What do you hope will happen as the result of most conversations?

I’m not talking about the occasional conversation where you simply need to tell someone what they need to know. I mean the normal conversations that make up so much of our lives. An employee comes into your office with a problem. Your spouse is trying to work something out. One of your kids is frustrated. A friend is stuck. Someone at church wants to talk through a decision.

What outcome are you hoping for?

There are certainly some shallow outcomes we might be tempted toward:

• I hope this conversation will be over quickly.
• I hope they think I am funny.
• I hope I feel important.
• I hope I can immediately solve their problem.

I’ve probably entered conversations hoping for all four of those outcomes, sometimes at the same time.

There are also some more manipulative outcomes. I might give someone my idea, but ask enough questions that they think it was their idea. I might play dumb so they don’t continue to bother me. I might tell them what they want to hear. Or I might avoid the truth because I have decided the truth could make things worse.

Those are obviously not great outcomes.

Then there are some perfectly good social outcomes:

• They will like me better, and I will like them better.
• My social life will improve.
• I will have made a friend.
• I will get elected mayor.

Nothing wrong with any of those. Depending on where you live, one of them might even be a reasonable life goal.

But I think there is another outcome we should desire in a surprising number of our conversations:

I want the other person to leave empowered.

That means they have figured out what to do next. They own both the problem and the solution. They are more confident about their next step. They have learned something useful about themselves.

The immediate problem may get solved, but something bigger has happened as well. The person leaves the conversation a little more capable of handling the next problem.

That is what I mean by an empowered conversation.

And this is useful almost everywhere: with business partners, employees, spouses, children, friends, neighbors, and volunteers at church. Anywhere you want people to grow in responsibility, confidence, wisdom, and ownership, an empowered conversation is worth considering.

There are certainly times when this is not the right kind of conversation. Sometimes you need to tell someone what to do. Sometimes you have information they simply need. Sometimes a decision has already been made and your responsibility is to communicate it clearly.

But I think we dramatically overestimate how often that is necessary.

I would say 83% of the time you would be better served by having an empowered conversation.

I completely made up 83%.

But I believe the principle.

Empowered conversations should probably be among the most common conversations we have, and yet they may be among the rarest.

The first shift is believing a better conversation is possible.

We tend to assume that if someone brings us a problem, our job is to solve it. If they are stuck, we should point them in the right direction. If they are uncertain, we should tell them what we think.

An empowered conversation begins with a different belief. The person sitting across from me may be more capable than I am giving them credit for. They may be able to think this through. They may be able to identify options. They may be able to take responsibility. They may be able to come up with the next step themselves.

Maybe the first thing I need to believe is not even that this will be better for them. Maybe I need to believe it will be better for me.

William Oncken Jr. and Donald Wass wrote a classic Harvard Business Review article in 1974 called “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?” Their metaphor is simple. An employee walks into the manager’s office carrying a problem. The problem is the monkey.

The employee explains what is going on, and the manager says something like, “Let me think about that and get back to you.”

The employee leaves.

Guess where the monkey is now?

It has moved from the employee’s back to the manager’s desk.

Oncken and Wass were writing about management and delegation, but the picture applies to all kinds of conversations. People arrive carrying monkeys, and some of us are incredibly skilled at collecting them.

Someone comes to us with a problem and we say, “Here’s what I think you should do.” Or, “Let me take care of that.” Or, “I’ll talk to them.” Or, “Send it to me.”

Pretty soon we are carrying problems that originally belonged to everyone around us.

A better goal for many conversations is that the monkey leaves with the person who brought it in.

That does not mean I was unhelpful. I may have helped them get clear about what is really happening. I may have helped them see possibilities they had not considered. I may have helped them decide what they are going to do next.

I was fully engaged in the conversation.

I just did not take ownership of their problem.

At Coach Approach Ministries, we know how to teach people to have these kinds of conversations. There are specific skills that are useful. There are particular shapes a conversation can take. And there is a posture that allows you to remain deeply engaged with another person without becoming responsible for solving whatever they brought into the room.

That last part may be the hardest because solving problems feels helpful. Giving advice feels helpful. Taking something off someone else’s plate feels helpful.

And sometimes it is.

But if that is the outcome of most of our conversations, we eventually create people who become increasingly dependent on us while we become increasingly overwhelmed by them.

After more than 15 years of coaching people one-to-one, coaching groups, training coaches, and leading organizations, I have become convinced that empowering conversations are the right conversation far more often than most of us realize.

They produce better next steps.

But more importantly, they develop stronger people.

And maybe that is the outcome we should be hoping for when someone walks into our office carrying a monkey.