aspiration to leverage multidisciplinary and geographically dispersed talent to achieve innovative business strategies. Task reigns supreme in many collaborative partnerships, but when we're talking about collaboration between people and not just systems, the primacy of relationships can't be underestimated. Here's the science of why, and some tips on what you can do to strengthen the relationship pillar for effective collaboration.

Caveat: amongst my clients, some technically oriented professionals can find the concept of 'relationship over task' too foreign to contemplate. If this applies to you, please feel free to substitute 'relationship over task' with 'relationship beside task'. I assure you, the views expressed below are backed by science and best practice!

The compelling reasons for emphasising relationship

One of the greatest blind spots humans fall into is assuming that everyone thinks the same way, and this prevents us from getting beneath the tip of the iceberg of other people's perspectives. It also places us at risk of distrust, born from the uncertainty that rises when we start to glimpse that other people's maps of reality are not the same as our own. As uncertainty increases, corrosive "us versus them" thinking - and the associated protective distrust behaviours - can derail collaborative efforts.

By emphasising relationship over task, we instead seek to understand other people's perspectives and see what's below the tip of the iceberg. We may not share the same perspective, but when we seek to understand other people's worldview, it contains our sense of uncertainty and by extension, enables trust to be cultivated.

Why is trust vital for effective collaboration? Well, think back to the original intent: to leverage multidisciplinary talent in order to achieve business objectives.

We know from neuroscience, that for people to operate at their best and utilise the extraordinary capacity of their prefrontal cortex, also known as their Executive Brain, they need to feel trust, or at least, not have their distrust networks dominating. When distrust networks are activated through a spike in the stress hormone cortisol, it can signal to the prefrontal cortex that it's not safe to open up and share, and so our access to our higher-order thinking shuts down. We can no longer tap into the full potential of our executive brain, where the capabilities of wisdom, innovation, strategy, empathy, foresight, insight and trust reside. So much for leveraging talent!

There's more that neuroscience has taught us. It's a key piece in the puzzle my clients are trying to solve when they ask: "How do you get people to want to work together in the first place?” When we place relationship over task and the associated intention to understand each other, we're also more likely to benefit from the social-bonding functions of our heart-brain. Yes, you read correctly, developments in neuroscience have shown that our heart actually sends more messages to our brain than our brain sends to our heart! These messages affect psychological factors such as attention level, motivation, perceptual sensitivity and emotional processing, so as you can see, collaboration is not all about using our heads. The heart, along with the brain, also produces the neurochemical oxytocin, commonly referred to as the love or social-bonding hormone, which has been shown to be involved in cognition, tolerance, trust and friendship and the establishment of enduring bonds. So when our heart-brain and head-brain are in sync, we optimise the potential of humans working together.

Google came to a complementary view when they sought to find out what made their best teams so productive and successful: their data from the research project code-named Project Aristotle proved that two relationship-oriented behaviours made all the difference. Firstly, all good teams practised conversational turn-taking, where all members spoke approximately the same amount of time, and secondly, they had high average social sensitivity, meaning the teams were "skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues". The interpersonal trust and mutual respect that these behaviours produce - aspects of what is known as psychological safety - are enablers for the interpersonal risk-taking that creativity and innovation stem from. So relationships really do matter. Effective collaboration goes beyond the task. It goes beyond the enabling conditions articulated by the late J. Richard Hackman of having a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context. When you place relationship as a central pillar you elevate the collective intelligence of the collaborative partnership and increase productivity and success. 

Practical ways to strengthen the relationship pillar

The following simple meeting rituals can assist collaborative teams to get below the tip of the iceberg of each other's perspectives and cultivate trust to enable greater results. Whilst I’ve framed them in a meeting context, they all include an intention to improve the quality of conversations and relationships, and can be applied to all conversation settings.

1. Establish terms of engagement for how you want to work together. Whether it’s an operational team, collaboration project or Board, my clients all report that the teams that have discussed and agreed how they want to operate together, perform better than those who haven’t. Terms or engagement, or T.O.E. for short, can include operational elements such as meeting structure and frequency, but the more powerful and trust cultivating elements reflect the purpose of the team and the collective values of its members. Incorporating aspirations as well as behavioural norms into the T.O.E. can also lift the energy of the group.
   

2. Introduce a check-in ritual as the first agenda item for each meeting. Allocating 3-5 minutes at the start of a meeting for each person to check-in encourages everyone to tune out from other distractions and focus on the meeting and each other. The check-in question can be as broad as "what's on everyone's mind", "what one word describes how you're going this week?" or “tell us about your highlight since we last met”. These questions allow each person to share something of themselves and this can help others to understand the context of comments they then make during the meeting. As a simple example, if someone shares that they've just received some difficult news, the rest of the team will understand why this person’s facial expressions and tone are more strained than usual during the meeting. They won’t need to guess whether this change is due to the meeting content or otherwise. You can also use check-in questions more tailored to the meeting content such as "What questions do you think most need to be addressed in this meeting?"
   

3. Practice the Conversational Intelligence® essentials of 'listen to connect', and 'ask questions for which you have no answer' - whether you're discussing task or relationship. Both of these practices contain an intention of engaging in conversations with curiosity and a desire to understand other people’s perspectives rather than allowing your preconceived judgements to dominate. You can find references to these C-IQ essentials in my previous articles.
   

4. Include an anti-groupthink process within meeting agendas by making it safe for people to express any concerns or hesitations. There’s a powerful tool within Conversational Intelligence that allows people to express not only what they like about the ideas or approaches being discussed, but also any areas they want to explore further or have feared implications about. These feared implications can then be reframed or restated so they can be constructively addressed. This process minimises the break-downs that occur as a result of false consensus and helps build a more thorough understanding of each other’s perspectives.

5. Close each meeting with an appreciation ritual. When we express appreciation we engage our heart-brain and get in sync with others. As shared above, this activates the trust networks in our brain and helps us to utilise the executive capabilities of our prefrontal cortex. At the end of each meeting, invite each person to share what they appreciated about the meeting. Responses can range from "I appreciated hearing Joe's perspective about...” to "I appreciate that we solved XYZ challenge", or simply "I appreciate that we're finishing on time". Aside from strengthening the relationship pillar, an appreciative mindset also boosts our immune system, so as people embrace this ritual and start to look for what they appreciate about the collaboration team, they'll also be contributing to their wellbeing.

May you enjoy the personal and professional benefits of incorporating these practices that focus on the heart (backed by the science) of effective collaboration.

Phrases that Foster or Block Engagement. Which Do You Use Most?

In an act of brilliance, my young son’s father encouraged him to replace his default "I can't remember" response to questions about his day, with “let me think about it”.

Witnessing the extraordinary shift in conversational dynamics that followed reminded me of similar engagement halting phrases that clients sometimes unconsciously use, and the alternatives that have helped them develop their conversational leadership.

But first, let me explain how my son's change in phrase turned out to be a conversational game changer. His old response of "I can't remember" was an unintended engagement blocker. The inquiring adult either worked harder to engage him, or gave up, no doubt feeling that their desire for connection with him was not to be satisfied, not through conversation anyway. And that is fair enough, for both sides.

Yet now, the seemingly innocuous little phrase “let me think about it” signals to the unsuspecting adult that he needs just that – time to think. Rather than pursue him with the usual barrage of further questions, the adults around him are learning to give him an often-denied gift in conversation – a pause. My son now literally thinks about their question and then shares his response. And there you have it, continued connection and engagement.

So how does this play out in our professional lives? How do we replace the phrases that block engagement with alternatives that foster connection? How do we become more conscious of the impact of our conversations?

It all starts with intention.

A former coaching client had a habit of frowning when people asked her what she perceived to be "stupid questions". Her default phrase in response to such questions was a derisive "Are you serious?"

When I asked her what impact she wanted to have in such exchanges her first response was flippant, yet honest: "I want them to go away!" We've probably all had moments like that when we're up to our eyeballs in demands and we're running as fast as we can, so our tolerance for problem-oriented questions is low.

What followed however revealed who my client really is and the ethos of how she leads today. She realised that her default phrase could indicate to the other person that she thought of them as being idiotic, and this was far from the impact she wanted to have as it was deeply incongruent with her values.

With this increased awareness of her impact, she changed her approach to such discussions in a way that was aligned to her value of respect for people. She learnt to pause, connect with her breath, and ask the person a little more about what they were concerned about. Her intention was connection and respect, and the result was greater understanding of her clients and vastly improved relationships. An added bonus was the decrease in stress that came with behaving aligned to her values and no longer getting triggered by less than eloquently phrased concerns. Today, she leads high performing teams and is well regarded for both her leadership and the quality of her client relationships.

I’ll leave you with a little tip to experiment with, not dissimilar to the conversational technique my client used several years ago, without really knowing it’s significance. It’s a gem from Judith E. Glaser’s book “Conversational Intelligence – How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results”: ask questions for which you have no answers.

Yes, you read correctly, you get to park the need to be the expert or the leader with all the answers and enter the conversation with the intention of listening to answers you hadn’t expected. You may just benefit as much as I did from my son’s answer of “let me think about it” and all that followed.

Is Your Listening Style Building or Damaging Trust?

I recently met Naomi Abbott who creates high-performance teams by improving the way people engage with each other. We discussed the importance of trust and the role truly listening and being fully there when you are in meetings. Here are her thoughts about the most important skill of influence... listening.

Listening is a bit like common sense, we all think we have it or do it well but in reality, we rarely question just what it is and how we stack up against the norms. Nor do we receive feedback from others as to the impact we have on them through our listening. In sales, the quality of our listening can mean the difference between securing an engagement or growing our list of lost opportunities, so it's a worthwhile topic to drill down on. 

Common ineffectual listening habits include listening to answer, listening with an expectation of what your customer will say, listening through a bias, or worst of all, pretending to listen. Most of us fall into one or more of these habits much of the time and this in part explains why a Stanford University study proved that 9 out of 10 conversations miss the mark. 

But there is a more effective and impactful way to listen – you can "listen to connect". It's one of the essential practices of the neuro-scientific framework of Conversational Intelligence® and it has a tremendous impact on relationships and performance. 

Listening to connect - rather than judge, accept of reject - takes the focus off ourselves and on to the other. It's about connecting to your customer's 'world' and exploring their world. It goes beyond listening to understand - which is more about listening to confirm what you know - and enables a more agile, emergent and deep connection with your customers.

In Conversational Intelligence®, we monitor the conversational patterns that produce different neurochemicals, activating either the trust or distrust networks in our brain. Pretending to listen is one of the main conversational behaviors that produce the stress hormone cortisol. When cortisol is elevated, it can shut down the thinking center of our brain and make us go into protection mode. Interestingly, so too does a focus on convincing others. No wonder the old-school style of selling by overcoming objections involved so much tension – your customers were hardwired to protect themselves against this! 

By contrast, showing genuine concern for others and stimulating discussion and curiosity are two of the conversational behaviors that produce the feel-good hormone oxytocin. This elevates our ability to collaborate, communicate and trust others. So listening to connect with your customers not only fosters connection, it actually helps them to engage their executive brain in the conversation and make the best decisions for their business. 

When Judith E. Glaser - the creator of Conversational Intelligence® – started working with the global pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, the sales force ranked 39th out of 40 major pharmaceutical companies. Clearly, that was not a great position to be in! What she observed was the traditional features-and-benefits model of selling, rife with argumentative and persuasive objection handling, and this was creating resistance amongst the doctors towards the sales reps. To resolve the issue, Judith taught the sales reps a combination of skills to achieve results including building rapport, listening without judgement, asking discovery questions and reinforcing success. These skills were centered around the concept of 'relationship before task', shifting the focus and intention of the sales reps interactions with their customers from persuasion to connection in order to build trust. Within a year of practicing this new approach, the Boehringer sales force was ranked number one – a tremendous success! 

Amongst my clients, I see a similar shift in the types of conversations sales professionals have with their customers. Once they align their intention with connection and building trust, and practice the Conversational Intelligence® essentials of listening to connect and asking questions for which they have no answer, they have fewer transactional and positional conversations and more transformational conversations that reflect a true partnership with their customer. They make this shift because the science makes sense to them and because they want to operate in an empowered way and reflect an authentic presence in their profession. So, I recommend you start with experimenting with 'listening to connect' with customers you already have rapport with, and then apply it to those you've struggled to connect with. You could be delighted by the results!

Listening and Self-Responsibility – Two Keys for Empowered Collaboration.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve supported numerous leaders and their teams to navigate complex and often contentious collaboration contexts, all of which have the potential to improve the conditions of our society if they are successful.

We focused on the intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects of collaboration – the amazing and tricky human parts – and leveraged the wisdom and experience of the Masters. I regularly felt awe at the willingness of these leaders and teams to look at how they themselves were showing up in their collaboration relationships and how they may be unintentionally contributing to things being as they were, which was, for the most part, blocked. Their willingness has inspired me to share the lenses through which we explored the terrain of Empowered Collaboration.

Stretch Collaboration

There’s perhaps no better frame for a program that’s focused on being empowered in complex collaboration settings than that brilliantly articulated by Adam Kahane in his book ‘Collaborating with the Enemy – How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust’. This book stemmed from Adam’s experiences working in the most complex socio-political contexts imaginable, including with Nelson Mandela at the end of apartheid and with Juan Manuel Santos in the formative peace discussions in Columbia. I shared an executive summary of Adam’s book in my previous article Stretch Collaboration - It's A Choice. But There Is No Point If You're Addicted to Being Right. As Adam states,

“Conventional collaboration assumes that we can control the focus, the goal, the plan to reach this goal, and what each person must do to implement this plan (like a team following a road map). Stretch collaboration, by contrast, offers a way to move forward without being in control (like multiple teams rafting a river).”

The three stretches that Adam offers to help us move forward when we don’t necessarily agree or have control are:

Stretch 1: Accept the plurality of the situation: collaboration involves both conflict and connection

For this interpersonally oriented stretch, we leveraged the neuroscience and practical frameworks from Conversational Intelligence® and the wisdom and expertise of masters in peace-making and deep listening.

The leaders and team members that I was working with were already strong interpersonally. This was about helping them intentionally bring those strengths to the forefront and grow them, so they could meet the higher levels of complexity and uncertainty that their collaboration contexts had shifted into. To allow for cognitive conflict without it tipping into interpersonal conflict.

"For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate. If we aren’t going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking, and then we have to get really good at it.” - Margaret Heffernan, Professor of Practice, University of Bath School of Management

Stretch 2: Experiment to find a way forward: redefine success as getting unstuck and taking a next step.

This approach to collaboration requires us to suspend our views and desire for control or a solution and to listen for possibility rather than certainty. It represented a challenge for many of my clients for two reasons: as highly experienced experts in their field – with engineers and lawyers among them - they struggled to suspend their views, and they bravely acknowledged that what they had previously thought was listening, wasn’t!

In the words of Dr Scilla Elworthy, three times Nobel Peace Prize nominee and author of the book ‘The Business Plan for Peace’,

“More conflicts are prevented or resolved by having the ability to listen, than by any other means. Most of us think we are good listeners, and most of us are not. When we are apparently listening, we spend most of our time thinking what we’re going to say next, or judging the other person, or interpreting - or simply not being present.”

This essential key to Empowered Collaboration is worth emphasising. As Jennifer Garvey Berger says,

“Listening to win and listening to fix are useful in the predictable world, where there are right answers and knowable problems that you might have the solution to. In a complex, unpredictable world what’s required is to listen to learn: you have your perspective and hold it, but also reach into the other person’s perspective, not to narrow and close and win, but to open and expand and increase the number of possibilities.”

To help with this on a practical level, we tapped into our local expert in Deep Listening, Oscar Trimboli , and the Five Levels of Listening that he has identified. The penny dropped as everyone started to listen for meaning, not only by holding the silent intention-based question of “What do you mean by that?” but also “What does that mean for you?”.

Zooming out from the listening aspect of this stretch again, you can see that it’s aligned to being agile. As Adam Kahane says, “Your goal is not to collaborate impeccably – but to become more aware of what you are doing and the impact you are having, and to be able to adapt and learn more quickly.”

Stretch 3: See yourself as part of the problem not outside of it: be open to influence rather than seeing everyone else (whom you may not like, agree with, or trust) as the enemy.

Ultimately, this intrapersonal-focused stretch had the greatest impact and to be transparent, is my favourite. It’s an invitation for conscious self-leadership - the essential key for true empowerment - as people take full responsibility for the circumstances of their life. It offers vertical development, such that the skills gained through horizontal development are applied through a higher level of consciousness.

“The boon we obtain from shifting our attention from [others to ourselves] is that we liberate ourselves and give ourselves agency: now we have a direct opportunity to effect change.” – Adam Kahane

I took a risk by starting with this stretch and it paid off big time. Thanks to the simple black line model of Conscious Leadership shared so generously by the Conscious Leadership Group, it became the norm for the leaders and their teams to notice and name when they were slipping from empowerment into reactivity, within their teams, and in their collaboration contexts.

One of my favourite moments was when a Leader shared that he’d let his team know ahead of a potentially contentious meeting with collaboration stakeholders, that he was at risk of “going below-the-line” (that is, being closed, defensive, and committed to being right) and he had asked his team not to follow him there if he succumbed. As soon he shared this with me and others in the program, he realised what he might have been setting up for his team by making this disclaimer, and how he may have unintentionally been giving himself permission to drop into reactivity and disempowerment. He swiftly shifted back to taking full responsibility in a beautiful illustration of conscious – self and other – leadership.

“In conventional collaboration, we focus on trying to change what other people are doing. But when we are in complex uncontrolled situations, we need to shift our focus onto what we ourselves are doing: how we are contributing to things being the way they are and what we need to do differently to change the way things are.” – Adam Kahane

I feel grateful both to my clients for entrusting me to support their leaders and teams to elevate their personal empowerment as they navigated complex collaboration conversations, and to the Masters whose wisdom we leveraged.