Lecture 3: Context Creation and Positive Leadership
Lecture 3 of the Principles of Leadership paper had a focus on Scharmer’s Four Types of Conversational Learning.
Scharmer’s 4 types of conversational learning shows us how to progress a conversation by first working out which of the 4 conversational styles the person you are communicating.
These are:
Downloading – Polite routines, empty phrases, autonomous responses. For example asking someone how their day was and they quickly respond “fine…” even if perhaps they might have had a bad day.
Attentive – Includes paying attention, debate, rational thinking and conversation. This could be perhaps where one person involved has a different opinion about a fact to the other, they will each explain their thinking and reasoning around thins fact. One may change his or her mind and this can lead to a progression in the conversation.
Empathic – At this stage in the level of conversation you are operating with an “open heart” and putting yourself in the other persons shoes by trying to understand where the other is coming from. More often than not we attempt to converse attentively with people requiring an empathic level of conversation. My example of this would have to be the very evening after lecture 3 I was asked by my girlfriend to have a look at her design work and tell her my thoughts on it (She is studying video post production at the moment). My first instinctive response was to come up with some constructive criticism and things that could have been fixed or changed (along with some positive too of course).
This however was not the best approach, very quickly the conversation had turn into an argument. What I had failed to pick up on was her insecurity about her design work and that she needed a more empathic response where I should have taken I what she had to say about her design and only offered more positive response once I had understood how she was feeling about her design work.
Generative – Once we take things beyond empathic communication and the conversation starts to bring up ideas of the future and what might be we enter the generative style of conversational learning. I guess this would be classed as communication with an “open soul” where new ideas flow and change occurs. Once I had worked out that Julia (my girlfriend) needed empathic reassurance and I stopped, listened and we started communicating on the same level we were able to progress the conversation up to the generative level. We ended up talking for several hours about each otheres work and how we were both feeling about life and where we were seeing us heading in the future.
There are also times when instead of trying to go up the levels of communication you need to come down to the level of the other party in the conversation. If for example someone is having a particularly bad day, attemping to talk to them about it without first entering the conversation on the same downloading level as them can come across very condescending.
This weeks journal questions consists of:
1. Talk about a time when you have had an experience of having a conversation that evolved to an empathetic or generative level, what effect did it have on you? (I think I may have touched on this in this post)
2. From the Skills of leadership questionnaire what are your strongest skills with in the each of the four areas?
What skill development would be most beneficial and how would you incorporate it into you PDP?3. From the Positive Leadership Assessment, What are your strengths?
What skill development would be most beneficial?
Is there anything to add to your development plan here?4. Using Kim Cameron’s term from his book ‘Positive Leadership’, who is it that could act as a ‘positive energizer’ for you and your PDP goals and why?
Again I find myself a bit behind on getting my thoughts on these questions up on the blog, the joys of a busy life!
