The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation - Couverture rigide

Yankelovich, Daniel

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0684854570 ISBN 13 : 9780684854571

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 1999

Synopsis

Book by Yankelovich Daniel

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Chapter 1: Overcoming the Dialogue Deficit

Dialogue played a special role in reversing the nuclear arms race and ending the Cold War. Some years after the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency, George Shultz, who had been Reagan's secretary of state, asked Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, what the turning point in the Cold War had been.

"Reykjavík," Gorbachev answered unhesitatingly.

He explained that at their meeting in Reykjavík, Iceland, he and Ronald Reagan had for the first time entered into genuine dialogue with each other -- a dialogue that extended far beyond their main agenda (arms control) to cover their values, assumptions, and aspirations for their two nations. Gorbachev credited this dialogue with establishing enough trust and mutual understanding to begin to reverse the nuclear arms race.

In Oslo, Norway, in the year before Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated, a delegation of top-level Israelis and Palestinians, previously implacable enemies, held nonstop dialogue sessions over a period of months. Together they hammered out a blueprint for peace in the Middle East that lasted until Rabin's violent death upset the political balance.

These are history-making examples of dialogue. But dialogue is not the exclusive property of those who perform on the world stage. It works at all levels of life in ways large and small:

In San Diego County, a group of American and Mexican businesspeople and community leaders convene regularly under the auspices of San Diego Dialogue, a project of the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). These dialogues are so successful that once-intractable border and regional problems are now dealt with almost routinely.

In Silicon Valley, the CEO of a successful high-tech company recently held a weekend retreat with all the engineers in the company to conduct a dialogue on why so many of the most promising young engineers were leaving to go to competitors whose stock option plans were less generous than his own. After an initial stiffness, one after the other of the younger engineers explained that as much as they appreciated the generous stock bonuses, they felt that their ideas were unappreciated and brushed aside and that the employer reserved all of the important decisions to himself. One engineer said, "I know the stock options are supposed to make me feel like an owner, but when I come to work I don't feel like an owner. I feel like a peon, and that's not why I came to this company."

At first the employer (an engineer himself) was defensive in asserting his conviction that the CEO should be the undisputed leader who calls the shots. As the dialogue unfolded, however, he slowly began to qualify his position. Gradually, the session picked up momentum, with many of the young engineers offering ideas for improving the company's products and reducing costs.

By the end of the weekend, the employer had begun to reexamine his assumptions about leadership, and the engineers who worked for him had begun to understand him better. Subsequently, the employer made the effort to adopt a more consultative style of leadership. It never came naturally to him, but he saw the merit of it and was able to meet his coworkers halfway. Gradually, the flight of engineers from the company slowed to a trickle.

In Boston several years ago, under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a number of Boston's public school teachers met over a several-day period with an equal number of professors from Harvard, MIT, and other universities in the Boston area. Together they carried out a sustained dialogue on how to improve public education in the Boston area. It was the first time these university professors (many of them distinguished scientists) and public school teachers had met as equals. Most left the meeting exhilarated and astonished at how much they had learned, how much respect they had developed for each other's point of view, and how much more hopeful they had become about future prospects for Boston's schools.

In a large midwestern food company, an older male executive formed a successful mentoring relationship with a younger woman executive. Both avoided any hint of sexual involvement and even the appearance of impropriety. A bond of real friendship as well as a business relationship united the two executives. Then one day a trivial misunderstanding triggered tension between them. The man wrongly assumed that he had offended his younger colleague's feminist sensibilities. An uncomfortable distance sprang up between them. Finally, however, they succeeded in engaging each other in dialogue. The misunderstanding evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. Now strengthened, the relationship resumed on a tranquil basis.

Every day countless dialogues -- formal and informal, brief and prolonged, between strangers and between people intimate with each other -- take place in a variety of settings and circumstances. Many, perhaps most, fail. But those that succeed transform people's relationships to one another, sometimes in ways that seem almost magical.

"The magic of dialogue."

I find the words easy to say now. Years ago they would have sounded exaggerated and unnatural to me. I would not even have known what they meant, let alone believed in them. Now they sound natural, and I fully believe in them.

The magic doesn't work if you substitute a different form of talk for dialogue. The magic of conversation? The magic of discussion? The magic of debate? None of these phrases rings true. But dialogue works its magic because it alone has unique capabilities other forms of talk do not possess.

In this book I identify what is special about dialogue, what gives it its magical properties, and, most important, what strategies individuals and organizations can use to help them conduct the kind of dialogue that best meets their objectives.

Most people have two purposes for doing dialogue: to strengthen personal relationships and to solve problems.

Today, this second purpose is growing in importance: increasingly, we find ourselves facing problems that require more shared understanding with others than in the past.

The need to reach better mutual understanding through dialogue is strong in all sectors of society, but in none more than the business community. The growth of technology, the increase in the number of knowledge workers, and the blurring of boundaries of all kinds are transforming relationships at all levels of business. The traditional top-down style of leadership in a fortress-type company semi-isolated from others is increasingly out of vogue. It is being replaced by what I have come to think of as "relational leadership," where the defining task of leaders is developing webs of relationships with others rather than handing down visions, strategies, and plans as if they were commandments from the mountaintop.

Many forces converge to intensify the need for dialogue in business settings:

• The steady erosion of authority and hierarchy in the workplace in favor of flatter organizations.
  
  
• The trend toward forming strategic alliances with organizations that bring different corporate cultures, traditions, structures, and even languages to the new partnerships. Without dialogue, misunderstandings arise almost immediately.
  
  
• The need to repair the damage to morale that results from downsizing. Employers who have recently downsized or reengineered their companies confront a mistrusting and resentful workforce precisely when, to remain competitive, they need highly motivated workers.
  
  
• The need to stimulate the maximum amount of creativity, innovation, and initiative in coworkers, rather than simply expecting them to show up and obey orders.
  
  
• The need to align the entire organization in implementing shared visions and strategies.
  
  
• The growing demand by employees for quality-of-life benefits rather than exclusively financial and status incentives.
  
  
• The growing importance of developing a strong customer focus, which requires a better understanding of one's customers.
  

In this book, we will be concerned with dialogue in all walks of life: public and private, personal and impersonal. But I intend to give special attention to the requirements for dialogue in the business sector of our society and, by extension, to organizations that share the same sort of leadership challenges that business faces.

What Is Dialogue?

What is dialogue, and what can it do for us that other ways of talking cannot?

Webster defines the purpose of dialogue as "seeking mutual understanding and harmony." In this book, I hew closely to the dictionary definition, straying from it in only one respect: I put less emphasis on harmony than the dictionary does, because the outcome of dialogue is not always harmony. In fact, as a consequence of dialogue you may come to understand why you disagree so vehemently with someone else; there will be better understanding but not necessarily more harmony.

In philosopher Martin Buber's classic work I and Thou, Buber suggests that in authentic dialogue something far deeper than ordinary conversation goes on. The I-Thou interaction implies a genuine openness of each to the concerns of the other. In such dialogue, "I" do not, while talking with you, selectively tune out views with which I disagree, nor do I busy myself marshaling arguments to rebut you while only half attending to what you have to say, nor do I seek to reinforce my own prejudices. Instead, I fully "take in" your viewpoint, engaging with it in the deepest sense of the term. You do likewise. Each of us internalizes the views of the other to enhance our mutual understanding.

To Buber we owe the stunning insight that, apart from its obvious practical value (most problem solving demands mutual understanding), dialogue expresses an essential aspect of the human spirit. Buber knew that dialogue is a way of being. In Buber's philosophy, life itself is a form of meeting and dialogue is the "ridge" on which we meet. In dialogue, we penetrate behind the polite superficialities and defenses in which we habitually armor ourselves. We listen and respond to one another with an authenticity that forges a bond between us.

In this sense, dialogue is a process of successful relationship building. Buber recognized that by performing the seemingly simple act of responding empathically to others and in turn being heard by them, we transcend the constricting confines of the self. Instead of saying "you or me," you hear yourself saying "you and me." The act of reaching beyond the self to relate to others in dialogue is a profound human yearning. If it were less commonplace, we would realize what a miracle it is.

Dialogue is not, however, an arcane and esoteric form of intellectual exercise that only the few can play. It is a practical, everyday tool accessible to us all. Nor is it a reversion to the participatory ideology of the 1960s with its insistence that everybody get involved in every decision, thus bringing decision making to a virtual halt. It is not, in fact, an instrument of decision making, which always involves considerations of power and interest -- issues that interfere with dialogue. And it is not a negotiating device that seeks agreement leading to action. In fact, some of dialogue's most striking successes (for example, in our relations with the former Soviet Union) have occurred because dialogue preceded, and was sharply distinguished from, formal negotiations.

A Missing Skill

Until recently, most people made the assumption that no particular skill is required to do dialogue. They assumed that dialogue is just another form of conversation and that we surely know how to carry out conversations without requiring a special discipline. Therefore, there was little need felt for assistance in doing dialogue. But in the past decade, a growing literature has demonstrated that there is something unique about dialogue when it is done well.

Dialogue turns out to be a highly specialized form of discussion that imposes a rigorous discipline on the participants. If they fail to observe the discipline, they still derive the benefits of ordinary discussion, but they lose the benefits of successful dialogue. On the other hand, when dialogue is done skillfully, the results can be extraordinary: long-standing stereotypes dissolved, mistrust overcome, mutual understanding achieved, visions shaped and grounded in shared purpose, people previously at odds with one another aligned on objectives and strategies, new common ground discovered, new perspectives and insights gained, new levels of creativity stimulated, and bonds of community strengthened.

I do not want to overstate the benefits of dialogue. Though I believe it sometimes has almost magical properties, it is not a panacea for all the problems that ail us. Faith in the ability of talk to solve problems is very American and, to some cynics, a sign of our cultural naïveté. It is certainly easy to poke fun at serious-minded and well-meaning attempts at dialogues that miscarry. And many efforts at dialogue do, unfortunately, miscarry.

Dialogue can fail for a variety of reasons. At times, violence, hate, and mistrust can prove stronger than the motivation to find common ground (as shown by, for example, Serbs and Albanians, Turks and Armenians, Arabs and Israelis). Or differences in interests can pose massive obstacles to dialogue. But the most frequent reason that dialogue fails is simply that it is not done well. Doing dialogue takes special skills that most Americans do not yet possess.

This is because in the past there was less need for dialogue and therefore less pressure to develop the special skills it requires. Those in positions of authority -- executives, teachers, parents -- usually told others beneath them what to do without bothering to engage them in extensive dialogue. Much less emphasis was placed on mutual understanding. In schools, teachers exercised their authority without necessarily understanding their students' psyches or the wishes of their students' parents. In the workplace, employers and employees weren't expected to understand each other as one human being to another. The employer was the boss. If you wanted to keep your job, you followed orders and did what you were told. In smaller workplaces, personal relationships did, of course, develop, and people who worked closely together often did come to understand each other quite well. But the culture did not demand such mutual understanding. It certainly did not demand that bosses develop an in-depth understanding of their employees' attitudes, motivations, and sensibilities.

In traditional hierarchical arrangements, those at the top of the pecking order can afford to be casual about how well they understand those at lower levels. But when people are more equal, they are obliged to make a greater effort to understand each other. If no one is the undisputed boss anymore, and if all insist on having their views respected, it follows that people must understand each other. You don't re...

Présentation de l'éditeur

In this groundbreaking work, famed social scientist and world-famous public opinion expert Daniel Yankelovich reinvents the ancient art of dialogue.
Successful managers have always known how to make decisions and mobilize coworkers. But as our businesses continue to expand, conversations and discussions just aren't enough to bring people and their different agendas together anymore. Dialogue, when properly practiced, will align people with a shared vision, and help them realize their full potential as individuals and as a team. Drawing on decades of research and using real life examples, The Magic of Dialogue outlines specific strategies for maneuvering in a wide range of situations and teaches managers, leaders, business people, and other professionals how to succeed in the new global economy, where more players participate in decision-making than ever before.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684854570
• ISBN 13: 9780684854571
• Reliure: Relié
• Langue: anglais
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 236
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible