Archive for category: Leadership

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

The Reasons Behind Changes in Leadership Communication

This is the third post in a series on leadership communication.  This series is based on an article in the June 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review by Groysberg and Slind.  In it, they cite five core reasons behind the dramatic shift in leadership communication over the past decade.  The reasons are economic, organizational, global, generational, and technological:

• Economically, the increase in service and knowledge-based industries has increased the need for faster, frictionless communication
• Organizationally, companies are flatter and faster with more decisions being made by front-line employees
• Globally, employees can be around the world.  This demands infrastructure for conversations
• Generationally, younger workers don’t hope for two-way conversation from their leaders, they expect it
• Technologically, the internet and social media platforms make communication instant and around the clock

In the next post, I’ll share specific ways that we support leadership as a conversation at Intertech.

 

Leadership Is a Conversation

“Leadership” is a lot like a U.S. Supreme Court Justice once described pornography: “Hard to define, but easy to recognize when you see it!” All joking aside, defining leadership is important for those of us who are interested in being effective leaders.

A recent Harvard Business Review (June 2012) article, “Leadership is a Conversation” by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind, does a great job of defining positive leadership through the art of conversation. (The two also teamed up to write the book, Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). In my book, Building a Winning Business, I dedicate five chapters in the leadership section to the topic of communication. There also are five other chapters sprinkled throughout the rest of the book on the importance of communication, including chapter 18 (Involve the Team when Defining Values), chapter 28 (Let Everyone Weigh In), chapter 41 (Communicate at the Beginning to Avoid Problems at the end) and chapter 46 (Communicate Early and Often).

So, please believe me when I tell you that I’m excited about this new work by Groysberg and Slind, which goes way beyond the One Minute Manager concept and includes observations based on interviews with nearly 150 people at more than 100 companies: large and small, blue chip and start up, for profit and non-profit, U.S. and international. Building upon insights and examples gleaned from this research, they developed a model of leadership called “Organizational Conversation,” which they define as having the following attributes: (1) intimacy, (2) interactivity, (3) inclusion and (4) intentionality.

“Talking with employees, rather than to them, can promote operational flexibility, employee engagement and tight strategic alignment,” notes Groysberg, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Slind, a professional writer and editor.

I’m going to take some time to explore “Organizational Conversation” as a leadership model in my upcoming posts. I’ll also share some of the lessons learned along these lines at Intertech. Please share your thoughts and observations too. After all, a conversation can only happen when there is an open exchange of ideas and information!

Next post: Just what, exactly, is Leadership Communication?