Managing conversations during onboarding and beyond

Before you engage in any conversation with anyone, know why.  That why will help you determine whether you're better off assimilating into their thinking, or converging and evolving them, or shocking them.

Assimilate

Consider assimilating into their thinking if your goal is to support them.  If they're doing good things and you want to encourage them, let them lead.  Follow and reinforce.

Converge and Evolve

Converging and evolving is appropriate when you agree with the other person in some ways, and want to help them evolve their thinking in some other ways.  Start with the common ground where you agree.  Converge on that.  Then build off the positive feelings engendered by those agreements to help get on the page with new possibilities.  Conver(ge) + Sati(sfy) + On = Conversation.  (OK.  It's a little cute.  But it might help you remember.)

Shock

Shocking is always dangerous because it's, well, shocking.  But sometimes you have to throw a new piece of information in someone's way to help them see things differently.  You probably want to use a shock technique rarely, but you do want to have it ready just in case.