Learning Ideas vs. Developing Skills

Do bright ideas going into your ear actually affect what comes out of your mouth?

It’s easy to get a bad impression of communication training. If you’ve spent enough time working in a business environment, you’ve probably attended at least one or two communications seminars that didn’t accomplish anything at all. We hear this from many people we talk to.

This doesn’t mean the trainings are bad; sometimes they’re a lot of fun. Often people learn a few interesting ideas that they can share with their friends, and maybe pick up some new terminology. (For instance, they’re able to understand their difficult boss as a “steamroller” personality type, or they realize that their compassionate friend must be practicing “active listening.”) But just hearing about these ideas doesn’t help people make substantial changes in their own conversations, and a few days or weeks or months later, they forget most everything they learned.

Sometimes, of course, the situation is even worse. There are plenty of courses that don’t accomplish anything and also aren’t in the least bit fun. We see the result of this in disgruntled employees whose supervisors have to drag them kicking and screaming into our courses. The thought of a communications seminar evokes horrifying images of either monotonous, droning lectures or a touchy-feely hand-holding session where everyone has to say only nice, friendly things to one another.

Now, a confession: Some of those trainings have been taught by us. Not the terribly boring or hand-holding ones, but seminars that have effected no lasting change. Why? There wasn’t enough time to have people practice anything, so instead we just talked. The truth is, no matter how skilled you are as a teacher, it is impossible to teach people to communicate differently simply by talking about it.

In talking about conversational fitness, we want to encourage you to think less about abstract ideas or principles and more about concrete actions. Good communication isn’t something that you know; it’s something that you do. Understanding just isn’t enough. To succeed, what you need is skill.

For this reason, effective communication courses need to function more like sports training than academic classes — at least in certain ways. The key is practice. Imagine trying to become skilled at basketball just by being told what to do and watching experienced players do it. Not a good idea. To gain those skills, you’d need to get out on the court, get the ball in your hands, and try doing those things for yourself. When you failed at certain types of moves (as you would inevitably do, just starting out), you’d need coaching to help you adjust and refine your techniques to get a better result.

With communication, we find that there are often very large gaps between knowledge and skill. A person can fully understand and believe in a principle (such as the importance of open inquiry, or of collaborating rather than competing) and yet consistently be unable to put it into practice. What matters most is that you can use what you know when it counts — right in the midst of the heated confrontation with your boss, the tedious staff meeting, or the same old fruitless argument you keep having with your friend or colleague.

It should come as no surprise that this type of capacity isn’t something you can’t suddenly grasp in a two-hour seminar. We have yet to meet the person who has independently, without assistance, mastered the full range of communication skills needed to make their conversations work well. (This includes us of course!) In the last post we listed five of those skills for you to consider. Here now are five more. Again, ask yourself, which can you do easily, and which are more of a challenge? Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is very little skill, and 10 is an ideal level of skill.

6. Bringing in new ideas in a constructive way
When you come up with a new plan or suggestion, are you able to express it in a way that is relatively easy for other people to hear, understand, and potentially agree with? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___

7. Bringing out new ideas from others and using them creatively
Are you skilled at eliciting the best, most creative ideas from those around you, and then building on them to generate innovative solutions? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___

8. Bringing focus and resolution
If you see a discussion going nowhere, with lots of people talking past one another, are you able to refocus the conversation and help the group reach a decision or some other type of resolution? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___

9. Using humor effectively
Are you able to use humor in a way that builds morale and adds fun to a conversation, without distracting from serious topics? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___

10. Giving useful feedback
When things aren’t working well, do you give clear, constructive feedback and then follow through to be sure that it leads to lasting change? And, when things are working well, do you give sincere, positive feedback that helps others to feel respected and appreciated? Rate yourself from 1 to 10:___