How to Talk with Anyone about Anything, page 15
Revitalizing a Community Agency Through Group Dialogue
Al Turtle, a skilled practitioner of Imago Therapy, retired a few years ago as a psychologist and relationship therapist in Idaho, where he was celebrated for his work in the community as well. When he stepped down as a board member of the local United Way of Kootenai County in Northern Idaho, for example, it was noted that he had volunteered more than 150,000 hours of his professional time to the organization.
Al was an early adapter of Communologue/Group Dialogue and used it for the benefit of his local United Way. He was known for helping people feel safe and comfortable in conversations, even if there were differing views in play.
For example, Al was asked to meet regularly with a group of Army Reserve–enlisted men and their noncommissioned officer leaders who were not getting along because of trust issues and, as a result, had difficulty completing their work. By using SC Group Dialogue methods, he enabled them to develop mutual respect and trust and begin working together effectively.
Al was also known for his work as the facilitator of meetings of the local United Way’s board of directors, where he made it safe to express differing views through “pre-validation,” a process based on his belief that “everyone has in their mind a personal rationale for whatever they say, and that’s OK.”9 He also used mirroring and other SC Group Dialogue methods to let members know that they were being listened to and understood. His facilitation methods ultimately helped to bring more dynamic leadership that revitalized the organization.
Bringing Together Historic Enemies to Increase Understanding
There are few groups in modern times with a history of conflict like that of the Israelis and Palestinians, whose contentiousness traces back to the end of the nineteenth century. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, brought this history to a horrific level in our times.
Before that already infamous attack, several organizations, companies, and everyday people brought Israelis and Palestinians together peacefully—seeking understanding, connection, and solutions. The indiscriminate attacks on civilians, however, justifiably caused feelings of rage, despair, betrayal, fear, and revenge, resulting in large-scale destruction and trauma throughout the region. At the time of this writing, the question of survival is too real for both Israelis and Palestinians (and unfortunately for Jews and Muslims around the world).
We decided to keep the following story in the book, despite the events that began on October 7, not only to honor the legacy of the work in Israel by Imago faculty member Orli Wahrman, but also to remind us of what is possible. And while reconciliation, healing, and peace may seem profoundly remote, we remember that the same was true at one point for people traumatized under apartheid in South Africa or during the civil war in Liberia or for the countless other nations ravaged by war. Safety, however, is indiscriminately an absolute. Without safety, SC Dialogue is not possible. Thus, with Orli’s blessing, we share the work that was done in Israel prior to October 7.
World-renowned Imago faculty member Orli Wahrman, a native of Israel and a pioneer in implementing Communologue, has endeavored for years to bring Palestinians and Israelis together through Group Dialogue.
Encouraged to bring positive change in the world, Orli conceived and led the Palestinian-Israeli Imago Project from 2002 to 2008, and was also involved in the Jewish-Arab Co-Existence Group, which began in 2006.
When this dedicated peace activist first conceived of bringing Palestinians and Israelis together, she led a demonstration workshop with two Israeli and two Palestinian couples in her private clinic, with support from the Israel Trauma Coalition. A Palestinian partner joined to provide equal representation and sensitivity to cultural differences.
The workshop was deemed a success, which allowed her to secure a $50,000 private grant to launch the peace project using Group Dialogue as the process for overcoming entrenched differences between the twenty-five rotating Israeli and Palestinian couples.
She established with them that the goal of using Group Dialogue and its trained facilitator was to create an environment for the safe sharing of personal viewpoints between two groups that might otherwise be unable to tolerate each other’s views, combining couples’ work and Group Dialogue, or Communologue, into a beautiful holding container. The participants agreed in advance to follow the process guidelines throughout the sessions.
Their first major Peace Project workshop was held in Istanbul, Turkey, to create a neutral ground and reduce political distractions. Five Arab and five Israeli couples came together for the four-day workshop. After the initial two days of a couples’ workshop, they were encouraged to discuss any subject in the peaceful Communologue process. All participants were considered equals.
In their early discussions, the differences in their cultures became clearer than ever, Orli said in an interview later.
We Jews learned that the traditional Arab society is a men’s society. Socially the conversations are between men. Men hang around with men. Wives in Arab couples are not normally treated as equals. The dialogical approach to relationships was quite new for them and full of potential. A second and wider form of equality came as both sides learned about life stories. Once we got down to the painful issues behind our present quarrels, we found out how similar we really are.10
The participants were not the only parties to learn from the workshop. The leaders also had to be flexible in their approach due to cultural sensitivities. This included even changing common metaphors used in workshops, such as “crossing the bridge,” which reminded participants of checkpoints common in their disputed territories.
“Telling them to go to a safe place brought a reaction that for them, there is no safe place,” Orli noted in an interview with Donald L. Gibbon. As a result, “We had to change our texts to make them more appropriate.”11
Even when the workshop participants and leaders went out to dinner at a Turkish restaurant, the history of conflict followed them—and yet, so did their experiences with Group Dialogue. When other Arab diners asked the Palestinians why they were sitting with Israelis, they answered, “They are our friends!”12After the success of the Istanbul sessions, several other meetings of the group were held, including one in Haifa, far from Jerusalem and overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. For this session, Arab participants were guests in the homes of Israelis, which was a major cultural challenge because many Arabs would consider that to be sleeping in the home of a traditional enemy.
The Arab participants came away from that experience with a different view of their hosts. It was noted that their hearts and views of Israelis may have softened and opened a bit. Some revisioned the soldiers at the hated checkpoints might be the children of their hosts.
Reports said relationships were permanently altered for participants on both sides. In fact, a family workshop was held in which children and grandchildren of participants were invited. Forty-eight people took part. The final session taught the children Imago principles, which bonded them all.13
Orli noted that the intense and violent historic conflict between these two very different participating groups resulted in many tense and emotional moments in the workshops, but the Communologue process rose to the challenge and kept everyone safe.
The volatile topic of Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip resulted in some especially tense exchanges in which the Jewish participants were not appreciative of how painful the occupation was. An Israeli participant validated by saying, “It’s like somebody putting a knife in your neck, then, when they take the knife out, they want you to say, ‘Thank you.’”14 Thankfully, both sides stayed with the format—listening, mirroring, and offering empathy to overcome differences and advance mutual understanding.
The Lebanon War was another contentious topic during a session held after the last war in Lebanon in 2006. Hezbollah had been shooting missiles in the north of the country and the Israeli participants came to the meeting feeling traumatized. Orli said of the Communologue process:
[It] helped us contain Palestinians saying that on one hand they cared about us and were thinking about us, but on the other hand they were glad that we got it. Everybody was crying, but we managed to listen without exploding. This is the power of this work. We also learned that they respect Hassan Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and we became curious to hear more. When you start listening, you learn all sort of stuff. Instead of focusing on who was right, we listened to discover and understand and put judgment aside.15
Despite some personal challenges in recent years, Orli continues to work for peace between these longtime adversaries through Group Dialogue. In an interview, she said: “We’ve kept our promise to them of safety no matter what. We’ve discovered a dialogue process for enemies or at least that our friends may have an enemy part in them. Couples and children are not a threat. We are able to talk to all of our people.”16
As Orli has demonstrated time and again, Communologue (Group Dialogue) empowers participants to move from entrenched power struggles into compassion, deep understanding, and a free exchange of ideas.
After the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, Orli was completely devastated, traumatized, and heartbroken from the terrible atrocities done by Hamas to the Jewish Israeli people and the war that followed in Gaza. As we completed this book, any hope for peace and the possibility of SC Dialogue and Communologue seemed remote to Orli and to many others.
Orli is one of our heroes. Her successful and brilliant work with various cultures is a testimony to the power of SC Dialogue in transcending differences. She and Al have shown that SC Dialogue is powerfully effective in helping individuals and groups achieve safety and move toward connecting. Each time this happens, we have the makings of a transformed culture locally, and eventually a new civilization where peace reigns.
CHAPTER 10
Safe Conversations at Work
Maddie is a lead engineer UX web designer in the corporate office of a financial services company in Florida. She is also the mother of a two-year-old daughter, Nichole. Her husband, Kyle, is a project manager for a large software-development company.
Both worked at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. They hired an in-home babysitter to help with Nichole during working hours, and it worked out well. Now, Maddie’s employer is trying to gradually bring its IT team members back into the corporate headquarters at least a couple of days a week. Kyle’s company told him that he will not have to return to the office, which is fine with him since he had at least an hour’s commute in heavy traffic.
Maddie has secretly begun searching for a job that allows her to work from home full time. Mostly, she believes she is more effective and less distracted working at home. Yet top management at her company has made it clear that they want all employees to return to the office eventually. She and the head of IT have discussed this and occasionally clashed over it.
Her IT boss says remote workers in general tend to have more conflicts and disagreements with supervisors because they rarely meet in person, communicating instead by texts, emails, Zoom, and other digital means that make it more difficult to build a sense of teamwork and trusting relationships. These challenges have become quite common in the postpandemic world of work, according to a 2021 study:1
“Eighty percent of remote professionals have experienced workplace conflict.”
Forty-six percent use a work messaging app for their arguments.
Nearly two in three workers (65 percent) have faced conflict with their coworkers. Nineteen percent have experienced conflict with their direct manager, 11 percent with an external manager, and 5 percent with an employee who worked at a different company.
The cause of conflict came from a “lack of transparency/honesty about something important,” according to 18 percent of respondents; 9 percent said it was due to a “clash of values”; and 2 percent said a “false accusation” caused the conflict.
More than one-third of respondents (36 percent) “felt that their bosses were too aggressive in their texts.”
After enduring virtual conflict with a coworker or a boss, 39 percent of respondents said “they wanted to leave or actually left their jobs due to the problem.”
And yet, those corporations where most employees have returned to their offices are also experiencing high levels of conflict over remote-work preferences. The major points of contention include:
staffing issues due to the Great Resignation;
generational gaps as younger workers replace those who have resigned and clash with older coworkers due to different values, issues of respect, and other cultural matters;
communication problems often involving misinterpretation of texts and emails;
differing attitudes about work and commitment to the job; and
ill will toward the corporation, often due to layoffs, terminations, outsourcing, and compensation disparities.
Safe Conversations: A Path to Healthier and More Profitable Corporate Cultures
Many businesses recognize that healthy relationships and a sense of safety in employee communications are critical to success. Yet most businesses don’t know how to achieve this.
Your company may achieve excellence in all other areas, only to be defeated by a toxic work environment. Why is it hard for employees to sometimes get along with one another and with supervisors and top managers?
A large part of the problem is, as we indicated in an earlier chapter, the traditional focus on individual achievement by the “best and brightest,” the practice of monologue and objection to difference, and lack of awareness that healthy relationships are essential, not optional, for healthy organizations and the emotional and mental health of individuals.
This emphasis encourages competition rather than collaboration, and it tends to reward those who are the most aggressively ambitious rather than those who thrive by building relationships and welcoming diverse opinions. American business culture also traditionally has valued improving the bottomline short term over building relationships and empowering teams to achieve success over the long term.
For many corporate employees, the goal is to reach the top of the organizational ladder by beating their competition up the rungs. Their aim is to dominate the competition through self-promotion. The competitive spirit can also interfere with healthy work relationships, which in turn impacts a company’s success.
By teaching people to talk without criticism, listen without judgment, and connect beyond differences, our SC Dialogue can help build a new culture in the corporate workplace. Happy employees in a healthy environment also improve the economic bottom line with increased profits.
Incorporating SC Dialogue strengthens teamwork skills and shifts the corporate culture so that employees and supervisors share a feeling that they are all in this together, working toward the same goals and sharing in the same rewards.
Adopting an open and collaborative work environment means people will feel more comfortable sharing their ideas and excited about carrying them out. This makes every employee feel heard and valued, which results in happier, more fulfilled, and more productive team members. Even better from a business perspective, the resulting free flow of ideas fosters creativity and innovation.2
The relationships between corporations and their employees, between employees and their supervisors, between employees and each other, and between employees and their customers and clients are critical to the well-being of corporations everywhere.
A 2023 Gallup report said, “After trending up in recent years, employee engagement in the U.S. saw its first annual decline in a decade—dropping from 36% engaged employees in 2020 to 34% in 2021. . . . Active disengagement increased by two percentage points from 2021 and four points from 2020.”3 The respected analytics and advisory company also reported a “six-point decline in the percentage of employees who are extremely satisfied with their organization as a place to work. These are all indications that employees are feeling more disconnected from their employers.”4
The Gallup report also noted that the largest decline in employee engagement was among those in remote-ready jobs who are currently working fully on-site. “It’s worth noting that exclusively remote employees saw an increase of four points in ‘quiet quitting,’ (aka not engaged in their work and workplace).”5
Positive social interaction plays an essential role in employee well-being, which increases employee engagement. Engaged employees “exhibit more altruistic behaviors by providing coworkers with help, guidance, advice, and feedback on various work-related matters.”6
We all want to have positive relationships with our bosses and coworkers. Who needs the stress of a toxic work environment? We would rather feel like our supervisors and coworkers share the same goals and support each other, right?
A workplace culture where everyone feels valued and supported is also good for business. Employee turnover is one of the most formidable invisible enemies of growth. High turnover rates disrupt corporate culture and weaken the fiscal health of the business. A public relations firm’s survey of four hundred large companies found the cost of disconnection and poor communication from bosses and among employees was $62.4 million annually. The toll of failed business relationships can include loss of valued employees and failed hires, as well as broken partnerships, disgruntled stakeholders, and lost customers.7
Strong relationships with employees, partners, suppliers, investors, and customers are critical to economic profitability for businesses. Disconnections in the workplace can influence employee well-being and engagement, not to mention turnover and the bottom line.
Many corporate workers have told us stories of how they struggled in their careers because of communication and relationship issues with coworkers, bosses, clients, or customers. Maybe you and your boss had differing views of your responsibilities, and you couldn’t come to an agreement. Or maybe a customer was unhappy with you and there was nothing you could do to resolve the issue. These are real-world problems in need of real-world answers, now more than ever before.
