Greetings! This is Ned Wasniewski, a member of the Insight Experience team. I'll be speaking to you about the importance of communication and specifically the skills of inquiry and advocacy as you collaborate and work with stakeholders in your day-to-day work on projects and special initiatives.
Successful collaboration begins with identifying with whom you should be working on a particular assignment or engagement. It then requires a deep understanding of what your collaboration partners or stakeholders need or hope to achieve in their work with you. It also involves sharing the same information with your stakeholders. Understanding what each of you needs might include understanding your respective goals and working together. It could include identifying specific outputs or deliverables for which you and/or your stakeholders are responsible, or it could include identifying resources required to achieve your goals, or outlining tasks and work assignments that need to be completed and by whom.
Understanding what stakeholders need when collaborating together requires active and effective communication. It will allow you to understand what's important and necessary to your collaboration partners, and it will enable you to share what's important to you and your organization when working with them. It will also help achieve alignment in purpose, process, and goals when collaborating with others.
There are three important communication skills and activities that will enable a team of people to more effectively collaborate with each other. These skills are advocacy, inquiry, and alignment. The first two skills, advocacy and inquiry, if done well, will facilitate team alignment, which is critical when collaborating with others.
Let's talk about advocacy first. Advocacy is the communication skill of making your thinking visible. It involves sharing your opinions, perspectives, and ideas about a topic with others. It allows your collaboration partners to fully understand your position or opinions about a topic or a decision that needs to be made. Advocacy enables them to consider other points of view, which may or may not align with their own, and may or may not lead them to shifting or altering their own opinions or positions.
It's important to understand that advocacy is more than just sharing your opinions or beliefs. Effective advocacy requires one to share the reasoning and rationale for the opinions and perspectives one holds. It explains why you have certain opinions or beliefs. As you make your thinking visible, you want to provide others with background context for your opinions or proposals. You want to share your assumptions for the topics at hand and share assumptions you have about your stakeholders and their opinions. Sharing assumptions allows you and your stakeholders to test and confirm what you believe and know about each other. Advocacy enables others to fully understand your positions and beliefs on a specific topic and vice versa.
While advocacy is about making your thinking visible, inquiry is about making others' thinking visible. It involves asking your stakeholders for their opinions and insights on a particular topic so that you have a full understanding of what they care about and what their goals are in working with you. Inquiry, like advocacy, helps uncover the reasoning and rationale for the opinions your collaboration partners have. Uncovering that reasoning can require asking many questions of your stakeholders in order for them to fully share and articulate why they hold certain points of view.
Inquiry requires active listening. Once you ask others for their insights or input, you need to carefully listen to and focus on what they are saying. Often, we are so focused on the next question we want to ask or how we might respond to our stakeholders' comments that we don't fully hear what they are telling us. Listening needs to be a conscious act. Inquiry also involves testing our understanding of what's being shared with us by playing back or summarizing what we've heard. This ensures that we have accurately heard what our stakeholders have told us.
There is an old leadership adage that says leaders don't provide the right answers; they ask the right questions. The benefit of asking the right questions is that it provides a greater range of perspectives that lead to better decision-making. Doing so can build ownership among collaboration partners for the decisions that have been made together, based on the information and insights that have been shared with one another.
The value of using the communication skills of advocacy and inquiry is that it helps facilitate alignment among a group of people working together. Advocacy and inquiry help identify where there is agreement among stakeholders, which will help facilitate decision-making. It will also surface where there is disagreement and potential conflict among parties. The benefit of surfacing these issues is that they are identified, and then the group can work together to resolve or reconcile any outstanding differences.
A leader plays an important role in facilitating communication among a group of people collaborating together. First, he or she should role-model the skills of advocacy and inquiry when communicating with others. But a leader also needs to enable others to use these skills effectively. A leader may need to explicitly ask or encourage others to advocate or make their own thinking visible, or a leader may need to coach others on the art of inquiry and asking questions to solicit ideas and insights from their own stakeholders.
I have one last observation to share with you. Of the two skills, most leaders are more proficient at advocacy. They have been trained, developed, and rewarded for sharing their opinions and ideas and for demonstrating judgment and making good decisions. However, fewer people have been encouraged or trained to help others make their thinking visible through inquiry in the art of asking questions. It can be a challenging transition to shift from advocacy and always providing the right answers to inquiry and asking the right questions. But it's a transition that will lead to more effective leadership, communication, and collaboration.
