Conversational Magic

Today a colleague and I completed the delivery of a new 5 week program we have designed called W.O.W.Power ( Willing, Open Wizard). We had loads of fun with our wizard theme complete with wizard capes and wands, castles, and wizard books for the 12 participants to compile.

The intention of the program was to have a team of leaders move to where they were having magical conversations- conversations that were deeper than normal, that were somewhat transformational in nature, that have substance and develop the team in the process. The program was a series of 4 two-hour sessions with some in-workplace assignments in the weeks between the sessions. Simple, practical model for learning yet quite magical in how well it worked overall.

We witnessed over the weeks conversational magic emerge. I was encouraged and in awe of the shifts we saw and heard and how the group built trust and improved relationships through this transformative conversational approach. Interesting to note that there is also some new research I read about out of the University of Arizona and Washington that holding substantive, meaningful conversations at work increases our level of happiness, with happiness to a degree being related to our level of engagement. We certainly saw happier more engaged employees emerge through this relatively short program.

Maybe it was the magic wands that made the difference or maybe it was the magic of learning and applying the coach-like leadership skills- all I know was the group had a lot of fun and transformed themselves through the magic of deeper conversations. Perhaps if we can learn to have deeper conversations in our workplace, if we can get past the fast paced social media multi-tasking and take the time to listen and ask more deeply we will notice some shifts in the level of engagement in our organizations.