Conversations: Your Personal Advantage
As you learn and practice using Initiative, Understanding, Performance, and Closure Conversations, you will see new ways to address these six limitations and enhance communication, productivity, and relationships in your workplace.
Changing your conversational pattern is not difficult. It does not require extensive training or a change in your personality or values. All it takes is a willingness to examine your current conversational patterns, identify the types of conversations and conversational elements you are missing, and practice using them. This will expand and strengthen your conversational tool kit to support your success in a wide variety of situations.
In the following chapters, we explain the four types of productive conversations and the ways each one works. Examples from real managers and workplaces will demonstrate different aspects of each conversational type, so you can begin to practice using them right away. As with anything new, practicing each conversation in different settings, with different people at different levels and areas of your organization or community, will help you gain confidence and mastery in your communication. We promise a breakthrough in your success— and a personal advantage—with every additional conversation you master.
Key Points
- Some conversations are not productive and take up people’s time and energy without changing anything. Complaining, blaming, and gossip are usually not productive.
- There are four types of productive conversations:
- Initiative Conversations get things started by proposing a new goal or future
- Understanding Conversations support input from, and discussion with, the people who will work toward the goal
- Performance Conversations are based on requests and agreements—ask and promise—to get specific about who will do what, and by when
- Closure Conversations are like erasing the past, and they focus on recognizing accomplishments and people, and clean up unfinished business
- Each of your four conversations needs to include all six elements to be a complete conversation.
- Asking the questions What-When-Why will help you develop information about what you want to accomplish or make happen
- Asking the questions Who-Where-How will help you develop ideas about the resources and methods involved in making it happen
- There are six workplace limitations—lateness, poor work quality, difficult people, lack of teamwork, poor planning and workload overwhelm, and insufficient resources and support—that can be managed with the four types of conversations.