How Effective is your Team’s Dialogue? It will Depend on This.

During a team meeting, a leader opened by expressing his desire to share some sensitive feedback he received about a decision the organization made. He clarified that the goal of sharing this feedback was simply to equip his senior leadership team with context, should they receive similar feedback, and not on 'doing' anything with the information at this point in time. 

After he shared the information, he opened the conversation up to clarification questions so that team members could be sure they understood and felt equipped. Very soon into the conversation, one leader shared what appeared to be an instantaneous idea (read: not thought out) about a radical action in response to the feedback. This idea caused a domino effect of emotional reactions from several other team members. This dialogue – intended for understanding the feedback – was now off the rails.

There are many processes for a team to use in its work together, depending on what it is doing, how large it is, and what its current state of function or dysfunction is.

However, if the goal is to build alignment – remember that alignment is enough shared understanding that the team can move forward together as a cohesive unit – then, ultimately, the team will want to get itself to a point where it can effectively execute the skill of dialogue. 

The effectiveness of the team's dialogue skills can make or break whether they can achieve true alignment. The level of dialogue skill will depend on two key factors. Here they are in order of difficulty:

1) How well can your team hold and address the topic?

• Are your team members focused on the topic at hand, or does the conversation meander to interrelated but out-of-scope areas?

• Are team members attached enough to stay focused and express their care and opinions, but not so attached that they can't be influenced by each other?

• Do you cover all the bases pertaining to the topic, exploring the 'dusty corners'?

2) Does the team course correct when the dialogue quality diminishes? 

• This is where a team coach can help, and teams that have been coached well can eventually learn to use these skills for themselves

• This involves self-awareness that transcends to the team level, providing enough emotional intelligence to know when to shift the conversation from 'the topic' to 'how are we doing at handling this topic.' Eventually, the lines between those realms may be blurred such that the team fluidly shifts back and forth.

• At first though, it can feel disruptive to a team to interrupt the focus on the work to name some elephant in the room, for example. It can feel like someone threw a grenade into the conversation. Building this awareness into your team culture will take intentional leadership. Its execution should look like gentle, mostly positive commentary on the 'how' at first.

Now, I haven't told you what the criteria is for “quality” dialogue that I mentioned in the second question. Suffice it to say that you can feel it when a conversation turns unproductive and needs a rudder steer. 

The team I told you about at the beginning did remain in a good-enough dialogue that it was able to bring itself back into constructive conversation and alignment, but most teams don't have the skill to do so.

You can start building this skill in your team if you tune into the question "how are we doing at having this conversation?" This means focusing your mind simultaneously on the 'what' and the 'how'. Start paying attention to the quality of your dialogue, measured against the amount of shared understanding – alignment – that actually gets built.