Conversation: three basic rules

Conversations are good for us. Research has suggested that having just one quality conversation a day can make us feel happier and less stressed.

We’re talking here about real conversations: preferably face-to-face; maybe online, or on the phone. We are not talking about email, texting, messaging or written chat on social media platforms. (Though all of these have their benefits, too.)

The word ‘conversation’ comes from a Latin word meaning ‘to turn together’’, or ‘to move around with’. You might not actually move around with the other person – though you might mirror body language, gestures and even the words you use. But the joy of conversation is the way it moves. A good conversation picks up a topic and takes it somewhere new. A conversation that gets stuck becomes boring, embarrassing or even excruciating.

Your workplace, in truth, is a network of conversations. If you want to stand out in your workplace, you need to develop your conversation skills.

And it seems that we do need to develop those skills. In a recent poll by Harris Poll for Fortune magazine, 65% of Gen Z workers admitted that they don’t know what to talk about with their coworkers.  (Among older staff, the figure is apparently around 25%.)

Two factors seem to be at play here.

• If you work remotely and depend on technology to communicate, your social and verbal skills might suffer.
• If you were in education during the Covid pandemic, you might find conversation even more challenging. That same Harris poll found that people entering the workplace post-pandemic are twice as likely to struggle holding a conversation with colleagues as people who were in work before Covid struck.

All is not lost, however. You can improve your conversation skills. Put the phone down. Look up from the laptop. And let’s begin.

The three basic rules of conversation

A conversation is not just people talking to each other. It’s also people listening to each other. And the quality of any conversation depends on the quality, not of the speaking, but of the listening.

Hence the three basic rules of conversation.

Rule One: balance speaking and listening.

Rule Two: one speaker at a time.

Rule Three: apply the Cooperative Principle.

In this post, we’ll explore all three.

Rule One: balance speaking and listening

Imagine a dance where you’re being pushed around by your partner all the time. Not much fun.

The dance of a conversation, too, can become unbalanced. The usual reason is that one person is speaking too much: they’re hogging the conversation.  When you’re holding a conversation, check out the ratio between speaking and listening.

• If you feel you’re speaking too much, ask a question and then stop talking.
• If you feel that the other person is speaking too much, find an opportunity to make a statement and then follow up with more talking. (This might be harder to do.)

Stephen Covey famously said: ‘Seek first to understand, then to be understood.’ We seek to understand, principally, by listening.

Listening involves four skills (at least).

• Paying attention
• Cultivating ease
• Encouraging the speaker
• Asking quality questions

Pay attention

Listening starts with paying attention. Paying attention helps a speaker to find their ideas and express them. The best way to look as if you’re paying attention is – well, to pay attention.

Cultivate ease

The best conversations happen when you’re both relaxed. You might be working in an organisation with a culture of urgency, which can generate chronic stress. Decision-making suffers; trust is eroded; people start to suffer burnout, or they give up and leave. And, of course, conversations suffer.

You might not be able to change the culture of your workplace. But you can begin to counter the effects of urgency by cultivating ease in your conversations. And you can start with the very next conversation you hold.

Encourage the speaker

Banish competitiveness from the conversation. Postpone any move to argue a point or contradict. Instead, welcome any difference in your points of view and encourage the speaker to develop their ideas further.

Ask quality questions

You might secretly feel that asking a question will dent your image at work. It might make you look ignorant or even stupid. It might look, sometimes, as if you’re challenging the speaker’s authority or credibility.

So, ask questions for the right reasons. Use questions to:

• find out facts;
• check your understanding;
• help the other person to improve their understanding;
• invite the other person to examine your own thinking;
• request action.

High-quality questions open up the speaker’s thinking. Which is almost guaranteed to improve the quality of the conversation.

Rule Two: one speaker at a time

The time will come when it’s your turn to speak. Rule Two is about turn-taking: when, and how, to take your turn to speak.

Stop interrupting

Rule Two is probably most obviously violated when we interrupt.

Interruptions, of course, also offend Rule One. By interrupting, we show that we’ve stopped paying attention. We’re communicating urgency rather than cultivating ease; we’re actively discouraging the speaker from continuing to speak.

I have spent decades working at the skill of not interrupting. In my experience, most interruptions are unhelpful. Resist the urge at (almost) all times.

Mind the gap

Once you stop interrupting, the conversation might slow down. Pauses might appear. You’ll need to decide whether you should fill the silence and take your turn.

Is the pause filled or empty?

• A filled pause is filled with thought. The speaker might stop and look away. They’re on an excursion, and you’re not invited. But they’ll want you to be there at the junction when they come back. You’re privileged that they’ve trusted you to wait. So, wait.

• An empty pause is not filled with thought. You’re standing at the junction in the conversation together, and neither of you is moving. If you’re both comfortable with that, let the pause run on. If not, ask a question.

If the other person is ready, take your turn.

Take your turn

You need to work out:

• when to take your turn; and
• what to say.

To do that, think about how you can do the following.

• Come in on cue. If you leave too long a gap before speaking, your companion will probably think you’ve not been listening. A gap of only half a second can be enough to attract notice.
• Show that you’ve been listening. If you don’t indicate that you’ve been paying attention to what your companion has been saying, they might feel that you’re not interested.
• Say something relevant to what your companion has said. If your remark seems unrelated to what they’ve been saying, they will be baffled or worried.

All this might sound obvious. But it can be hard to follow these guidelines in a real conversation. Practise them deliberately in a low-stakes conversation.

Rule Three: apply the Cooperative Principle

In the most successful conversations, we’re cooperating to reach some kind of shared understanding. We might agree that we disagree about something; but the success of the conversation itself depends on our ability to cooperate. Think of this as a game of tennis in which you both want to keep the ball in play. As you take your turn, try to set your partner up to take their turn successfully.

Four ways to cooperate

At each turn, you could cooperate with your partner in (at least) four ways. You could:

• connect to their remark in some way;
• complete what they’ve said;
• clarify something you don’t quite understand; or
• convert what they’ve said into a new idea.

And you could do that by either asking a question or by making a statement.

Suppose your conversation partner is complaining about a supplier giving them poor service. You might ask a question.

• “I wonder – how could we tackle this problem?” [Connecting]
• “How could we find out whether they always operate like this?” [Completing]
• “How could we identify a particular aspect of service that seems to fail?” [Clarifying]
• “So, should we be looking for a new supplier?” [Converting]

Or you could make a statement.

• “That’s interesting. I’ve been having a similar problem with one of my suppliers.” [Connecting]
• “They seem to have other issues as well, from what I’ve heard.” [Completing]
• “I know what you mean. Late invoicing seems to be a particular issue.” [Clarifying]
•  “Well, maybe we’re not making our expectations clear enough.” [Converting]

Applying the three rules

We hold all sorts of conversations at work. Some are more or less formal: planned interviews, performance reviews, meetings and presentations (yes, I do think of a presentation as a kind of conversation). Some conversations are spontaneous, unplanned and relaxed.

The three rules apply to all of these conversations. Balance speaking and listening; take turns carefully; use the Cooperative Principle.

And watch your conversations improve.

Explore the ideas in this post in more depth.