Directions: Understanding the purposes and goals behind our communication is critical in building a strong team. Explore the different forms of communication below and reflect on how you want to communicate and interact with your team. You can also share this information with staff during staff meetings or staff training and ask them to reflect on the ways they communicate with each other.

Discussion

• Present ideas
• Seek answers and solutions
• Persuade others
• Share information
• Solve our own and other’s problems
• Give answers
• Acknowledge feelings, but sometimes discount them as inappropriate
• Listen for places of disagreement
• Avoid feelings
• Avoid areas of strong conflict and difference
• Retain relationships
• Avoid silence

Debate

• Succeed or win
• Look for weakness
• Stress disagreement
• Defend our opinion
• Focus on right and wrong
• Advocate one perspective or opinion
• Judge other viewpoints as invalid or inferior
• Deny other’s feelings
• Listen with a view of countering
• Focus on conflict and difference as advantage
• Disregard relationships
• Use silence to gain advantage

Dialogue

• Broaden our own perspective
• Look for shared meaning
• Find places of agreement
• Allow for and invite difference of opinion and experience
• Discover collective meaning
• Challenge ourselves and others preconceived notions
• Listen without judgment and with a view to understand
• Validate other’s feelings
• Build relationships
• Honor silence

Source Material:

Adapted from Exploring the Difference Between Dialogue, Discussion and Debate (Tanya Kachwaha, 2002, adapted from Huang-Nissan 1999)