Leadership as a Conversation: Intentionality

The last element in leadership as a conversation is intentionality.  Authors of the book Talk, Inc. Groysberg and Slind state, “(intentionality) enables leaders and employees to derive strategically relevant action from the push and pull of discussion and debate.”

Further, they note, “One way to help employees understand the company’s strategy is to let them have a part in creating it.” Years ago, I attended Dale Carnegie leadership training.  There the instructor echoed this same idea, “People want to live in a world they help create.”

So how does a leader involve everyone in the company’s strategy?  At Intertech, we do a “Town Hall.” Once a year, all employees take part in the half-day Town Hall session.  At the Town Hall, leadership isn’t present.  Employees share ideas and provide feedback.  This information is used in the leadership team’s SWOT analysis at our yearly strategic planning session.  Three of my favorite questions Town Hall questions are:

• What’s one thing we should stop doing?
• What’s one thing we should start doing?
• What’s one thing we should always continue doing?

Well that’s it… this is the final post in leadership as a conversation.

Up Next:  How to get IT and the overall business working effectively together.

Dialogue and Roles in Leadership as a Conversation

The second element of leadership communication is interactivity.  In the book Talk, the authors note, “The pursuit of interactivity reinforces and builds upon intimacy, but employees need tools and institutional support to speak up and talk back.”

At Intertech, we’ve institutionalized “speaking up” thru:

A yearly town hall where employees share insights on the business without leadership present

• A yearly survey, via a “Best Places” to work competition, where employees rank the firm on the major areas of engagement including benefits, job satisfaction, feeling valued, trust in senior leaders, manager effectiveness, trust with coworkers, individual contribution, alignment with goals, retention risk, and teamwork
• Quarterly review of an employee’s Key Result Areas where they can note tools or training needed
• Yearly reviews
• Informal conversations at social events

We also encourage inclusion.  Inclusion in the sense of leadership as a conversation means expanding employees’ roles as industry leaders.  At Intertech, this has means members of our firm are:

• working with Microsoft’s product groups to give them feedback on our use of their products in the field;
• starting user groups at the forefront of technologies like Java and Windows Azure;
• participating on sites like StackOverflow, DevX, and CodeProject;
• being named a Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP) for their elite thought leadership;
• speaking at conferences and user groups.

Up next, the final post in this series: The Agenda

Leadership Communication Elements

Related to the Harvard Business Review article being discussed in these blog posts, from the same authors, is the book Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations.  In it, they list the four I’s of conversational leadership:

1. Intimacy

2. Interactivity

3. Inclusion

4. Intentionality

This post covers intimacy.  Intimacy in the context of conversational leadership means shortening distances between leaders and team members thru:

• Listening.  Many years ago, I asked a board member, the best advice he ever got.  He paused and said, “First seek to understand then seek to be understood.” This is habit number five in Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  As a leader, we need to make a lot of decisions.  For me, it can be tempting to make a decision quickly before listening/getting input.  Every week, I can point to an example where following this advice (of waiting, listening, and getting input) resulted in not only better decisions but a better experience/process for those impacted by the decision.

 

• Equality.  Managers using a conversational approach to leadership won’t dictate or demand based on their title.  They let the best idea win.

 

• Transparency.  In a conversational approach to leadership, the authors note, organizations and leaders need to be willing to “share sensitive data such as financials.” Intertech has been open book for so long, I can’t remember when we didn’t share financials. When other business owners have questioned me on this practice, I share most people in an organization want to know how the organization is doing financially.  This is especially true in tougher economic times.  If people don’t have information they’ll make it up.  What they make up will be way better or worse than the actual situation.

Next: Dialogue and growth as ways to improve communication