Scenario: An employee who doesn’t report to you asks that you keep the following in confidence. His performance review is overdue by 4 months. He anticipates a pay raise which is needed due to his spouse’s working hours reduced due to forced furloughs. The employee also wants to know if he is doing OK or not, and on track for a promotion. He thinks he is performing well, but without feedback, doubt is creeping in. Other circumstances: a pending lawsuit is pulling the leader, his manager who is to conduct the review, into emergency meetings with concerned stakeholders; plus, the board chair recently resigned. The employee who’s coming to you for advice said he asked for the review 2 months ago and has heard nothing. The employee says he does not want to show up as greedy or add stress to manager.
Will you advise your colleague to have a transactional or the transformational conversation? Transactional conversations keep things and people as they are. Transformational conversations move people outside the boxes in which they’ve placed themselves and others. Before you choose, let’s look at each type.
| Transactional Conversations | Transformational Conversations |
| Framed by my agenda and needs only | Framed by our spoken commitments |
| End point known at beginning | Solution, outcome unknown |
| Exchange data, information, reactions as The Truth | Exchange data, information, reactions as my view, not The Truth |
| Predictable outcome | Willing to not know |
| Maintain status quo | Go beyond status quo |
| No straying off my agenda | Willing to evolve the focus |
| Lots of talking at, point making, debating | Lots of listening to and “listening for” |
| Thing focused | Relationship-building focused |
| Now focused | Now and future focused |
Back to the scenario: As the advice giver, which kind of conversation will you have with the employee?
A transactional conversation might look like this: You tell the employee to: Email boss with copies of past, unanswered emails you sent to him, cc: HR as a veiled threat and cite some HR policy to be right about cc’ing HR. Then get back to work and update your resume.
A transformational conversation might go like this:
(1) Ask the employee what he wants to accomplish in the long run in his relationship with his manager and in the short run (a performance review). Find the commitment beyond the upset.
(2) Distinguish fact from interpretation. (For example, one interpretation could be that the employee thinks asking for the review would add to manager’s stress, an interpretation, not a fact.)
(3) Invite employee to have a face-to-face (not email), no blame conversation with the boss. In the conversation, the employee takes responsibility for not speaking up before now; asks boss what “we” can do to make the review happen; request a date for review to happen and follow up.
(4) Thank boss for helping to resolve this issue.
Consider that a transformational conversation can accomplish the task (get the review to happen) and go beyond the task to build the relationship. A shout-out to Steve Roesler for his article which helped me make the table above (http://tinyurl.com/2ede4no).
Transformation is not a technique or parlor game – it is a way of ‘being’. It begins with generating a commitment and where you are coming from. There is a technology (methodology) associated with it: ontology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology), which you can learn. I invite you to take it on. Your world will never be the same, nor will you.
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