22 Improve your Communication Skills example in presentations or meetings, must be spelt out in detail
and rehearsed.
A conversation is a dynamic of talking and listening. Without
the listening, there’s no conversation. And the quality of the
conversation depends more on the quality of the listening than
on the quality of the speaking.
Balancing advocacy and enquiry Peter Senge, author of
The Fifth Discipline
(Random House
Business Books, London, 1993), uses the words ‘advocacy’
and ‘enquiry’ to describe talking and listening. Talking is
principally the means by which we advocate our point of
view, our ideas, our thinking. Listening is the process of
enquiring into the other person’s point of view, their ideas,
their thinking.
Adversarial conversations are pure advocacy. We
advocate our own point of view, reasonably and calmly, and
become more and more entrenched in our positions.
Advocacy without enquiry simply escalates into conflict. You
can see this escalation happening every day. It’s exhausting
and debilitating. It becomes part of the culture within which
managers operate. It can be so upsetting that managers
avoid holding conversations at all and retreat behind their
office doors – if they are lucky enough to have one.
But conversations that are pure enquiry are also
unsatisfactory. If we concentrate solely on listening to the
other person, we risk an unclear outcome – or no outcome at
all. Indeed, some managers use the skills of enquiry –
listening, asking questions, and always looking for the other
point of view – as a way of avoiding difficult decisions.
The best conversations balance advocacy and enquiry.
They are a rich mix of talking and listening, of stating views
and asking questions.
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