Manila, 20 May 2020 — Are your conversations at level 1, 2, or 3?

In Grow3Leaders we continue our exploration of the theme Engage: Leaders invest in building trust with people. Three Trust Barriers allowed us to explore how the Language, Power, and Care barriers can hold us back in our leadership. And in Colors of Trust, we asked what the color of our trust is when we’re relaxed and when we’re stressed, referring to seven colors that represent the worldviews we encounter in our workplaces.

Building Trust is Key

Among respondents to date, the highest interest was shown for how to tackle the Language and Power Barriers. To discover more about the Colors of Trust, members have already started double-clicking on the Language Barrier using the Work In All Colors course.

In this post, we will explore one of the dimensions of the Power Barrier, and that is how to build trust through conversations. I shared this in Creating Better Conversations, parts of which I would like to share again here.

In doing so, I am paying tribute to my teacher, Judith Glaser, the executive coach who taught leaders and coaches how to change the world one conversation at a time. Judith left life in 2018, and her legacy lives on through her students.

Trust in Conversations

Several years ago, Judith Glaser’s Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results opened my eyes to the many possibilities we have to change the world through the conversations we engage in. “Everything happens through conversations,” Judith liked to say, and I could not agree more.

After reading her book, I joined a group of fellow coaches from around the world to take a deep dive with Judith into her knowledge through her 7-month Conversational Intelligence (C-IQ) program, which she co-created with the World Business and Executive Coach Summit, better known as WBECS.

The legacy left by Judith is not for coaches only. The value of what she taught is available to all leaders and aspiring leaders. As students of leadership, we find useful insights and tools in her book.

Here are my three favorite learnings from the book:

Three Levels of Conversations

Judith taught us that there are three levels of conversations that leaders use: 1. transactional, 2. positional, and 3. transformational. While each level has its value and purpose, the skills taught by Judith focused on helping leaders to move conversations from one level to the next. And she made us see that it is the third level that we need more when we set out to influence positive changes in our workplace. 

Of the specific skills taught by Judith, some appeared to be counter-intuitive at first, like ‘asking questions to which there are no answers.’ Their purpose is to open up a space for collaboration and co-creation that helps to move our conversation from the I into the WE space. 

The three levels of conversation require increasing levels of trust, as illustrated by the Dashboard of Trust.

Dashboard of Trust

This dashboard points to what I consider the heart of Judith’s work, based on her insights that organizational changes require a sustained process of building trust to create spaces for effective collaboration. After double-clicking on the process of building trust, and exploring the roles played by different parts of our brain and the cocktails of hormones they produce according to the different situations we experience, Judith offered us a set of practical tools that we can use when we have, and facilitate conversations.

The Dashboard of Trust is one such tool. The Ladder of Conclusions is another.

Down-regulating and Up-regulating Emotions

Continuing from what I mentioned about the continuous cocktail of hormones produced in our brains, Judith explained in great detail how we can learn to down-regulate our fear (distrust) networks and up-regulate our trust networks, and how we can use this knowledge to bring about positive changes in the discussions and dialogues that we facilitate as leaders and coaches. Once you get the hang of this, every day will bring more opportunities to apply it.

Coach Judith Glaser’s C-IQ work is a treasure trove of resources for us to work with when we set out to grow more leaders around us and simultaneously let our own leadership grow. For a deeper dive, and to discover how to level up your conversations, I recommend that you check out Creating Better Conversations and read Judith Glaser’s book.

Practicing Conversations

In Grow3Leaders, we unpack the skills we need to build trust in people during our conversations so that we can influence positive change in the workplace. In turn, these changes then allow us to advance sustainability through our businesses and organizations.

Engaging more people around us by building trust is a fundamental leadership behavior we want to see more of by modeling it ourselves, individually and together. 

We are a private community of leaders from countries around the world, and from different generations, who are committed to learning and practicing effective leadership behaviors ‘out loud’ and together to create positive change in our workplaces.

You can join us free of charge—not free of commitment. Send us a request if you feel that you are up to our Grow3Leaders challenge and are ready to join together with three of your colleagues in your workplace.

We look forward to learning together with you and your team.