Communicating More Effectively

Much has been written about conflict management and the consequences of not dealing with major disagreements but few of us stop to think about the costs of bickering over matters of minor significance. Bickering and incivility can wreak havoc with organizations if left unchecked, contributing to low morale, decreased productivity, and staff turnover. In this topic, you will have the opportunity to investigate some issues which may be contributing to bickering within your workplace and to develop solutions to minimize them.

Discussion, debate, negotiation, and information exchange are the most common forms of communication in organizations, and although helpful in many ways, they rarely push us beyond our current paradigms of thought and action. This session is an introduction to dialogue, a more creative and collaborative mode of communication that increases our capacity to address complex organizational issues.

Most of us have consciences. Despite this fact, we sometimes overlook or fail to identify moral issues that arise in the course of our work: We can fail to voice our own moral concerns directly and forcefully, and fail to pay attention when others voice moral concerns.

These shortcomings in moral seeing, speaking, and hearing can be costly to our organizations, our fellow workers, and our own sense of integrity. In this session we look at examples of these failings and explore how moral concerns can become more open and active within our organizations.

Generative relationships are ones which bring unforeseen, novel solutions to a complex context. Managers often face challenges where no precedents exist, such as when a company or industry faces a new competitive landscape. Relationships which have generative potential can be key to creating innovative solutions.

But how do you know whether relationships have generative potential? And how can you deliberately increase the generative potential of relationships?

Metaphors—which transfer concepts from one context to another—are typically viewed as a linguistic device used by poets. In this session you will see that metaphor also can be a powerful tool for creating and communicating new approaches to managing, and for understanding the approaches that prevail in your organization today.

Providing feedback has long been considered to be an essential skill for managers. Traditionally, this information has been communicated in the form of “downward feedback” from managers to their employees.

But there is a fundamental problem with this type of feedback: it focuses on a past, on what has already occurred—not on the infinite variety of opportunities that can happen in the future. As such, feedback can be limited and static, as opposed to expansive and dynamic.

This session invites you to examine the way in which you provide—and accept—feedback by learning a technique called feedFORWARD. By increasing the effectiveness of this important exchange, you can increase productivity and positively impact morale.