3 steps toward conscious workplace conversations

Miscommunication between executives and managers and managers and employees are as much a fixture in the office as cubicles and water coolers.

Still, there’s hope. It’s a three-step verbal communication technique – which has been promoted for years by communication expert Harville Hendrix – that serves a few vital functions in vastly improving workplace conversations.

First, it focuses your attention on the actual words being spoken by your colleagues. Many of us rarely listen to what other people are saying. Instead we are defensively responding to the impact of what we are hearing. We react rather than listen. When you manage to focus on the words your co-worker is saying, you start discerning the meaning behind those words.

Second, when you engage in dialogue with your colleague and really listen to the words and search for their meaning, you discover that you work with a person whose experiences are often very different from yours. It is essential to realize that you work with people who are not extensions of yourself. To not recognize this results in a major source of conflict between co-workers.

Thirdly, regular use of this communication technique creates a deeper connection between you and your co-workers, dramatically improving office camaraderie.

The three parts of this dialogue technique are:

1. Mirroring
2. Validating
3. Empathizing

Mirroring is a straightforward communication technique. For example, if your employee says, “I don’t enjoy managing the company’s public seminars when you don’t seem to appreciate all the effort involved.”

When mirroring you restate the sentence in your own words and then ask if the message was received correctly. Example: “Let me see if I got it. You don’t like handling the company’s seminars because I don’t express thanks for the hard word you’ve done. Did I get it?”

You repeat this process until you’ve accurately heard and mirrored the meaning of your employee’s statement. Then you deepen the communication by asking if your colleague has anything more to add to the topic. It suffices to ask, “Is there more?”

You might find that your employee adds, “I never actually wanted to do these events. They were delegated to me without even asking if I had any interest or expertise in event management.”

Continue with this process until you’re satisfied that your employee has fully disclosed what’s on his or her mind. What you’ll find it that your people get tremendous satisfaction from simply being understood, in knowing that their message was received.

Although mirroring is a fairly simple process it is so contrary to the way most people converse that it requires a great deal of practice to get it right and make it effective.

Once you’ve become adept at mirroring, validating is the next step.

The validation step requires learning how to affirm the internal logic of your employee’s remarks. In essence, you are telling your colleague, “What you’re saying makes sense to me. I can see why you would think that way.”

People want to know that their internal logical is making sense. That is what validation does. Rather than validate, however, people tend to aggressively defend their separate reality.

“If must be connected to our fear of the loss of self,” Hendrix writes. “If I see it your way, I will have to surrender my way. If I feel your experience, I will have to invalidate mine. If what I say is true, then what you say must be false. There can be only one center of the universe and that center has got to be me.”

Rather, Hendrix says, we must have the courage to suspend our own view of the universe for a moment and manage to understand and acknowledge the other person’s reality. When we accomplish that, he says, something miraculous happens.

First, a feeling of safety comes over your colleague because the way he sees the world is no longer challenged. Because you were willing to abandon your centrist position, it defuses the ego battle. That brings his defenses down. At the same time, it invites him to become more willing to acknowledge a portion of your reality.

It’s at this point you begin to experience connection.

Empathy is the third and final step in the dialogue process. It is only natural that empathy would follow on the heels of validation. If you listen carefully to your co-worker, understand the totality of what he is saying, and then succeed in stretching out of your own worldview to affirm the logic behind your co-worker’s words, you are poised to go one step farther and become empathic.

“Given the fact that you see things the way that you do, it makes sense to me that you would feel unappreciated.”

Once someone’s emotions are affirmed they begin to feel whole.

As you might imagine, the ease with which you can empathize with your partner depends a great deal on the situation. It’s very easy to be empathic when the two of you share the same experience and react similarly to an issue or event. Problems tend to arise when two people react quite differently to similar events. Those situations require some effort to imagine your colleagues experience and identify with them – even if you don’t personally experience the same feelings.

This three-step communication technique requires you to abandon some deeply ingrained habits and adopt a formulaic way of relating. In the beginning, it’s going to feel forced. But the benefits come quickly, making you less resistant. Soon the technique takes on a natural feel. Eventually, you will have transformed your work relationships to the point that you will be able to abandon the exercise all together. When that day arrives, you will be doing more than conversing, you’ll be communing.

Hendrix says that mirroring alone with greatly improve the quality of your conversations, though you’ll deepen your conversations and connections with your co-workers even more by adding validation and empathy to your exchanges.

Use this technique. Master it. Then teach your staff how to do the same. Get your entire workforce communicating in this manner and remarkable things will happen.

• Conflicts will subside
• Morale will rise
• Camaraderie will increase
• Job satisfaction and productivity will reach new heights
• Turnover will decrease

Now here’s the surprise. Harville Hendrix is a Ph.D. and couples therapist, and he calls the technique the Couple’s Dialogue. Go to his home page and watch his “what is dialogue” video on the subject.

Though the Couple’s Dialogue was invented as a marriage counseling tool, it also yields great benefits for workplace communication.

But don’t stop there. Use it at home with your spouse or significant other, too, and improve your love relationship.

 

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