Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

Key factors: relationship 
• 
Status.
Is there a marked difference in status between 
you? Why is that? How does this difference affect the way 
you are behaving towards the other person? How do you 
think it might be affecting their behaviour? 
• 
Power.
Can you see power being wielded in the 
conversation? What kind of power and in which 
direction? How might you both be affecting the power 
relationship? How do you want to affect it? 
• 
Role. 
What is your role in this conversation? Think about 
your formal role (your job title perhaps, or contractual 
position) and your informal role. How do people see you 
acting in conversations? Can you feel yourself falling 
naturally into any particular role in the conversation? 
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30 Improve your Communication Skills
Setting a structure 
Many of our conversations are a mess. We rush. We wander from 
point to point. We repeat ourselves. We get stuck in a groove. 
Some conversations proceed in parallel, with each of us telling 
our own story or making our own points with no reference to 
what the other person is saying. If conversation is a verbal dance, 
we often find ourselves trying to dance two different dances at 
the same time, or treading on each other’s toes. 
Why should we worry about the structure of our 
conversations? After all, conversations are supposed to be living 
and flexible. Wouldn’t a structure make our conversation too 
rigid and uncomfortable? 
Maybe. But all living organisms have structures. They cannot 
grow and develop healthily unless they conform to fundamental 
structuring principles.
Conversations, too, have structural principles. The structure 
of a conversation derives from the way we think. We can think 
about thinking as a process in two stages (see also Figure 2.1).