In this episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, Brandon Laws interviews Cheri Torres and Jackie Stavros, coauthors of Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement. The three discuss eye-opening tips for recognizing negative communication patterns and having meaningful conversations that move you and your team forward.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
With a combined 50+ years of experience in teaching Appreciative Inquiry methodology, Cheri Torres and Jackie Stavros are passionate about effective communication, creativity, positive culture, and high engagement in the workplace. They just released the second edition of their book, Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
CASE IN POINT
And at the beginning of their book, authors Cheri Torres and Jackie Stavros introduce Alicia, a team leader at a medical center. Cheri explained, “Like most people, when there’s a problem, we keep harping on it and asking why isn’t it fixed?” and this was the case with Alicia. “She wasn’t getting anywhere with that, though — quality was still dropping, patient satisfaction was still dropping.”
Around this time, Alicia happened to find an Appreciative Inquiry Training that was geared specifically toward healthcare institutions, and it was the only thing that she could find that she thought might offer something different.
Cheri went on, “On her first day of training — when she was in the midst of learning about appreciative inquiry and how the focus of our conversation actually influences what’s possible — she realized she was part of the problem in the way she had been engaging in conversation.” She realized that the questions she had been asking her team members weren’t resolving any issues.
“If you really think about our organizations, they’re like little hubs of conversation,” Cheri explained. “Everything we do revolves around conversation either with other people or with ourselves in our own head. And those conversations are fateful. They move us either in the direction towards where we want to go, or they keep us spinning around what is not working.”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
What’s the Matter?
Jackie Stavros: I would say that some leaders have no understanding that words do matter. Our words and our conversations affect our wellbeing, our productivity, and our engagement. We need to be very intentional with our words and what we’re saying that moves people forward.
A New Approach
Cheri Torres: One of the things that happens with Appreciative Inquiry is there’s a paradigm shift that occurs — it’s moving from resolving a problem by determining the root causes toward, instead, engaging around what it is that we want to see. Where do we want to go? What’s the outcome we’re looking for? And what are we already doing that’s helping us? And what else could we do?
A Means to an End
Cheri Torres: For the Flip Technique, determine what the issue or problem is. Once you’ve got the problem named, then “flip” it to the positive opposite. So if you have low engagement, the positive opposite would be high engagement. Then, the idea is to move from the positive opposite to asking what it is we actually are wanting to address. What’s the outcome we’re looking for? If we had high engagement, what would that look like?
A Change in Perspective
Jackie Stavros: Generative questions are questions that change the way people think and act. […] My favorite question — and who wouldn’t want to be asked this question when you have a problem — is this: “So tell me, what are your wishes? What would you like to see happen?”
Cheri Torres: Generative questions are powerful because they widen our view of any situation or any person. So often, especially when we get into work mode, there’s a pattern. We have a way of doing things, and there’s a kind of tunnel vision, and then we always do what we’ve always done. And we complain about getting the same outcome. However, if we stop and ask generative questions, it actually widens the screen of what we’re looking at, making the invisible visible. So it really lays the groundwork for greater connection and greater creativity.
The Role of Emotional Intelligence
Jackie Stavros: When we come from a place of destructive, depreciative conversations, we’re putting people in protect-mode and they shut down. In these conversations, you’re coming from the back of your brain, and it impacts the chemistry in your body. Whereas when you ask generative questions and do positive framing, you’re working from the frontal part of your brain.
Cheri Torres: Emotional intelligence is seated in that prefrontal cortex.
And so when we’re in that place of protection, we can’t even access our emotional intelligence.
Seeing Real Change
Jackie Stavros: We’ve seen workplaces transforming. They’ve got a healthy culture. People are excited to come to work. You can just feel the buzz around how people treat each other. Productivity is up. I think that people catch on that you’re modeling the way to have these types of conversations. And it’s a positive contagion going through your organization.
Cheri Torres: I think the other thing that I’ve been seeing with my clients is that people begin to adopt a set of common terms that continuously bring them back to having conversations worth having. They are spinning around a problem and focusing on the negative, and somebody says, “Wait a minute. We need to name it,” and boom, the energy changes. Or someone says, “Wait a minute. I need to get above the line,” and they start to go back and forth at each other. And suddenly somebody will say, “Let’s widen the screen,” and all of a sudden, everybody shifts into asking generative questions. And so it really creates the culture where people are more easily able to connect with each other, engage with each other, not feel threatened, and find that they feel valued and they can value others.
LEARN MORE
Download a free conversation toolkit and the preface to Cheri and Jackie’s book, Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement, by going to their website cwh.today.