Conversational Intelligence

Judith Glaser: I'm so glad that you put that on the table. All of us converse with others day and night – and it's like the air that we breathe or the water that we drink – and we really don't think about it, it's just something that we do. I'm going to give you one of our conversational essentials, which is "double click." I decided to double click on something that was commonplace for everybody, look inside, and then see if I could discover things that I never knew before, or we never knew before.

When I double clicked on conversations I realized that what's going on behind the scenes is fascinating. When human beings are conversing with each other, so many chemistries are going off in the brain, so many things are connecting with each other that enable us to take what we know, what we store in our brain, and to marry that with what's going on in the moment, to build a relationship with people that we're speaking with, and to plan the future about what might be.

So, it's not just passing information back and forth, which is very transactional and often what we think about as conversations – I'll tell you this, you tell me that. As we double click on the word "conversations" it gets us into what's going on in the brain and that drives us into the future, it's what enables innovation, what builds relationships. All these beautiful things are part of this incredible thing called conversation.

It took me years and years, in fact decades, to explore it and to understand the science behind it and now I'm summarizing it in a book – which I never thought I'd be able to do – so that others can begin to look at conversations in a completely new way and benefit from doing that. It opens up and flowers our capacity as human beings to learn and navigate and grow with each other.

Rachel Salaman: So, tell us a bit more about the term "conversational intelligence."

Judith Glaser: We know we have emotional intelligence and it's something that we learn about how to manage our emotions. It's an "I-centric" ability to look at the emotional state that we're in and learn how to regulate it so that we can communicate with others more effectively. Conversational intelligence is something different. I started to look into the brain and what happens when we engage with others and it's interesting to know that human beings actually can regulate each other's emotions, so not just me regulating my own but regulate each other's.

When we do that we actually open up parts of the brain that become available to us, or we close down parts of the brain, based on how our conversations feel healthy or not healthy. Let's say you have a leader who is managing a team and he or she is in the room and the leader wants to inspire the team to do better, so he has choices of conversations that he could have with people.

He could say things like, what you did in the last meeting wasn't good for our results. So, you could have a leader who comes out and his conversation is kind of negative. What is that doing to the emotions of the people in the room? Well it's what's called activating the lower part of the brain, the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for detecting fear.

So, that leader is having an impact on the brain of the person and also on what those people in the room are actually capable of saying. Believe it or not, when we activate that lower part of the brain and it spews a hormone called cortisol, it blocks the parts of the brain that produce wisdom and insight, in the pre-frontal cortex. That leader has just done something to turn what could have been very smart team into a very dumb team, because they have access to what is inside them to make a better result.

So that's one leader and he's down-regulating or activating parts of the brain of the other person. That's part of what conversational intelligence teaches us, that every word we say can activate a part of the brain, and if a leader doesn't know that – like this leader, who maybe had good intentions but bad impact – we want to teach leaders that what they're saying does have an impact. It's never neutral when we have conversations with other people.

Rachel Salaman: Now in the book you say that there are three levels of conversation: transactional, positional and transformational. Could you give us an example of each of those?

Judith Glaser: I observed thousands of people engaging with each other and I noticed that there are two things that happen in each level, there's a push and a pull energy. So, push energy is tell, where I'm putting an idea out for you to hear, while pull is where I'm listening and pulling the idea from you. Both are important to have in each level of conversation, and you have to have two, a push and a pull energy, otherwise you're not having conversations.

Transaction is things such as telling you what's on my mind or asking to confirm something that's on my mind. A lot of this level one is about confirming what I know, and it's important to do, as there's not one level that isn't important and every level happens with all people. So, tell and ask is number one for transaction. By the way, that uses the neocortex, the part of the brain where knowledge lives. It's really all about confirming what we know.

In level two, positional, this is where I feel stronger about something. It's not just information I'm sharing with you but I have a position about it. We would think of that as persuasion in some cases, where I have a very strong opinion, so that's a push. And enquire, which is pull. Same combination of push and pull energy, but now there's a strength behind it, as I'm committed to my point of view and I probably want to influence you to go in my direction. I will listen to you but I do have a commitment to something that I want to take place or a position or a point of view that I want to share, maybe even have you adopt, and that's positional.

And the last one is transformational. This is very special because it involves a whole different dynamic, called share and discover. Share is telling you, while discovering is finding out something that's coming from you. So, it's to share share my ideas, my thinking and to discover your ideas. This is where we discover what we don't know, we don't know.

When people engage in level three there's work that's being done in much more of a so-called "we-centric" way. People create a space that's neutral, and they're not trying to force an idea on others. We're listening to people, we're discovering what we don't know, and as a result of that we start to change the brain. When we're open for level three, we're absorbing new information but not as information but as activation of the brain to think in news ways, and it's quite beautiful.

Many companies talk about living a lot in level one, or we live a lot in level two, but we really want to learn how to live in level three because companies that live in level three more often are able to innovate in ways that go beyond what we think innovation is. There's a marriage of ideas that is beyond what we see in level one or level two.

Rachel Salaman: Should we be aiming for transformational in all our conversations and, if not, which ones?

Judith Glaser: A lot of times people say, oh my goodness, level three is heaven, how do we get there and can we stay there all the time? Actually, it's really important to use all three levels because the idea of confirming what you know, in a healthy way, is very important, so that people can walk out of meetings and know they are on the same page.

Having positional conversations where you have a point of view and you help people make decisions together, in a healthy way, it's very important as in companies you do both of those. When I go into companies and I map for them, asking what's the construct that lives in your company, what kind of conversations are you having, and people learn that they are spending 60 to 70 percent of the time in level one, where they are confirming a lot of what they know. That doesn't give them a chance to go to level three.

No, you shouldn't be in level three all the time. You should go there when it's important to really expand what's possible in your company, to think beyond what's obvious. I was observing a CEO, working with him in this meeting, and there were 149 people. He had sent the people in the room to do thinking together in level two, which is have a position, share your positions, and let's see what we want to do.

Then at one point he said, we've been in level two long enough, let's go to level three. Now, because everybody in the room knew what level three was, all of a sudden the energy shifted in the room, and that this leader was able to help people navigate into a different way of thinking with each other by just calling it out.

That's the epitome of what I'd love for companies that learn this work. People learn what each level is, they start to know how much time to spend. When they start to feel that positional is getting heavy and that people are really getting stuck in their positions, they move people into another level and everybody goes there. When everybody's doing it, it increases the health in an organization, it multiplies that a thousand times.

Rachel Salaman: In the book, you talk about something called "tell, sell, yell" syndrome. Can you tell us about that, what's wrong with it, why we should avoid it?

Judith Glaser: Each one of the levels we've just talked about has a healthy side and an unhealthy side. In level one, transactional, the unhealthy side – because that's about telling – is tell, sell, yell syndrome. This is where we have a leader that has communicated with an organization, trying to build a vision and talking about the vision and confirming it. Then the leader watches people and part of the vision is that everybody collaborate with each other, for example, and the leader doesn't see it happening.

So, they say what we talked about in our vision is that people will be collaborating, that's one of our values, but what's going on? It's not happening and so then the leader gets upset, because some leaders think that if they tell a vision to everybody, that people will follow – I tell, you follow. In some leader minds that's what happens.

Tell, sell, yell is where a leader gets frustrated because she's not seeing what they thought would be an obvious display of collaboration happening in this company and she gets upset because, as a leader, she's on the line for building the vision and making it happen. Tell, sell, yell is where you, as the leader, get upset emotionally, start to do the telling, and in fact create just the opposite of what you hoped.

Rachel Salaman: We touched on the relationships between conversations and neurochemistry a little bit earlier. What more can you tell us about that?

Judith Glaser: The most important part is that we have two chemicals that play out together, they are connected and they are the most important to know about. One is called cortisol, which happens when we are in a fear state, and when that gets activated it activates the lower part of our brain, the primitive brain, the limbic brain. You've heard of an amygdala hijack, when it's the cortisol that's activated and we are in fear and it closes the part of our brain – the prefrontal cortex – that has all those great ideas in it.

When we have trust with other people, the prefrontal cortex is the most important part of the brain that has to be activated and the chemical hormone for that is called oxytocin. When we have more oxytocin in the brain, the prefrontal cortex opens, and that is what gives us trust. So, we have to have that oxytocin in order to open up the prefrontal cortex, connect with people, and feel safe in doing so.

Rachel Salaman: And how does trust, and distrust, affect how we interpret what is said in conversations?

Judith Glaser: This is one of the most fascinating things in my research. When people are in trust we believe that others are going to tell us the truth. We're OK to share what's on our mind, we trust the other person to come through, there are all sorts of things that we will entrust. It's like, of course you're going to do it, I trust that you'll do it and so I tell you some things, and you'll be secretive and you'll keep alliances with me. So that's what happens when we have trust in the brain and that's when oxytocin is available.

However, when we are feeling distrust – and cortisol shows up – it's just the opposite. We're afraid to share so we hold on, withhold information, and we don't believe the other person is going to tell us the truth. There's all sorts of behaviors that we have when we're in trust and not cautious. We're open, we're transparent, we have a relationship with that person, we share what's on our mind.

That's that wonderful feeling that I can be open with you, we connect and you're not going to take what I tell you and destroy the whole future of my company. But what's amazing is literally we have the opposite when we're in fear, with cortisol, than when we're in trust, with oxytocin. Those two chemicals pretty much define relationships in our life.

Rachel Salaman: Now I mentioned in the introduction that your book is full of tips and tools that people can use, and one of these is called TRUSTT, an acronym for Transparency, Relationship, Understanding, Shared success, Testing assumptions, and Telling the truth. Could you talk us through that?

Judith Glaser: We have had leaders with teams where there was a lot of conflict, where people were in distrust, they didn't want to share, they didn't want to give away, they thought that was giving away their secrets. I started to experiment with how do you take a team that's in conflict and not in trust and move it into a place where the leader can help? It's almost like giving them the right alchemy of trust. In other words, what's the magic that can happen?

There are a lot of theories about how you move teams into trust, and I said I want a quick one, I want one that can happen in a meeting, in a moment and make all the difference in the world. I've discovered that transparency, when people are willing to be transparent about what's on their mind, it activates the brain because transparency is very powerful.

It says that I trust that you will not harm me. I've taught leaders how to be in meetings with teams that are not in trust and start a process that is transparency first, which can be sharing a story about you with others that gives you humility, that you're not perfect, that you've had issues and challenges in your life, and you're willing to share that.

We've had leaders running meetings where they were uncertain about where people stood in the room, and they had the top leaders literally go around – I did this with Burberry – and share a story that was very transparent and humble. That changed the whole room. Suddenly, 150 people in the room are willing to step into sharing with each other and be transparent. Just that one part of our model, it was amazing. Each one of these words represents a place in the brain where we want people to go that activates the chemistry that will enable people to build trust.

Rachel Salaman: Could you share an example that shows a little bit more of what this looks like in practice?

Judith Glaser: Let's stay on the example that I was just giving from a company such as Burberry where the leaders, the top leaders, wanted to bring people into a space of deep trust because they were going to be talking about the future of the company.

They had two days where they could plan together, and they wanted people to put really difficult challenges on the table. So, the top leaders shared stories, then we took the 150 people on tables, I think we had about 15 per table, and they paired up and they talked about things that they hadn't shared with other people, being transparent with them. Then they talked about relationships, namely what kind of a relationship do you and I want to have with each other in order to support each other the best we can and have trust be at the heart of our relationship.

And people talked about how to put relationship before task, how to understand your partner and to learn about what's important to them, asking questions to which you don't have answers, so that you learn what that relationship with that person wants to be. You learn to build rules of engagement with each other so that you honor and respect each other. You're giving people a way of building pillars under the relationship as they move forward with each other.

The most important word here is understanding. A lot of people know the word understanding as 'I understand what you mean', so we'll do things like you'll tell me something and I say let me play back what you said so I understand. That's not the understanding in this model. We want to stand under each other's reality.

The most important part of trust is that I share my life with you, I share what's important and you understand me, and we understand each other by standing under each other's reality. That's getting to know people in a much deeper way, so it takes transparency in relationship to a whole other level.

And the next two are a complement to that, in that we look for shared success. We say in our relationship what would shared success look like, not me forcing my success on you, not just me being the one that drives this. I want to understand what our success would look like and if for any reason, I'm not supporting all of these transparency relationship, understanding and shared success, let's test it. Let's make sure that I'm constantly in a place of telling the truth and checking because sometimes we fall out and don't realize it and those activities done in a meeting solidify relationships.

Rachel Salaman: Another useful idea that comes through in your book is blind spots and you've identified five conversational blind spots. What are the most common of these?

Judith Glaser: Well I don't know if it's common but what people really giggle about is that when you're talking with another person, a lot of the time what we remember is not what the person said to us, but what we're thinking about what the person said to us. The thing here is that meaning resides in the speaker – we think that's what it is – when in fact it resides in the listener.

Rachel Salaman: What should we be doing about these blind spots? I suppose we need to be aware of them and work on them both as listeners and speakers. Is that right?

Judith Glaser: It is very much the case and I think what you're bringing up is listening and this is one of the most important things. If I could give people something to take away and practice, then we have what's called a conversational essential, a list of five things that are the most important that we recommend in people learning how to be more conversationally intelligent.

So, listen to connect is one of the most powerful things you can do in the world because many of us listen to understand, and again it's about me understanding what you're saying. Listen to connect is an energy where I remove judgment as I listen and I try to step into your world, envision it, picture it, be part of it in my mind.

We're connecting to a person's energy field when we do that and what happens is, the energy fields have translations of a lot of things going on in each other's lives that we can't conceptualize because it's not at the word level, it's at the energy level. We're feeling the other person and as we speak we're getting a sense of their life, and we step into it.

When we do that, it changes relationships in a quantum way. I've only seen this in companies. I just got a letter from someone this morning saying that when you listen to connect with us in ways nobody had, you ask different questions because that's part of what happens. She said let me share with you all the things that have changed in just that one hour where you listened so deeply to connect with us that it literally gave us a whole new way to see how we are as a team.

So, one is listen to connect. The second is asking questions for which we don't have answers. These are two of what we call the conversation essentials. I'm putting it out in the world of your listeners to experiment, listen to connect, ask questions for which you don't have the answers, and I'm going to throw in a third, I hope you don't mind.

Rachel Salaman: Please do!

Judith Glaser: It's called double clicking. You know when you have a folder on your computer and you double click and something's inside. Well, if we realize that, when we talk with people, part of what we do is confirm in our heads – I know that, I got that, I can listen to that. Most of the time we're confirming. When we double click we take things that are commonplace, that people use, and then say, wait a minute, tell me a little bit more about that, or how does that show up, or what else could you say about that?

And the more we do that, the more we can step into another person's world. We're not making stuff up about what we think those words mean, we're hearing it from the person and it opens up a window to them that is very big and wonderful, and that's where trust lives, that's where transformation takes place.

Rachel Salaman: Now something that ties into different ways of listening is priming, which you discuss in your book. Could you tell us what that is, and why it's important?

Judith Glaser: I love the concept of priming and using it, and learning how to use it is a game changer for people. I'm going to talk about priming through a story, and it's something that you do to prepare people for coming into a meeting together.

The story I want to share is the story with Coach, the handbag company. It used to be just leather bags, but now you know if you go into a store, you see a designer oriented company. I worked with Coach for quite a few years and it was having a lot of trouble convincing stores such as Bloomingdales and Macy's to take the new designer products, not just leather but other things that were more beautiful. The stores were fearful because Coach had always been a pocket book, handbag company that was leather.

I talked with the CEO and said, what happens in your meetings? She said, we get into the meetings, we talk about it and then we seem to argue and get into conflict because they just don't believe we can do what we say. I said let me give you some tips to experiment with. How about if we prime the meeting before you come in: call the people you're having your meeting with and say, what would you like on the agenda? Hence, you start the agenda before you get there, it's in front of your meeting. Make sure you pick up on what they're most interested in doing.

Then, when you come to the meeting, don't sit at the ends of the table, which is what they did, as that's priming the brain to resist each other, to have a point of view, to be positional. Just sitting in the room that way makes you positional, and your brain is going to operate a certain way. Don't do that, sit next to them, have the agenda on the table, look at it together, make changes, talk about what you want to come out of the meeting. You literally bond with people in the second example, when you sit next to them, whereas you're positional with them if you sit at the other end. It's all about shaping your brain and how you are going to interact.

So, it did that with each one of its major stores that it wanted to go in and all of a sudden, it had a breakthrough. That, it felt, was the beginning of what enabled that company, Coach, to grow into the billion-dollar company it is now. It wouldn't have had that without priming the conversational space so that the brain would be open and activated to receiving a different type of conversation and coming to a different outcome.

Rachel Salaman: So how would priming work for a manager on a day-to-day basis, for example? If he or she needed to speak to a team member who wasn't performing very well, how would the manager prime that conversation?

Judith Glaser: There are things that people need to hear before you have what is called a "difficult conversation." What you need to do is establish trust with the person that you're speaking with, and supporting them in doing some learning around some activities they're involved with, so that they could take away new skills and take away new insights about how to grow.

Now I just gave you a frame that most leaders don't give but need to consider giving, so that it establishes that you as the leader care for this person, and you want to help them grow and you have some things that you want to talk with them about that they could learn from to make them an even better sales person, or a better team member, or whatever it is.

Once people hear that you care then they'll be open. If in fact you go in and discipline the person, which is what a lot of people do because they're not performing – we have talked about cortisol – you're taking them to that lower part of the brain. They are going to be upset, they're going to not listen to you and think that you don't care about them. They're going to think that you are punishing them, you're judging them, all the things that make us close down and go into cortisol.

Any conversation that is about growth and where you're giving what we call feedback or feed forward or whatever we call it, once they know what the relationship is and that you care about them, they'll listen and they'll grow.

Rachel Salaman: So far, we've mostly talked about conversations between individuals. In the book, you also explore conversations among groups or teams. How are team conversations different from one-on-one conversations?

Judith Glaser: If you have a team of people, depending on what you're doing, whether it's working on a project with them or just doing everyday stuff, there are so many interactions that are happening all the time and there are a variety of things that you can do to help.

If you're working in a team where you're in a room together, not just everyday life but in a room together, there's some things that you can do to help make those conversations thrive. Again, as I described with a leader who talks about how they care about someone, when a team gets together if it focuses on relationship before task, learns more about each other, how it wants to work together and what things its want to do to support each member, it's not what you normally see.

Again, it's the idea of people learning to connect, human being to human being, and talk about how we want to work together. You might even set up rules of engagement in the team so that members know how to listen. Some of the things that we talked about are the essentials, how to listen, how to ask questions, so that they set the rules of how members work together and then teams thrive.

In fact, teams go to higher levels of innovation, but the performance is never as good unless you start with bonding the team, that idea of relationship before task. It's part of the trust model too, relationship before task, and then people are fabulous with each other and the outcome is a demonstration of how important and how good that is.

Rachel Salaman: Well we've covered a lot of ground in this discussion. What, for you, are the key takeaways for managers who want to develop conversational intelligence?

Judith Glaser: I believe that there are many practices that I study that are life-changing, such as putting relationship before task or listening to connect. So, what I would say is take a look at the conversational essentials that we've talked about and try to do some experiments.

We talk about being an ‘experimenter', a mentor of experiments. Every day I get letters that are life-changing. People are saying that I didn't know if I listened this way, or set up the meeting that way, or talked about where you could prime, or I didn't know I was impacting the neurochemistry of another human being, or that I can do it in a positive way, or I could do things without realizing it will cause us to fall back and not connect.

We call this the third eye. I have good intentions but not a good impact and we want people to study the intention impact to make sure that they are bringing the best they can out of each other. It's a chemical thing. It's alchemy, but it works. There is so much that we have to learn in order to elevate our conversational intelligence.

Rachel Salaman: Judith Glaser, thanks very much joining us today.

Judith Glaser: I'm thrilled to have spent this time with you and thanks for your great questions.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Judith's book again is "Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results." You can find out more about Judith and her work at creatingwe.com.

I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.

[This interview was recorded in 2017. Judith Glaser sadly died in 2018. We are grateful for her contributions to Mind Tools including her first interview with us, in 2007, on corporate culture and Creating WE.]