Professional vs. Personal Conversations
After a bit of a pause in blog posts, I thought I’d come back and speak to a question posed by Kim Hyshka of Dialogue Partners in episode #24 of the Cool Collaborations podcast. In our conversation, she challenged us to pay attention to and think about the differences between our professional and personal conversational situations. She asked that we take the opportunity in each of these situations to step back from our involvement for a moment to observe the meeting process and see what’s working and not working.
So, let’s take a look. For my version of Kim’s exercise, I’m comparing professional conversations that happen outside of an official meeting with a personal conversation with a group of friends. Here’s a three points to compare and contrast.
1) Food
Almost without exception, my personal conversations include the potential for eating or drinking while only a few professional conversations might include food and drink. In my experience, the closer the professional relationship is to friendship, the more likely it is to include eating. When I think of the work colleagues I would join for coffee (or for a walk to get coffee), they are almost always both friends and colleagues. In personal settings, food can be the ‘excuse’ for getting together.
Food is a really powerful belonging cue that signals you are part of the group. For established relationships, like in personal conversations and close working relationships, eating and drinking together as a group is a way of reinforcing the bonds between group members.
2) Humor
When getting together with friends, there is always an element of fun and humour, probably because that is some of the reason for gathering in the first place. Thinking about, I’m not sure I’d be willing to spend my personal time with people if there wasn’t some fun in it.
In professional settings, there is an element of humour and joviality, but I would suggest that it is much subdued. It’s like we all push our desire to be ‘professional’ to the front and our normal tendencies to inject humour into our relations to the rear. It turns out there are actually advisors who coach businesses on how to increase the humour in everyday business life. (check out Mike Kerr and Humor at Work for more).
3) Dynamic
Regardless of their purpose, personal conversations don’t usually have much structure and can take a meandering route toward whatever goal they are intending to achieve. I think this is because the relationship is more important than the individual conversations, which means that time is spent on conversation that is meant to maintain and build the relationship between the people in the conversation.
I’ve observed that professional conversations focus more on results and less on the relationship. In fact, the ‘idle chit chat’ is often eliminated or confined to the periphery of the conversation. It feels unproductive to indulge in ‘personal’ conversation inside a professional one. I have noted; however, from my personal experience that the conversations of higher performing teams (outside of a meeting rooms) tend to feel much more like personal conversations (more humour, less direct).
I’m sure there are many other ways that professional conversation can inform personal conversations, and vice versa. What are your thoughts? Send me a note at scott.millar@collaboration-dynamics.com or leave a comment below.
Happy collaborating!
Scott Millar, through Collaboration Dynamics, often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together.
Season 2 of the Cool Collaborations podcast is here! Join Scott as he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
