How to have difficult conversations
Rapport - The Four Ways to Read People
The challenge
Difficult conversations are an essential part of meaningful collaborations. A big part of changing the ways we work together implies changing the way how crucial conversations within an organisation take place. Many of the social tools we use at collaboratio helvetica, including dialogue, 4-levels of listening and liberating structures, among many many others offer different methods to have deep conversations that allow everyone to be heard, and any topic to be discussed. But are these conversations also successful in terms of outcome? Do we achieve what we gather for in the first place?
Holding a deep and harmonious space for important conversations is one of the main tools of any team dedicated to the new paradigm of work, in order to avoid the toxic effect of allowing implicit or explicit power structures and differences in personalities to stir the organisation in new directions without alignment and collective consent. And yet, groups working with such tools often are incapable of addressing deep issues at the heart of the organisation, simply because the desire for harmony leads to a fear of conflict, paralysing any effort towards greater clarity and resolution. The maintenance of the container becomes more important than the caring for the tensions inside it, resulting in an impasse, where certain topics repeatedly emerge as sources of misalignment and misunderstanding, and yet each time they appear they are immediately suppressed to protect the peace. Consequently, important conversations move underground, small groups discuss different aspects of the often paradoxically difficult questions that in reality need to be resolved on an organisational level. As a result, there is an unhealthy fracturing of organisational direction, which only becomes visible momentarily, in situations of urgency, when there is no time for slow, collective deliberation to see them through.
How can we bridge the gap between the principle to maintain organisational harmony and the need to address difficult and often controversial issues that have direct effect on the present and future of the organisation?
Rapport
A key component of successful conversations is building what the Alisons call ‘rapport’ - “a harmonious relationship, characterised by agreement, mutual understanding or empathy". While the concept is intuitive and easy to grasp, we often do not know how to create it consciously, especially in difficult situations, when all participants are on edge, triggered or out of their comfort zone. Even when things go well, it is often difficult to discern why and how that happened. When the conversation breaks down repeatedly around important topics, an organisational fatigue sets in, where it is easier to avoid the situation altogether rather than re-live the frustration of communicational failure.
The book ‘Rapport - Four Ways of Reading People’ offers a playful map to navigate conversations. The authors identify 4 main communication styles: the T-Rex, the Lion, the Monkey and the Mouse, and provide rich examples of both the Good and the Bad version of each. While it is highly recommended to read the whole book, you will find below a brief summary of each style, and a simple tool to map one’s own strengths and weaknesses in terms of successful communication. This is not a definitive test, where one finds out whether one is a Monkey or a Lion. The Good map helps us to see which styles we have a natural tendency towards, and which ones we need to work on learning to use more effectively. The Bad map offers an insight into why conversations go wrong due to our own Bad communication techniques, and serves as an aide to diagnose potential problems in an unfolding conversation.
As it is often the case, the remedy for organisational problems is held by individual responsibility. However, introducing the concept of ‘rapport’ and encouraging the identification of and reflection on individual communication styles may enable the organisation to break out of ‘pink zone’ impasse and deepen the alignment and collectively held purpose within the team, by not only having ‘nice’ conversations but also successful ones.
The next paragraphs are out of “The Four Ways to Read People” by Emily Alison and Laurence Alison:
The four cornerstones of rapport
Honesty: be objective and direct when communicating your intentions or feelings.
Empathy: understand someone based on recognition of their core beliefs and values.
Autonomy: emphasise other people’s free will and right to choose whether to cooperate.
Reflection: identify and repeat back those elements that are significant, meaningful and tactical to help guide the conversation towards the goal.
Communication styles
T-Rex: conflict. To master dealing with conflict you must learn to remove aggressive, demeaning and punitive ways of interaction from your repertoire. Good arguers are assertive, frank and forthright, but not attacking, punitive or sarcastic. It is often the area people find it hardest to master and also requires the most self-control over your emotions.
Mouse: capitulate. To master letting others take control you must avoid appearing weak and instead learn to sit back, listen, and take advice with patience and good grace. Good followers are humble but not weak.
Lion: control. To master Lion, you need to be able to take charge and lead effectively. The risk is that your efforts may become too controlling, dogmatic, or pedantic. Good leaders are supportive, set the agenda clearly and firmly, and lead by inspiring devotion and confidence in others.
Monkey: cooperate. To master friendly cooperation and teamwork, you must be wary of overfamiliarity and inappropriate intimacy. Good friends use warmth, conversation and consideration for others to build affection.
The Good map and the Bad map
There are three key skills the communications style maps will help you develop:
Recognising your own behaviors. Knowing what animal style you naturally adopt most of the time and those styles you need to avoid or develop further.
Recognising other people’s behaviour. Diagnosing the animal style other people are using in order to respond effectively and get most out of the interaction.
Being versatile. Knowing how to use the full range of styles of communication to become interpersonally versatile - how to communicate in all the animal styles. This is the sign of expert interpersonal skill and can substantially improve rapport in your relationships.
The questionnaire
Download the ORBIT quiz: Which Animal Are You? here.
Sources
Alison, L., & Alison, E. (2020). Rapport: The Four Ways to Read People. Vermilion
Katalin Hausel is responsible for organisational health and evaluation at collaboratio helvetica. She has gained three Masters degrees over the years. Katalin has a past in writing code, making and teaching art, working on rural regeneration and social cohesion projects, building IT tools, designing learning and evaluation tools, developing learning and evaluation solutions, working on new forms of collaboration and generally putting her mind to complex situations and finding a way through. Lately, she has been focusing on developing a framework for social innovation initiatives to use observation and organisational learning as a project evaluation methodology instead of predefining objectives. As a dedicated discipline-roamer and paradigm-shifter, she has been exploring how to craft situations, tools and spaces for transformation and learning to support systemic change and the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).