Preparing your team for Conversations that Matter: 4 Practical Tips to help you get started
Conversations that matter are deep, genuine exchanges that build connection, understanding, and insight by exploring emotions, experiences, and perspectives. They require people to be genuinely curious – sometimes vulnerable – but always willing to see things from alternative viewpoints.
These conversations help people feel seen, heard and valued, and can lead to real change; whether it’s personal growth, stronger relationships, or better decision-making. Those things in turn, can result in big wins for a team including increased trust and psychological safety, greater innovation, and overall higher performance.
It is an approach to communication; a method of engaging with others that is purposeful and human-centred.
Conversations that matter are generally associated with performance and feedback discussions. Those where we address underperformance issues in a timely, fair and curious way to understand what might be contributing to the underperformance and identify supports to rectify whatever the issue is. And this makes sense with research conducted by Gallup showing 80% of employees who receive meaningful feedback were described as ‘fully engaged’. Conversations that matter can extend beyond performance discussions though.
Because the approach is rooted in human-centred principles (trust, empathy, and proactive communication), conversations that matter can be used to address emotionally sensitive situations at work, tease out professional development or career aspiration goals, uncover causes of discomfort with change or particular work tasks, and resolve interpersonal conflict in the workplace.
You might be wondering: ‘this all sounds great – but how do I actually bring my team along when this style of working is totally new to them?’ It’s a reasonable question and I’ll start by acknowledging that an overnight transformation is pretty unlikely. 
A promising starting point, however, is taking some of the concepts used in conversations that matter and grounding those in everyday exchanges. I’ve put together 4 practical tips that you can use to help your team reshape the way they interact with each other, and prepare them for building conversations that matter into the workplace.
Really get to know your team:
Think about how the team is operating as a whole unit. Are you seeing high-transaction low-connection behaviours or perhaps avoidant, or overly agreeable ways of working? Is the team in a state of stagnation or disengagement? The first step towards disrupting the status quo is understanding your team.
When you get to know the individual work styles, moods, needs, and motivations of your team members you can undertake intentional interventions to energise people, create momentum, foster healthy debate, provide support and connect people.
Build a foundation of psychological safety
Work towards creating a work environment that is safe for people to share their unique perspectives, own their mistakes, respectfully challenge ideas, and to be authentic.
As a leader, your role is pivotal in creating this safe space – set the ground rules for demonstrating respect, encourage team members to be curious and listen actively, and to maintain confidentiality to facilitate trust and openness. You could start with building these concepts into team meetings and decision-making processes.
Notably, a trend we are seeing is the tendency to label difficult discussions as ‘unsafe’. If this arises, explore what that means and talk about the fact that meaningful discussions can sometimes feel uncomfortable, awkward, or challenging but that isn’t the same as them being unsafe.
Create opportunities for deeper connection
You are in a unique position as a leader to intentionally create and shape opportunities for connection within your team. By taking time to connect beyond tasks and checking in on obstacles, underlying needs, and personal well-being, you signal genuine care.
A good place to start is by adjusting regular one-on-one meetings to go beyond the transactional ‘WIP’ style to include deeper discussion; think questions like, ‘What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing right now?’ or ‘What’s something I can do this week to better support you?’
Another opportunity might be opening team meetings with a temperature check to gauge mood and engagement levels- creating space for conversation and collaborative problem-solving.
Be the change you want to see
Leaders set the tone by modelling the behaviours they want to see in others. To foster an environment that supports conversations that matter, this is going to include showing vulnerability—being open about challenges, admitting mistakes, and asking for help. All of these things signal to others that it’s safe for them to do the same.
Show team members what active listening and genuine curiosity means in a practical sense. During interactions with others, focus on being fully present, using positive body language (like eye-contact, nodding etc), and providing verbal feedback (‘I understand’), validating feelings (‘that sounds frustrating…’) and asking questions (‘What do you mean when you say ABC?’). Avoid interrupting or jumping straight to solutions before the person has had the full opportunity to talk through their experience – you want them to feel seen, heard, and valued.
And while we talk about having deeper interactions, a great place to start is by creating, identifying and responding positively to ‘bids for connection’ (coined by relationship therapists John & Julie Gottman from The Gottman Institute). It’s something that can be overlooked easily but goes a long way in building rapport and connection in relationships.
A bid for connection is any attempt – verbal, or non-verbal – to get another person’s attention, presence, or support and it can be as subtle as someone sharing an interesting article, asking how a recent presentation went, sighing loudly in the office, or casual comments like ‘argh, it’s so busy at the moment!’.
Responding positively (called ‘Turning Toward’) might mean simple acknowledgement (‘Thanks, great article!’), participation (‘the presentation when really well, they particularly liked ABC’), showing consideration (‘you sound how I feel, want to grab a coffee?’), or validation and support (‘So busy! Let’s order the priorities and see what we can put on hold.’). You’ll experience connection setbacks through negative responses like ignoring someone or giving a minimal/distracted response (‘Turning Away’) or being dismissive, rejecting, or aggressive (‘Turning Against’).
True Conversations that Matter will have a positive impact on the wellbeing, social connections, behaviours and attitudes in the workplace, but it can be challenging to go from ‘0 to 100’ if your team isn’t used to this way of working.
If we view Conversations that Matter as an approach to communication – a method of engaging with others that is purposeful and human-centred – there are manageable adjustments we can make to support teams in reshaping how they interact at work. Once those foundations are set, you can look at formalising greater structure both within these discussions, and within the contexts in which they should occur.
What can we here at Worklogic do to help?
If you’ve set the mood in your team and you’re ready to build some structure around conversations that matter, Worklogic conducts training for people leaders on this very topic. Head to our training page for more information and schedule one of our expert consultants to attend your workplace to conduct our ‘Conversations that Matter’ training.
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