What Conversational Intelligence® Tells Us About Team Communication in Early Childhood
- Sarah Moore
- Aug 12
- 6 min read
Most leaders think about communication in terms of content. What to say. How to phrase something. Which words to choose. And those things matter, of course. But Conversational Intelligence®, developed by organisational anthropologist Judith E. Glaser, starts somewhere quite different. It starts with what is happening in the brain during a conversation, and what that means for whether the person on the other side of the exchange can actually hear you at all.
This framework has been at the heart of the work I bring into early childhood leadership for many years. I am a Certified Conversational Intelligence® Coach, and the more I have applied these ideas in early childhood contexts, the more I understand why the quality of communication in a service is not primarily a skills problem. It is a trust problem. And trust is built, or eroded, one conversation at a time.
Conversations Are Neurochemical Events
Here is the foundational insight of Conversational Intelligence®, and it is worth sitting with: every conversation you have is a neurochemical event. Long before you have finished your sentence, the brain of the person listening to you has already made an assessment. Is this conversation safe? Am I being valued here? Is this person with me, or evaluating me?
Depending on that assessment, the brain releases very different chemicals. When people feel safe, connected, and genuinely heard, the brain releases oxytocin, the neurochemical associated with trust, openness, and collaboration. When people sense judgment, criticism, or threat (even subtle, unintended threat), cortisol rises. The prefrontal cortex, where reflection and curiosity and learning live, begins to go offline.
What this means practically is that you can have the clearest, most well-structured feedback in the world, and if the person in front of you does not feel safe in the conversation, very little of it will land. Their brain is not in the state where it can receive it. The quality of the relational container around the conversation shapes what the conversation can actually achieve.
“To get to the next level of greatness depends on the quality of the culture, which depends on the quality of the relationships, which depends on the quality of the conversations. Everything happens through conversations.” - Judith E. Glaser
The Signal Every Conversation Sends
One of the things I find most useful about Conversational Intelligence® is its attention to the signal that a conversation sends, beneath the content. Every interaction communicates something about how the speaker sees the other person. It either says: I trust you, I value your thinking, we are in this together; or it says something else entirely.
In early childhood teams, this plays out in some very specific ways. The tone a leader uses when an educator makes a mistake. Whether questions are asked from genuine curiosity or as a lead-in to correction. Whether team meetings are spaces where people speak freely or spaces where people say what they think is expected. Whether a difficult conversation begins with care for the relationship or goes straight to the issue.
None of these dynamics are accidental. They are the accumulated result of hundreds of small conversational moments, and they shape the culture of the service far more powerfully than any policy, process, or professional development day.
Three Levels of Listening
Conversational Intelligence® describes three levels of listening, and understanding them changes how you think about the quality of attention you bring into any exchange with your team.
Level 1 listening is where most of us spend most of our time. We are listening, but we are also forming a response, preparing advice, thinking about what we want to say next. The other person can often feel this, even if they cannot name it. Something in the exchange feels a little transactional. The listener is present in body but somewhere else in thinking.
Level 2 is listening to understand. The listener is more fully present, genuinely interested in what the other person is saying, tracking carefully. This is meaningfully better. But there is a third level, and it is the one that changes things most significantly.
Level 3 is listening to connect. At this level, the listener is not just tracking the content of what is being said; they are also attending to the person behind the words. Their emotional state. What might be sitting beneath what they are expressing. The meaning they are making. When someone experiences this quality of listening, something shifts. They feel genuinely met. And from that place, much more becomes possible: honesty, reflection, genuine collaboration.
As I described it to a group of Dandelion Program participants: the starting point is to connect with the person, to hear what they are saying in order to genuinely be with them. The conversation can move forward from there. But connection comes first.
From I-Centric to We-Centric
Another of the central distinctions in Conversational Intelligence® is the shift from I-centric to we-centric communication. I-centric conversations are driven by the leader’s agenda, perspective, and conclusions. The educator is consulted, but the outcome is already shaped. We-centric conversations are genuinely co-created. Both people’s thinking shapes what emerges.
This shift matters enormously in early childhood teams, where educators bring deep practical knowledge about children, families, and pedagogy that leaders need access to. A team meeting run as an I-centric experience, where information flows from the top and questions are answered from a position of authority, extracts very little of that knowledge. A team meeting designed as a we-centric space, where questions are genuinely open and educators are invited to contribute rather than receive, draws on the full intelligence of the room.
The language shift is small but the effect is significant. Moving from “this is what we are going to do” to “what do we think we need here?”, or from “I have noticed” to “what have you been noticing?”, signals a fundamentally different kind of relationship. And the brain notices. Oxytocin rises. People lean in rather than switch off.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Conversational Intelligence® is not a script or a set of techniques. It is a way of understanding what is happening beneath the surface of every professional interaction, and using that understanding to communicate more intentionally.
In practical terms, it means pausing before a difficult conversation to check your own state and intention. It means opening with something that signals care for the person, not just the issue. It means asking genuine questions and waiting, really waiting, for the answer rather than moving on before it fully arrives. It means noticing when a conversation has generated cortisol and being willing to slow down and create safety before continuing.
These things are not difficult to understand. But they require practice. And they require a leader who is willing to attend to the quality of their own communication, conversation by conversation, as the ongoing discipline of conscious leadership.
Reflective Questions
Consider these questions as an invitation to notice your current patterns:
Q1. Think about a recent team meeting or one-on-one conversation. What level of listening were you operating from for most of it? What was the impact on the other person?
Q2. When you initiate a difficult conversation with an educator, what does your opening signal about how you see that person and the relationship?
Q3. How we-centric are your team meetings in practice? Who contributes, and who tends to stay quiet? What might their silence be communicating?
Q4. Where in your leadership practice do you most consistently create oxytocin conversations? Where might cortisol be quietly accumulating?
Bringing It Together
The team culture of a service is not built through policies or planning. It is built through conversations: the everyday quality of how people speak to each other, listen to each other, and make each other feel. Conversational Intelligence® gives leaders a way to understand what is actually happening in those exchanges, at a neurological level, and to become more intentional about the experience they create.
Culture changes conversation by conversation. And that means it is always within reach.
Want to take this further?
If you are ready to develop your conversational practice at a deeper level, the Conscious Leaders Mastermind and the Dandelion Program both embed Conversational Intelligence® into ongoing, applied leadership development. I would love to tell you more about what each program involves.
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