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THE RIGHT CONVERSATION
“In the new economy, conversations are perhaps the most important work.”
Organizations run on conversations. They are the un-codified, and often overlooked, lifeblood of companies. Conversations are what give the day-to-day operations of business their momentum. Organizational knowledge is shared, reviewed and created in off-sites, team meetings, phone calls, working sessions, one-to-one appraisals and corridor talk every second of every work day. When you cut through MBA analytics, conversations are, quite simply, how business is actually done.
Yet many workplace conversations are meaningless, empty or (worst of all) actively destructive. Rather than generate new insights and strengthen relationships, they destroy trust, send meetings spinning in the wrong direction and waste vast amounts of time. Yet few organizations pay active attention to this. We believe they should.
In partnership with the UK firm The Right Conversation, Mint Chip Studios offers leadership teams a way to have more productive conversations that help accelerate change and improve business performance.
Does your team lack authentic and open dialogue?
Are you struggling to find a sensible way to ‘talk about how you talk’?
Do managers use dialogue with staff to openly explore issues and strengthen relationships, or are they stuck in a tick-box mentality?
Do leaders in your organization rely on set-piece events and careful message control to communicate with the wider organization?
Does conversation in your team sometimes seem as useful as this phone?
We can help.
Conversations are like dancing. You can improve your steps. In fact, there’s a good reason for choosing dancing as an analogy for having a conversation. The Latin derivation of the word ‘conversation’ means ‘turning together’. So you could say that a conversation, like a dance, is something that two or more people do together that they cannot do on their own.
Clearly, some people are better at dancing than others. However, professional dancers are trained to master the basic moves that underpin all dances. This is why they are so sure-footed when tripping from a waltz to a jive. Conversations are no different. Like dances, they come in many forms - from a quick catch-up at the coffee machine, to a performance review meeting, to a detailed team pow-wow about the new strategy. However, research shows that there are fundamental skills that underpin every conversation we have.
When you learn these basic skills and get better with practice, you’ll notice a big difference in how you interact with others, not only at work but in your home life too. So this is an investment in a better workplace as well as in the wider wellbeing of employees. And the good news is that small improvements make a BIG difference. We can help you make these improvements.
Mint Chip Studios focuses on improving two conversations in particular:
1. Between Managers and Staff
Performance is improved one conversation at a time. Which means managers need to be skilled at having great conversations. In fact, the ability to have great conversations is arguably one of the core competencies for modern managers. It is through conversation that managers address important workplace topics such as:
Performance management
Well-being and career development
Coaching and giving difficult feedback
These are all conversations managers are expected to be good at. Unfortunately not all managers are. How we talk to each other is based on our skills…but also our personality.
Using a proprietary curriculum, the 5 Super-Skills of Effective Conversations™ program, we teach managers how to have more productive conversations. Conversations are based on a distinct set of skills and attitudes – and some people are clearly much more effective than others. Helping people have better conversations drives improved performance across your organization. Once equipped with the five core skills of effective conversation, we also help managers develop personal actions plans.
The 5 Super-Skills of Great Conversations
2. Within Leadership Teams
Using our proprietary tool, the Team Dialogue Indicator™, we help leadership teams to understand how effectively they currently talk as a basis for identifying improvements. This unique diagnostic tool developed by The Right Conversation in conjunction with the Ashridge Business School (UK) Psychometrics Team enables teams to reflect on their conversational habits and patterns with the aim of improving dialogue and ultimately performance.This tool helps teams to improve their overall effectiveness and build the ability to engage in open and constructive dialogue.
The benefits of improved dialogue to business performance are numerous:
Improved employee engagement and retention
Faster and more informed decision-making
Greater cross-functional collaboration
Improved capacity for innovation
More productive meetings
Greater trust in leaders
A culture that is more open and transparent
DETAILS
The rates for individual projects are negotiated based on project scope and complexity.