Conversational skills can make a difference in team success, as they can in many other parts of work and life. When team members care about each other, as well as the work they’re doing together, it increases the chances they will succeed.

Good conversation has common characteristics, no matter who’s involved, or what subject is being covered.

Compare two very different conversations you’ve had in the past year. Think of one very satisfying conversation, and one that was unsatisfying or frustrating in some way.

What was the difference between the two experiences?

The following were probably some of the characteristics of good conversations you’ve had (and the opposite was probably true of unsatisfying ones, as well):

– People were fully “there,” and discussion was shared and free-flowing.

People in the good conversation were fully present, and committed to the discussion. They shared the give and take that good conversation involves. No one person or group dominated the floor, or had the burden of carrying the conversation on their own.

– There was a creative flow, and a sense of discovery.

In satisfying conversation, there’s often a sense of a flow, an exploration, in a way, as you share ideas and learn about each other – and often, learn about yourself, as well – in the process.

– You felt you could be honest in the discussion, and were. You felt that others were comfortable being honest, too.

You had no sense of trying to crack through a shell or a mask that you or others in the conversation had created to keep others away, or to block or prevent a high-quality conversation and experience together.

There may have been other reasons why the great conversation you recall was so memorable, but these are some of the most common ones.

If your conversational skills could use a tune-up, don’t be afraid to admit you’d like to learn and practice.

For starters, find and observe a friend who’s a good conversationalist. That’s probably not your friend who talks the most.

It’s the friend who draws others out, and engages them in a satisfying give-and-take…and seems to be able to do that in almost any situation.

A good conversationalist doesn’t try to control the conversation – unless it’s an interview, performance or meeting, but those are other experiences, entirely.

He or she can let go, and trust himself and others in the dialogue, as it happens.

Try to learn from good and great conversationalists. Ask them how they do what they do so well, and ask for their advice on how you can improve.

Practice skills and abilities they show in their easy and free-flowing conversation. Practice their mindset before and as they’re in conversation, if they share that information with you.

Also, increase your curiosity about others with whom you’re trying to have a conversation.

If you’re often nervous when talking to others, talking less, rather than more can help.

Learn to be comfortable with silence.

Ask more questions. Listen.

Let someone else share the floor, and the responsibility for good conversation.

Also – and this seems deceptively simple, but it’s an important thing – make sure you’re taking deep breaths so you’re as relaxed as you can be.

Taking deep breaths forces you to slow down, calm down, and relax a bit, and helps you to stay present. And that’s all part of being a good conversationalist.

The ease, confidence, and flexibility being a good conversationalist offers you can take you far.

As a final review for now, keep in mind these simple guidelines:

Care

Share.

Be there.

Be curious about other people.

Be open, be honest.

Breathe.

Relax, and let go.

Being a good conversationalist is an increasingly rare skill. It can lead to many great opportunities and wonderful experiences, if you learn to trust and let go a bit.

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Recall a frustrating conversation you had recently.

Can’t think of one…a conversation that is?

I’m kidding, and yet, conversations – and really great ones, especially – are becoming increasingly infrequent.

More often communication occurs in fragments: bits, bytes, snippets, streams, strings, posts and comments.

Contact is often more frequent in our techno-tethered times, yet communication is not always better when it happens in micro bites.

Could it be that as our technological options for staying in touch grow, our conversational skills are waning? And our satisfaction with the experience of contact we have is decreasing?

And could all that technology be handicapping us as it drains us of the opportunity and ability to use some of our basic – and in some ways, some of our most satisfying communication skills, the in-person kind?

Some people think so.

Here’s just one example. In a recent “Dear Abby” column, a woman was frustrated when guests at a dinner event endlessly texted friends, checked their Facebook pages or in other ways remained electronically tethered to people in other places, rather than to try to converse with people they were sitting right next to.

The situation the reader described was not unique. We’ve probably all seen similar situations at times, in our work and our personal lives. The reader suggested the guests were purposely being rude, and it can seem that way.

The advice columnist countered that the guests’ seemingly addictive use of technology was more likely to be a crutch or cover-up for lack of confidence and comfort in their social and conversational skills.

Conversational skill, like any skill, takes practice to develop and maintain.

Once developed, however, conversational skill can give you great confidence and flexibility.

It’s almost like an insurance policy, enabling you to talk to – and enjoy talking to – people in almost any situation, even if you’ve just met.

Sounds implausible, if not downright impossible?

It’s not.

If you’d like to learn how to improve your conversational skills and confidence, see, also, Tips for improving your conversational skills, the next post.

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Have you had the experience of feeling unseen, even though someone was talking directly to you?

Perhaps they said something to you like, “I know what you’re thinking!”

And then, as they announced what they were sure was true for you, it turns out they couldn’t have been more wrong?

Or maybe you’ve been guilty of that, yourself.

Projection is often at least part of what’s going on.

Projection is when someone “assigns” feelings they are having to someone else, often because they either do not see, or are unable to accept those thoughts or feelings in themselves.

When you are the one who has been “assigned” an erroneous feeling or thought by others, it can take a bit of time to realize what’s going on, and to try to untangle the stories people have created, or the misinterpretations that have been “cooked up,” somehow.

Projection is fairly common, and causes other problems.

It can lead to miscommunication, at a minimum, and various issues that arise when people are wasting time, effort, and precious resources, trying to solve the wrong problem – or busying themselves with a story but not trying to improve the situation, at all.

Projection can start from some simple observation, followed by assumptions and misinterpretations.

When we may draw these erroneous conclusions, they’re often based on our own past experiences, the way we believe we would have felt in such a circumstance, or any of many reasons why we assign a particular meaning to what we observed.

How can you reduce your own tendency to project, even if you can’t guarantee that it will never happen?

First, simply observe.

- What do you see?
- Would you hear?
- What do you feel?

Next, be aware of what you’re interpreting from what you observe.

- What do you interpret?
- Why are you interpreting it that way?
- Do you need to interpret what you observe?
- How could these assumptions or interpretations be helpful to you in some way?
- Could your observations or interpretation help other people involved, if they are correct? If so, how?
- Instead of interpreting, how can you check with the person, or people, involved to see if your assumptions are correct?
- If need be, how can you help the people involved? How can you check to see if that’s what will be most helpful to them?

Ask, don’t assume.

Be curious about the other person’s experience.

Care about what’s happening to that person, and in their world.

If you don’t care about what’s happening to the other person, what’s the point of taking the time and energy to form an opinion about this particular situation or how they’re handling it?

Free yourself and others of opinions you’ve formed if there’s no role you can play in improving the situation, or supporting those involved.

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“Investors are investing in you, the team”

That’s what companies who seek venture funding are advised, as they were once again, many times, at a boot camp for startups where I was a mentor recently.

“We’re investing in the team” is easy to say.

It’s not always easy to understand.

That’s especially the case if you haven’t had a lot of team experiences, and more specifically, if you haven’t had a lot of business team experiences and roles.

To really understand “We’re investing in the team,” you have to understand teamwork in a visceral sense.

And sometimes, frankly, it helps to have been on, and to have led very successful and less successful teams, as well.

“We’re investing in the team” is far easier to grasp if you understand the risks, opportunities and tools of teamwork and leadership.

And often some of the best learning occurs when you’ve had excellent but also less praiseworthy experiences on, and at the helm of a team. You learn a lot, like it or not, from having to scramble to create success from impending failure.

Fundamentally, what “We’re investing in the team” means is that investors – whoever they are – are looking to see if you and your leadership team can:

1. Turn a great idea into a company and then a growing flow of profits
2. Work well together
3. Turn your strengths as a team into something far greater than your strengths, as a group of separate individuals
4. Connect well with your prospects and convert them into customers
5. Organize people and resources to meet the opportunities and challenges you face, some of which you know, and many of which you don’t…yet
6. Attract a great team
7. Engage the team in your vision and keep them engaged through the ups and downs of startup life
8. Lead without squashing the strengths and enthusiasm of individual members of the company
9. Adapt well, as a team, as conditions change – because they will
10. Admit when you, as a leader or leadership team, need help
11. Listen and learn from customers, advisors, employees, and other members of your team
12. Make good decisions
13. Lead effective implementation of decisions
14. Grow and change, as individuals and as a leadership team, as the need for your leadership evolves
15. Let go of the reins, as appropriate, and delegate well
16. Show courage without foolishness
17. Get over, around and through the barriers that are presented to you without, in the process, causing other problems downstream
18. Be an alchemist, sometimes making progress in lieu of funding, sometimes stretching cash, and always turning the resources you have into more and better results than one initially might expect
19. See the path to success, and keep seeing it, and keep leading your team to it as it changes occur, obstacles emerge, and distractions happen
20. Handle success well

There are other things that investors are looking for, too, when they say they’re “investing in the team.”

You can rest assured, however, that if you do the 20 things on this list well, and if you do them better than your competitors, you’re well on your way to success, however your company is funded, whoever is at the helm.

Think about what would give you confidence that a startup company and leadership team were likely to succeed, if you were an investor, trying to guess which company was most likely to succeed from among the many on which you could place your bets, and your money.

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Having a great decision-making process increases your odds for success in many aspects of your work and life.

Because it’s so important, stop periodically to review and improve the way you make decisions.

Grow (and grow your appreciation for) your strengths, and eliminate or reduce your decision-making weaknesses.

Start by making review and improvement of your process an annual event, even if you dedicate only an hour to decision-making process improvement.

How can you begin?

Start by reviewing significant decisions you made during the past year.

Divide these decisions into three categories:

- The ones that worked really well
- The ones that worked out okay
- The ones that didn’t work…at all (and hopefully there aren’t many in this category)

Look at the patterns in each group to see what you can learn and improve – and also what you need to stop and appreciate about the things you’re doing very well.

Consider, specifically, your skills in:

- Framing the decision
- Information gathering
- Decision-making
- Implementing decisions

Consider some of these things as you review these recent decisions and how they worked for you:

1. Did you define the problems correctly?

2. Did you have the right decision customers in mind?

3. Were you clear about what these customers needed?

4. Did you gather the right information? Was it timely? Did you use that information well for the decision-making process?

5. Did you evaluate the decision risks correctly?

6. Did you assess and envision implementation circumstances and challenges correctly?

7. Were there any significant issues you didn’t consider as you prepared to make that decision? These may have been favorable or unfavorable issues, ultimately, but they were things you overlooked or didn’t see initially.

8. Are there other things you notice about the way you prepared for, made, and implemented decisions that can help you to improve your decision-making process in the future?

9. If you have decision diaries that you kept as you worked through stressful or high-risk decisions, review those to see what they can tell you about your decision-making preparation, thought process, the way the decision was actually made, and the implementation quality.

10. What pleased you most about your decision process and experience this year?

11. What surprised you most?

12. What was the most difficult lesson?

13. What was the best lesson?

14. If you were teaching someone else how to make great decisions, what would you advise them, based on your recent experience with decision-making?

15. Were there any serendipitous, unplanned but fortuitous experiences in your decision-making and results this year? Are there any lessons you can learn from that to improve your decision-making process and results in the future?

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Do you have decision phobia?

Some people do, and it can be very life- and progress-limiting.

Decision-phobes may not know why they’re fearful of committing to one course of action instead of leaving their options endlessly open.

Perhaps their fear is based on having made big mistakes in the past.

Or perhaps they felt that perfection was expected from them with each and every step they took. And as a result, they began to stay cemented in spot, rather than to take the risk of making one misstep, no matter how recoverable it was.

Decision-making doesn’t have to be scary.

If the decision is one that you’re familiar with and have made successfully before, or if the risks of making a mistake are low, the information gathering can be very quick.

If a decision has large, clear risks, all the preparatory phases will take more time and careful thought.

As you get ready to make a decision, there are ways you can further reduce the risks. Here are a few:

- Rehearse
- Look at the costs and benefits of all options and choose the best one
- Use scenario analysis
- Test your decision with experts you trust
- Create a decision diary for high-risk decisions

Here’s more detail about each of these options:

Rehearse

Imagine the outcomes.

Envision a successful outcome of the decision-making process that meets the requirements of the customers for the decision. If you need more information about this, learn more about creating decision-making frames.

Now imagine yourself being comfortable making the decision, and comfortable with the outcome of the decision.

When you imagine that, what does it tell you about the process, and the decision, itself?

Look at the costs and benefits of all options and choose the best one

List the various decisions you could make.

Now list the costs and benefits of each option. If a more analytical approach will increase your confidence in the decision, use weighted criteria. Evaluate how each possible decision meets each criterion, and see which option “wins,” when viewed analytically.

Use scenario analysis

Create scenarios of most likely circumstances. Then exaggerate these scenarios by imagining far better outcomes and far worse outcomes.

Now, fortified with the wide range of scenarios, consider which ones seem most likely.

Test each possible decision in these most likely scenarios.

See how that affects your decision, if it does.

Test your decision with experts you trust

One additional way to reduce the risk of the decision is to find experts you trust. Test your decision with them.

See if they advise you to consider something you had not seen, or to weight decisions in a different way than you anticipated.

Create a decision diary for high-risk decisions

Just by writing down your decision-making, you may make better decisions. It’s like writing down goals to increase your chances of reaching them. The simple act of writing tightens your focus, and can improve your logic and the completeness of your thinking.

Here’s a simple way to create a decision diary:
1. Write down the decision you have to make.
2. List the customers of the decision and what success would be like for them.
3. Record your assumptions.
4. List the decision you’ve made and what you expect to have happen.
5. Use this information if the decision needs refining, changing, or when you are improving your decision-making process.

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A colleague stopped me the other day after a meeting. She was worried about her son, still in elementary school. He’s competitive, and that has many benefits in the world in which he’s being raised.

Still, she thinks he may be becoming too competitive for his own good.

“He’s starting to be afraid to try new things,” she explained.

“He can’t stand to lose. He thinks that if he doesn’t try something new, but stays with what he knows, he’s far less likely to lose,”  she added.

Are you afraid to try new things because you can’t stand to lose?

Are you afraid of being a learner again? On the way to mastery of any skill, there’s always some uncertainty, experimentation, and failure that goes along with eventual success.

Is it possible that you’re too competitive for your own good?

You may actually be handicapping yourself, if you restrict yourself only to activities you can win.

If so, may be missing a lot of good experiences and great people.

And you may never uncover some of your greatest strengths, talents you never found you had because you chose the safe, known road rather than venturing beyond it.

Is it possible that you create unnecessary stress and competition in situations where it has no real value…to you or anyone else?

If you’re too afraid to try something new, you could soon be frozen in place (or frozen out of it), unable to adapt and change at the same pace as the rest of the workplace and world.

Don’t lose the race you’re trying to win by being afraid to try.

The skill it would be useful to master is learning how to learn well…and then knowing how to turn learning into valued results.

Here are some of the other things I advised my friend, the mother of the little boy who knows how to win, but is quickly becoming afraid to try:

- Applaud initiative, including good attempts and steady progress.

- Reward learning experiments.

- Encourage activities and learning where there is no clear winner.

- Look for ways to take competitiveness out of circumstances where it has no value, or may be a detriment to the desired experience or skill development.

Let the learner plan and dictate his or her learning path.

Reward the learning process.

Skills of the future include having the ability and initiative to direct one’s own learning  effectively, the ability to discern and gather high-quality information, the ability to synthesize much information, high quality decision-making and action taking.

Don’t handicap yourself by putting competition in places where competition doesn’t belong.

Ask yourself the next time you think your competitiveness maybe making things worse:

- What’s the point of competition here?

- Is competitiveness adding to the overall experience or taking away from it? How is it affecting the other people who are involved in the experience, in addition to me?

If you think you may be too competitive for your own good, try this test:

Let someone else be first in line once in a while.

You’ll survive the experience. And believe it or not, you may even find you enjoy it even more from that spot.

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Could your company use a glossary?

“That’s ridiculous!” you reply?

You might be surprised.

As a consultant, I must go into a company and quickly learn as much as I can in order to come up to speed rapidly on foundation knowledge.

More often than you might guess, as I’m going through the rapid-cycle learning process as I begin a project with a new company, I’ve found that employees don’t know, or don’t agree on the meaning of some of the company’s most-used terms and acronyms.

Consider these examples:

For one project I had one day to “crash learn” as much as I could about the basic technology and terms involved in a major process. I was leaving the next day for a three-day offsite where I was helping the client company finalize a cross-company product delivery process.

To learn as much as possible, and as rapidly as I could, I dove right into all available information about key terms, processes, roles, responsibilities and other knowledge that was important to have for the process design and improvement work to be successful.

Eventually, I’d gone as far as I could in the process of learning on my own. I needed to clarify some things and met with a few people to close the gaps in my understanding.

I asked one manager fairly high up in the organization what one key acronym meant.

She admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that she didn’t know.

And the tough thing was, she was outside of what might be considered, unofficially, as the “statute of limitations” on when she could safely admit she needed to learn some of basic information at the company, too. I could ask the question she needed to because I was clearly in learning mode. She was supposed to have “graduated” it already.

At some point, it’s somehow assumed that people know what they need to know to do their jobs.

But if they don’t, and they’re afraid to ask, where do they go?

And who asks the question of the employees who work for them (and makes it safe for them to answer it honestly), “What do you need to learn, or know, that you don’t, to be successful in this job?”

In a second example, I was helping to create onboarding tools for a rapidly growing company.

The learning processes and tools I was helping the client company create were designed to help the cross-functional teams get established quickly and consistently, and start performing well together as quickly as possible.

We were editing a final draft of one product in the set of team tools.

In a meeting with two fairly senior people in the group, we discovered that each thought a key acronym meant something different.

They realized that many people in the organization were using the same acronym to mean different ways, and that it may have been just one of many miscues in a job and role that required excellent communication.

Is it possible this is happening at your company?

Eliminate the primary causes for miscommunication wherever you can.

One easy place to start is to make sure is to make sure that commonly used acronyms and terms are consistently defined.

In addition, make sure that other foundation knowledge that it’s important for employees to have is readily available. At a minimum, this is important to have when new employees join the company, or move to new jobs inside the company and need to get up to speed quickly and consistently.

Here’s how you can make your own glossary:

1. Make a list of key terms and acronyms.
2. Assign a person to complete the glossary by gathering and writing the definitions for the terms.
3. Ask a few people to review the glossary, noting additions or changes that they think need to be made to it.
4. Refine the glossary, reconciling any differences of opinion about what terms or acronyms mean.
5. Post the glossary on your website in a place where it will be easy to access and use.
6. Include contact information for anyone who needs to get more information about any of the terms, or to contribute new terms to the glossary.

In the process of creating and publishing the glossary, you may find other information you need to share, or to train people on.

Do everything you can to ensure that communication is clear and effective for the people working in your company. It can make a far bigger difference in effectiveness and business results than you expect.

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What can consume hours of time, oceans of creative and productive energy, and still produce nothing useful?

Worrying.

Maybe you don’t waste your time in worry, but many people do.

Some are pretty experienced, and dedicated worriers – professionals, almost.

It’s easy, mid-worry-stream, to think that you’re doing something useful for someone, or some situation, somewhere.

My younger sister once said to me when I was in college and getting little sleep, “If you don’t quit staying up so late, Mom and I will quit worrying about you!”

She’d seen her worrying as a sisterly service she was doing for me.

It wasn’t making any difference, of course.

Worry isn’t work.

Here’s how work is defined in physics: work = force x distance.

Worrying doesn’t change things unless it is a force that moves people across some distance, to change, to become different in a positive way.

Here are a few things you can do to turn worry into productive results:

1. Understand your own motivation for worrying.

What are you trying to accomplish through your worrying?

Is it to entertain yourself, perhaps through the steady updates in a local drama that keeps everyone wrapped up in details of a story you share?

Is it to distract yourself from something you should be doing, instead, but are afraid of?

Consider what else you might be doing with the time you are wrapped up in the lives of those around you. Consider, also, what part of your own life isn’t not getting full attention because you are distracted in this pursuit.

Are you afraid to say what you really think?

If so, muster up your courage and figure out what your truth is. Then figure out how to tell it to the people who you think need the information in a way so that they can hear you, and feel your concern.

And then it is up to them to use the information, save it for a later time, or reject it as not being right for their lives. And you might not like it, but they do have that right – to make their own choice about how they will live their own lives.

Then, let your advice and worry go. Know that the people you are trying to help via your advice and concern will choose and take their own actions. That’s how they’ll become strong. That’s how they’ll learn and grow.

And you want that for them, don’t you?

2. Know what the real problem is, and what evidence you have to know that it is real.

State what you think the real problem is.

Now, consider what evidence you have to know that the problem you describe, of the magnitude you describe it, is actually happening?

If you don’t know, or can’t find evidence of a problem, there may not be one at all.

Then, go back to considering what this worry might be distracting you from…or trying to.

That’s where your problem-solving attention might best be invested…in the problem you don’t want to think about, at all.

3. Know why you believe the bad news scenario is most likely.

If you have a real problem, and have evidence of it, why do you think that dire circumstances will be the result of the issue?

Good outcomes could also occur.

Think through what the chances are that your worries will come true, and why you believe it.

4. Think back to your most productive worrying time, and what the outcome was.

Sometimes worry is productive in that it gets us to consider alternatives we hadn’t thought of before. Or it may make us aware of a risk we had, blithely, brushed off as not likely at all.

Worry gets us to focus and consider possibilities we might not want to think about, at all.

5. Take the persistence and creativity you’re investing in worry, and turn it into something productive.

Direct that effort to doing something tangible about the problem.

Take your concerns, if they prove to be valid, and turn them into a plan of action to take the cause of the problem away.

Then, take the actions you planned, using your resolve to make the problem go away.

Your worry may, in fact, lead to a change that might not have happened any other way.

6. Get more exercise.

Treat yourself to some endorphins.

These are the hormones your body releases when you’ve had a vigorous run, walk, swim, bike ride, or other physical release.

7. Get more sleep.

Good sleep refreshes and rests your mind and body.

And it gives you the reserves to provide a good, calm, long-term assessment of the situation, providing a perspective on problems that might loom when you’re tired, and tempers are likely to be shorter.

8. Find a diversion that’ll keep you from going into worry so deep.

Make yourself so busy you aren’t available for worry duty.

Well, not so much, anyway.

Take your own big goals and break them down into very tangible small-term milestones.

Work on those.

9. Make something.

When you produce something tangible, it can go a long way to make you feel good about yourself, your abilities, and what you can do.

Besides, it gives you something you control. And that helps siphon off worry energy, too.

You may not be able to control the big thing you’re worrying about, but when you make something, you often get an increased sense of control about your portion of the world.

10. Find someone else who has been through this thing you’re worrying about. Talk to them.

They’ll give you some perspective.

They’ll probably tell you that if the problem actually happens, you, or the people you’re worrying about, will live through the experience, and you’ll be stronger in the end.

And that it may not happen…so the worrying didn’t help.

11. Set a daily worry budget, and when the time is up for the day, change the subject.

You think I’m kidding.

If your daily budget covers one hour of worrying, set your timer when worry time arrives.

Worry big for that hour.

And when that hour is up, change the subject. Don’t talk about the thing you’re worried about. Don’t text about it, think about it, imagine it.

Move on.

You can pick up it up again during worry time tomorrow.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish every Tuesday. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Think of the worst meeting you were ever involved in, whatever your role was. (Don’t worry…we won’t stay in this memory for long).

Now, think of the best meeting you ever attended, or were a part of.

Why did one meeting work so well, and the other one flop?

The odds are very high that the good meeting had a good leader. In addition, it’s likely a lot of careful planning was involved.

Beyond that, though, the group involved in the good meeting probably used simple ground rules to guide their work together.

If that sounds a bit too bureaucratic to you, consider how kids create a game at a playground. It might be a pick-up basketball game where they’re setting the boundaries and rules of play. It might be a new game they invent.

Either way, one of the early steps in getting the game underway is to set some basic rules, boundaries, and other guidelines.

Why is setting the rules and boundaries important early in the process of getting the play underway? It helps them to:
- Make the game clear
- Focus on playing the game, not continually inventing or refining it
- Make the game fair
- Increase the chances that the game will be enjoyable
- Make the game as much fun as possible

Ground rules don’t have to be complicated.

In fact, it’s far better if they’re not.

You want rules that are clear, simple, easy to understand and teach, easy to enforce.

Ground rules also set up expectations of the way you will behave together, and how you will treat each other. And they provide a solid foundation or “home base” you can return to if the group gets lost in a heated debate.

If you need a set of ground rules you can adapt to create your own, try this set. I’ve used variations of these ground rules with more than 100 teams, and they’ve served each group well:

– Be prompt. Stay focused.

– Be an active listener and participant. Ask clarifying questions to understand others’ points of view. Be clear about your own point of view.

– Act with mutual respect.

– Emphasize inquiry and advocacy.  Inquiry: exploration of an issue, reserving judgment about the outcome. Advocacy: pushing or selling one’s position.

– Stay engaged. Stay with the team and the work until there is an outcome all parties can take credit for designing. Be flexible to accommodate information you receive in the dialogue process.

– Take personal responsibility for results.

– Turn cell phones, pagers, and other electronic devices off while the group is meeting.

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