By Judith E. Glaser | huffingtonpost.com
Published: May 30, 2013
I'm sure this has happened to you: You're in a tense team meeting trying to defend your position on a big project and start to feel yourself losing ground. Your voice gets louder. You talk over one of your colleagues and correct his point of view. He pushes back, so you go into overdrive to convince everyone you're right. It feels like an out-of-body experience -- and in many ways it is. In terms of its neurochemistry, your brain feels as though it has been hijacked.
The body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself -- in this case from the shame and loss of power associated with being wrong -- and as a result is unable to regulate its emotions or handle the gaps between expectations and reality. So we default to one of four responses:
1) Fight (keep arguing the point),
2) Flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus),
3) Freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or,
4) Appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him).
What do you do? Can you guess which behavior is the most common?
I can tell you that the fight response is by far the most damaging to work relationships. It is also, unfortunately, the most common.
Luckily, there's another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It's activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing.
Your goal as a leader should be to spur the production of oxytocin in yourself and others, while avoiding (at least in the context of communication) those spikes of cortisol and adrenaline. Here are a few exercises for you to do at work to help your (and others') addiction to being right:
- Set rules of engagement. If you're heading into a meeting that could get testy, start by outlining rules of engagement. Have everyone suggest ways to make it a productive, inclusive conversation and write the ideas down for everyone to see. For example, you might agree to give people extra time to explain their ideas and to listen without judgment. These practices will counteract the tendency to fall into harmful conversational patterns. Afterwards, consider see how you and the group did and seek to do even better next time.
- Listen with empathy. In one-on-one conversations, make a conscious effort to speak less and listen more. The more you learn about other people's perspectives, the more likely you are to feel empathy for them. And when you do that for others, they'll want to do it for you, creating a virtuous circle.
- Plan who speaks. In situations when you know one person is likely to dominate a group, create an opportunity for everyone to speak. Ask all parties to identify who in the room has important information, perspectives, or ideas to share. List them and the areas they should speak about on a flip chart and use that as your agenda, opening the floor to different speakers, asking open-ended questions and taking notes.
Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results by Judith E. Glaser (BiblioMotion -- forthcoming October 2013; pre-order now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble)