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.