Conversations make culture

By Francesca Pagni, InFrame Leadership Developer

The InFrame project, a collaboration between Universities of Glasgow, St. Andrews and Edinburgh, will test new ways of transforming research culture over the next two years.

With a project team assembled, one of our first orders of business has been to turn the lens on ourselves: What development do we need as a team to promote a healthy culture? What values do we need to express through our own team culture and behaviour? How do we lead a ‘good culture’ by example?

There is an inexorable link between our behaviours and our culture. We make culture, and culture makes us. And ultimately, cultures are an expression of what the people in a group collectively value.

For example, imagine one group that values productivity, efficiency and assertiveness. The people who embody these values become leaders and create structures and rules that reinforce those values, people and groups within that system develop behavioural norms that sustain and protect the culture.

Another group that values connection, relationality, and rest, might step into the above-mentioned culture of efficiency and think it’s all wrong. Suddenly, there is a clash of culture based on these differences. How will these two groups navigate this to work well together? To engage well with difference, we must be open to change. This is sensitive work – even if we really want to make change, we will likely still find the process destabilising or challenging to go through.

For example, many of us are fully on board with inclusivity. We want this value expressed in our organisational norms. But when that expression requires dramatic shifts of our status quo (decision making becoming more participative and democratised, or the release of engrained power hierarchies for example) additionally meaning a great deal of extra time and energy is required of us, it’s not always comfortable.

We need good tools to navigate culture change

One tool for culture development is language. My own assessment is that conversations, and the language we choose as we engage in them to a large degree, shape culture. See Matthew Budd’s work on language or Fernando Flores’s work on conversations for more in depth analysis on this, or explore the research literature on this topic.

Recently, the InFrame team met up to spend some time thinking about our conversations. We wanted to learn new tools that we might use in our team practices to create collegial and inclusive culture for ourselves. We also wanted to explore how we might take these tools into our conversations with leaders in the research ecosystem.

To start, we Checked In.

A ‘Check In’ is a simple, but powerful group practice. Launching straight into team business is common enough, but when group meetings begin this way, valuable insight about the individuals in the meeting and the group as a whole is lost. A Check In is simply a first step that focuses everyone on the space and people they are about to work with.

Good Check Ins enable the team to:

• Connect with and acknowledge each other
• Gain insight into the overall energy and headspace of the group which can be used to make the meeting more relevant and useful
• Ensures the team is aligned on purpose of the meeting
• Gain insight into any tension, resistance, needs (including accessibility or inclusion needs) present that should be addressed
• Allow alternative views or urgent questions/items that need attending to that are not included on the agenda to be voiced
• Acknowledges that team members are human, not cogs, and that we each bring a lot with us whenever we enter a meeting

Over time, a practice of including regular Check Ins establishes team relationships and builds psychological safety.

Types of team conversation

Alongside, and complementary to this, we also explored the foundations of a model called Three Conversations (Thirdspace Coaching, 2021). This simple model suggests that almost all conversations fall into one of three categories:

• Conversation for Relationship: Essential for succeeding in the other conversation types. You are establishing the relationship through discovering common interests, concerns or commitments together – this is the foundation for working in partnership.

• Conversation for Possibility: This type of conversation is held with the intention to freely explore ideas, creative suggestions and possible future actions together. Importantly a conversation for possibility is not held not with an intention to critique or evaluate the ideas generated – that comes later, when deciding how to take action.

• Conversation for Action: If the previous two conversations have been held well, this is easy and quick. This is when actions are coordinated through the conversational partners evaluating possibilities, seeking agreement, and making requests, offers and promises.

This model above shows a nested diagram with relationship being the largest circle, as it is foundational for all the rest. Your conversation for relationship ‘holds’ your Conversations for Possibility, and for Action.

Many of our communication difficulties occur when we don’t know which conversation we are in or if prior conversations are left out – hence the addition of the team Check In, a type of Conversation for Relationship. For example, conflict can arise when one person thought they were in a conversation for action, and the other party thought they were simply exploring possibilities. Explicitly discussing the model within our team has helped InFrame colleagues become more aware of the different types, and hence more aligned.

Likewise, actions taken without due care and attention to the relationship, then fall down, or don’t go as planned. Think of project plans that go astray due to team dynamic challenges, or where people agree to do things that they don’t really believe in. Typically, what happens in this case is that teams charge ahead by adding more meetings centred on new actions. But if your actions are not succeeding, your issue may lie within a previous incomplete conversation. It’s worth going back a step and checking: do we need to review what is actually possible? Do we need to establish a better relationship before action can continue?

With these tools in mind, the InFrame team explored a scenario that might arise for us and discussed how we would respond using these new insights and the knowledge and skill we already hold as a team. The themes discussed were: allowing for uncertainty or not knowing, how to skilfully summarise and playback what we hear, how to sensitively explore the risks of potential actions, and how to question assumptions to surface underlying motivations or values.

To close, we reflected on our project values and how these will integrate into the sort of conversations we have, and actions we agree on.

Culture is shaped by every conversation and action we take. The practices we use as the InFrame Team matter: how we start and end meetings, and hold conversations are the foundation and currency for the culture we are shaping.

Questions for your reflection:

• What values are important in your work culture?
• What team/organisational norms do you practice to reflect these?
• What is your go-to preference of conversation at work: relationship, possibility, or action?
• When challenges arise, what conversation type do you intuitively pivot to?
• Have you tried a Check In recently?