The one easy way to become worth 50 percent more than you are now
— at least — is to hone your communication skills.
— Warren Buffett

PUSH YOUR PERFORMANCE

We can help you improve your performance by treating dialogue as a discipline.

We do this by helping you build your Conversational Capacity.

WHAT IS CONVERSATIONAL CAPACITY?

Conversational capacity refers to the ability – of an individual or a team – to engage in constructive, balanced, learning-focused dialogue about difficult subjects and in challenging circumstances. It’s a pivotal competence:

• Personal performance: A person with high conversational capacity makes every conversation or meeting smarter because they’re in the room. A person with low conversational capacity – even if they have high intelligence and good intentions – often has the opposite effect.
• Collective performance: A team with high conversational capacity can perform well, remaining on track even when dealing with their most troublesome issues. The performance of a team with low capacity, by contrast, can be derailed by a trivial disagreement. In this sense conversational capacity isn’t just another aspect of effective teamwork – it defines it. A team that can’t communicate about its most pressing issues isn’t really a team at all. It’s just a group of people who can’t engage with each other effectively when it counts.

A FOUNDATIONAL COMPETENCE

Conversational capacity strengthens every activity that depends on open, clear, effective dialogue for its effectiveness – from running meetings, making decisions, and giving feedback, to crafting strategy, managing change, and fostering innovation.

The more challenging your situation, the bolder your strategy or initiative, the more significant your change process, or the more stringent the differences in personality, experience, or opinion around the table, the more vital a role conversational capacity will play in your performance.

If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.
— Ed Catmull

SO HOW DO YOU BUILD IT?

This distinctive, highly acclaimed workshop is fun, engaging, and most importantly, highly actionable. The workshop is often a turning point in the work of many people and teams. Many describe a clear contrast between their pre-workshop and post-workshop performance.

The workshop is based on the ideas outlined in Craig Weber’s two books, Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Team that Perform When the Pressure is On (McGraw-Hill, 2013), and it’s sequel, Influence in Action: How to Build Your Conversational Capacity, Do Meaningful Work, and Make a Powerful Difference (McGraw-Hill, 2019). Drawing on rigorous research in psychology, leadership studies, business management, and neuroscience, the Conversational Capacity Workshop shows participants how to build healthier, more adaptive teams and working relationships. Highly practical, the ideas have been tested and refined in a wide range of organizational settings. They work.

The core concepts and skills are easy to learn, remember, and apply, and yet the overall discipline has depth. One recent participant put it this way: “The conversational capacity discipline is immediately applicable – and yet it can fill a lifetime with practice.”

In the workshop participants explore three domains of practice:

• Awareness – They will learn to recognize two powerful human tendencies that, when triggered, so easily cripple collaboration and communication. They’ll explore how these tendencies affect their own behavior, the behavior of other people, and the performance of their team.
• Mindset – They will learn about a guiding mindset that allows them to remain more focused and effective under pressure – even when they’re being triggered.
• Skill set – They will also learn a set of simple but powerful skills – demonstrable behaviors – for remaining balanced and learning-focused under pressure that can be practiced, measured, and improved.

In each domain they identify a core competence and adopt specific practices to help them grow and expand their conversational capacity.

LEARNING BEYOND THE WORKSHOP

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good.
It’s the thing you do that makes you good.
— Malcolm Gladwell

More than just a flash-in-the-pan learning experience, the workshop sets up both individuals and teams for ongoing skill building so that with every passing week they’re applying what they’ve learned and expanding their competence.

It’s a genuine discipline that requires regular practice, so we show participants how to turn every conversation, meeting, problem, conflict, and decision into an opportunity to strengthen their conversational capacity.

The goal is to create an upward spiral of performance where their daily work helps people build their conversational capacity, and their higher conversational capacity improves their daily work.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Because the workshop provides such a foundational competence the benefits are plentiful. Participants will learn to

• Contribute to every conversation and meeting in a way that makes it smarter.
• Generate teamwork characterized by less strife and more collaboration; less rigidity and more agility; less defensiveness and more learning; less frustration and more fun.
• Exert greater influence and help good ideas get the traction they deserve.
• Create greater fit between what they’re working together to achieve and how they’re working together to achieve it.
• Sharpen their emotional and social intelligence.
• Do more meaningful work that contributes to the success of their team while acquiring skills they can use in every aspect of their lives.
• Adapt their thinking to fit a new problem rather than interpret a new problem so it fits their old thinking.
• Remain levelheaded and learning-focused in frenzied circumstances that cause most people to shut down or go ballistic.
• Demonstrably strengthen their capacity for problem solving and decision-making.
• Create a more inclusive and engaged workplace culture that encourages everyone to bring their A-game to the enterprise.
• Boost their competence and confidence for dealing with difficult issues and stressful circumstances.
• Participate in their teams, projects, and organizations in a way that cultivates the higher aspects of their humanity – candor, curiosity, courage, humility, conviction, and compassion.
• Harness the power of diversity in the service of learning and making smart choices.
• Cultivate interpersonal and team dynamics that are increasingly open, rigorous, balanced, and respectful.
• Improve levels of trust, civility, and psychological safety.
• Gain an advantage over less disciplined people and teams by cultivating the capacity to think more clearly, quickly, and collaboratively when it counts.
• Transform the workplace into a dojo by using the most important activities in their daily work as a vehicle for continually building their conversational capacity.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

The workshop is perfect for anyone who wants to improve how they converse with others about important issues. It improves the performance of individuals, teams, as well as the relationship between people and groups. In short, it’s perfect anyplace you want to improve personal, team, management, or leadership performance.

Whether you’re building a new one, or trying to raise the performance of an existing one, the workshop is ideal for intact teams.

• Are you up against significant changes or challenges that will require your team to work at its best?
• Do you feel like your team is capable of performing at a much higher level but you’re not just sure what to do about it?
• Are there important issues in your team or organization that aren’t getting enough traction?
• Do you suffer from conversations that spark more defensiveness and dysfunction than learning and progress?
• Or is your team performing well but you’d like to boost its capacity for working effectively when the heat is on?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, the Conversational Capacity Workshop can help.

IT’S CUSTOMIZABLE

Facing unique issues and challenges? Want to tie this workshop to other development initiatives? We can tailor this course so it supports your other strategies and development goals.

WORKSHOP LENGTH: 4 hours

SUGGESTED READING

Want To Have More Influence? Take Your Ego to the Mat

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

To learn more, or to schedule a workshop for your organization, send us an email.