Learning checklist for fostering meaningful conversations in teams

Before we start to speak about meaningful conversation in teams, we have to think about conversation as a tool for learning. Because everybody in the team should know that through listening and good conversation can he/she learn something new.

Team learning is the systematic ability of team members to raise their "collective IQ". That is, a team which has acquired this capacity for special type of learning, f. e. has tools for seeing the bigger picture of what is going on in its part of the systems, and can communicate that to other parts of the system. Or the team has mastered the disciplines of listening to another, inquiring about underlying assumptions, and of slowing conversations down in order to reduce errors, establish shared vision and achieve results faster.[1]

For sure there are many assumptions, which should help us to create meaningful conversations in teams. On the beginning we should create team which is based on respect, ability to share, healthy climate, equality etc. But we as leaders are still the most important part of this process. Even in today's workplace, the power of provocative questions is underrated. It's ironic really, since all brilliant answers start with questions. To have more meaningful, productive conversations and get better answers, we need to ask better questions. [2] That means great questions are more than half of our success to create meaningful conversation.

To support our questions we should create attractive workplace for our discussion (maybe we should even refresh the team with new members who can refresh our discussion). Not only you, but also the team should be creative. Creativity is the part when you (thanks to your questions) and the team (thanks to their active participation) think about new ideas. After that you can start with innovation, it's the part of implementation of new ideas. It means to be innovative you need meaningful conversation as a first step. Don't forget that this conversation should be effective, logical, on the end also concrete and everybody should understand what are you talking about and on which goals are you now focusing. Conversation can be meaningful only if everybody who takes part in it understand why, what, with which aim are you talking about it. Everybody should feel that this conversation is needed even for him/her and also should agree with the conversation (on the beginning - I want to talk about it, and on the end - I agree with our team result/standpoint etc.). Otherwise could happened that our first successful and meaningful conversation could be the last one, because nobody has then motivation to do it again. These sentences also say, that meaningful conversation is really necessary for our organizational development.

[1] http://www.inflectionpoints.com/Team_Learning.htm

[2] http://www.creativitypost.com/business/meaningful_conversations_start_with_great_questions