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“I think getting up in the morning is more exciting when you’re nervous. If you’re not nervous, you’re dead. . . .It’s time to change your life or your work the moment you stop having butterflies in your stomach.” – Warren Bennis

If certainty and stability breed complacency and mediocrity, then change and challenge is necessary to breed leadership. Leaders bring about change they initiate, they innovate, they make things happen, they disturb the status quo! Why? Because leaders bring about change and what leaders want to change must get talked about..!

“If the marketplace isn’t talking about you, there’s a reason. If people aren’t discussing your products, your services, your cause, your movement or your career, there’s a reason. The reason is that you’re boring.” – Seth Godin, You’re boring

The vision and actions taken by leaders should generate the kind of emotional engagement that provokes conversation. Leaders are responsible for shaping and organisations conversation and the quality of an organisation’s conversation is the leadership’s responsibility. The quality of the conversation can be directly correlated with the quality of the organisation’s leadership. Using conversation deliberately means that we need to think carefully about how we will craft conversation and how we can use it purposefully.

“A leader’s job is to engineer epiphanies one conversation at a time.” – Susan Scott

Consider the following:

• If you’re not waking up nervous, then you’re not getting talked about!
• If you’re not disturbing the status quo, then you’re not getting talked about!
• Is your purpose, cause and vision getting talked about? If not…. you don’t matter!

Related posts:

1. Shaping Conversation as a Leadership Practice
2. Leading through conversation
3. Your product may be good, but will it spark a conversation?

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Conversation is an important part of effective leadership and change for the following reasons:

• Vision must be shared, before it can be lived… this requires conversation.
• Change is underpinned by conversation Organisations change, when people change…. and … people change one conversation at a time…..
• Employee engagement is driven by meaning and purpose… this requires conversation.
• Execution requires alignment of action…. this requires conversation.

Given the importance of conversations in the leadership practice, the following principles serve as useful guides to leaders wanting to shape conversation:

• Leaders are the custodians of an organisations conversation. Conversation happens on a daily basis in within teams and organisations and much of this conversation occurs by default. By this I mean that it’s aimless and unproductive. The quality of an organisation’s conversation is the leadership’s responsibility. To effectively navigate change leaders need to be proactively engaged in focusing, shaping and influencing an organisation’s conversation. The quality of the conversation can be directly correlated with the quality of the organisation’s leadership. Using conversation deliberately means that we need to think carefully about how we will craft conversation and how we can use it purposefully.Quality conversation leads to effective decision making, engaged employees, a compelling vision and aligned execution.  This requires leaders have a clear point of view about, what the organisation needs to be talking about at this time. “A leader’s job is to engineer epiphanies one conversation at a time.” – Susan Scott
• Effective conversation is about meaningful inquiry. An effective conversation is always based on asking questions that matter. This means that leaders must to be open to multiple perspectives and view points. To explore all facets of an issue requires open questioning your primary tool. Asking not telling, using open ended questions then standing back to listen. This is the key skill of inquiry. What is the ratio between asking and telling in your daily conversations?
• Conversations shape the context in which people act. Effective leaders use conversation deliberately to shape the organisations direction. However, without a clear philosophy and vision, the shaping of the organisations conversation cannot happen. Leaders need to have a clear message that effectively sets the containerin which conversations take place. A great container for conversation require leaders to be clear about the following issues:
  • The organisations purpose – why it exists?
  • The organisations key objectives – what it needs to achieve?
  • The business model – how it makes money?
  • The leadership philosophy – how people behave?
  • Their goals, priorities and actions – what is most important, what should be do first?

“What gets talked about in a company and how it gets talked about determines what will happen. Or won’t happen. Conversations provide clarity or confusion. Invite cross-boundary collaboration and cooperation or add concertina wire to the walls between well-defended fiefdoms. Inspire us to tackle our toughest challenges or stop us dead in our tracks wondering why we bothered to get out of bed this morning.” – Susan Scott

• Language and words shape meaning. Effective leaders are very aware of the impact of their words. What a leaders does and what a leader says, are amplified and exaggerated by their constituents. Given this, if leaders don’t take charge of their words and carefully shape their messages, someone else will do it for them.

“…it’s through language that we create the world, because it is nothing until we describe it. And when we describe it, we create distinctions that govern our actions. To put it another way, we do not describe the world we see, but we see the world we describe.” – Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity: the Inner Path of Leadership

• Build bridges and not walls. Leaders are in the business of building bridged to the future, this require the breaking down of walls! Change will always require the destruction of walls and the building of bridges. One of the best ways to do this in conversation is to replace “Yes, but . . .” and instead say “Yes, and . . .” When someone says something you disagree with, don’t make them wrong with “Yes, but I don’t agree with you” Rather, help them understand that you you have a different point of view “Yes, and in my experience there is another way of understanding that situation.”
• Leaders selectively involve influential people in meaningful conversations. When seeking to bring about change, leaders involve influential people to help shape the message and allow them to take the necessary action to bring the message to life. This involves a very conscious choice of people, and of process that’s convened to manage the organisations the conversation. Conversation taps into our head and hearts, it taps our mind and our emotions. Inspire influential people and they will take your message to others, sparking further conversation…
• Keep the conversation focused on a few key themes. Focus the organisations attention on a few key themes, the essential drivers of performance and shapers of behaviour. Concentrate the key themes on what really matters. These themes must be simple enough to communicate effectively and be understood. They should be repeated over and over, be managed and measured so that they lead to action. Key themes need to be framed so that they capture the imagination and inspire further conversation.

Considering the above principles, how effectively are you leading your organisations conversation?

Related posts:

1. Leading through conversation
2. Your product may be good, but will it spark a conversation?
3. Building Bridges in Conversation

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The need for effective “social architectures” within organisation is critical if we are too ensure that we develop future leaders, to drive innovation and to create an organisation that has a great legacy. If we examine our leadership, I’m sure we’ll find that meetings are where we do much, if not most, of our leading.

Peter Block in his book “The Answer to How is Yes” discusses the importance of the leaders’ role as social architect which he describes as follows:

“Where the architect designs physical space, the social architect designs social space….. the role of the social architect is to create service-orientated organisations, businesses, governments, and schools that meet their institutional objectives in a way that gives those involved space to act on what matters to them…. The social architect’s task is to create the space for people to act on what matters to them.”

Social architecture is about leading in a way that creates space for what matters! To focus on creating the necessary conditions for acting on what matters is one of the most urgent needs of organisations today. Peter Block goes on to say that “Acting on what matters is an act of leadership, it is not dependent on the leadership of others.” This means we all need to take responsibility for our choices and our actions. Leadership is a choice, it’s a decision we make to act on what matters. Issues such as integrity, responsibility, and authenticity are all issues that matter.

Five Capabilities of the Social Architect

Peter Block describe the following five capabilities as being necessary for the social architect to be effective. Paradoxically much on these ‘capabilities’ seem to get lost in the organisation we work in today…

1. Convening: “Social architecture is fundamentally, a convening function, giving particular attention to all aspects of how people gather. The future is created as a collective act…… The fundamental tenet of social architecture is that the way people gather is critical to the way the system functions.” In many organisations meetings are seen as a ‘necessary evil’, something to be tolerated, in between more important events. The consideration of how people gather and meet is of secondary importance.
2. Naming the question: “The social architect has an obligation to define the context, or the playing field, and then define the right questions, at least to start with“. Too many people dive into the how, selling solutions and describing best practices. Not enough people lead by taking the time to understand the quest that matters.
3. Initiating new conversations for learning: “To sustain the habitability of a social system we must initiate new conversations and manage the airspace so that all voices stay engaged with each other.” Too many conversations in organisations are initiated to ‘align’ people to lead them towards a predetermined answer, with not enough learning happening.
4. Sticking with strategies of engagement and consent: “…dialogue itself is part of the solution…. Commitment and accountability cannot be sold. They have to be evoked, and evocation comes through conversation.” Organisations change through effective conversation.
5. Designing strategies that support local choice: “If our intent is to create a social system that people want to inhabit then the social architect’s job is to demand that the inhabitants join in designing the system.”

Looking at the above list it seems that organisations are failing in their ability to create social systems that encourage people to act on what matters. Instead organisation are creating systems of compliance. What has been the result of your leadership?

Related posts:

1. Are you a “Push” or “Pull” Leader?
2. Leader as the facilitators of meaning and purpose
3. Leader: Are You Purposely Shaping Your Culture?

Carol Hymowitz wrote an interesting article "Sometimes, Moving Up Makes It Harder to See What Goes On Below" discussing the need to leaders to kee in touch with what’s happening on the ground in their organisations and teams…

"Executives know success in business depends on identifying and fixing problems before they become crises. It is the most basic rule in management: No matter how smart your strategies seem on paper, if you don’t know how they’re being executed and whether there are urgent problems, you won’t be successful. …The higher executives climb, the less likely they are to know what is and isn’t working at their companies. Many are surrounded by yes people who filter information; others dismiss or ignore bearers of bad news…..Ken Siegel, an organizational psychologist and president of the Impact Group in Los Angeles, believes that most CEOs avoid learning what their employees are thinking and doing. He advises those who want to get to the truth to assemble a senior team of people with diverse points of view. ‘Instead of surrounding them with executives who think just like they do, they need people down the hall who are their opposites, have very different strengths and push them to see reality differently,’ he says….. Executives at big companies who have many layers of management between themselves and front-line employees face the biggest challenge finding out how their strategies are actually working. Those who want accurate information must commit to spending time in the field — often and on their own — where they are away from handlers and can coax employees to be forthcoming about problems."

How effective is your feedback loop? Are you getting the good and especially the bad news from the ground? Good quality information and feedback is essential for the effective execution of your vision and strategy. Poor information equals poor decision making and failed strategy….!

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Communication, Conversation, Feedback, Strategy, Execution

Related posts:

1. Peter Drucker on Effective Executives
2. Companies Need Less Communication…. Not More!
3. Lessons in Leadership Development from the Worlds Best Companies

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I have posted before on the importance of conversation in leadership (here and here). Meaningful strategic conversation is an emotionally draining and difficult leadership task. However without meaningful conversation, buy-in and commitment remains elusive, as was observed by Steven Covey “no involvement, no commitment“. Meaning conversation creates involvement……. which generates the commitment …… and…… it’s commitment that ensures aligned action and an effective end result. Therefore, getting the conversations right is of critical importance.

One of the most frustrating situation which a leader is faced with is one where a team’s conversation becomes stuck. I’m sure we’ve all experienced these  stuck conversations, on these occasions:

• People feel they have not been heard and keep repeating the same points over and over again.
• It feels like everyone in the room has run our of ideas.
• People feel that they have missed some critical aspect of the issue at hand and therefore get stuck in analysis paralysis.
• People are ask themselves, ”why we’re have in this conversation again?”
• People feel that they don’t have all the facts necessary to commit to a course of action.
• There seems to be a hundred different reasons why the ideas resented to solve a problem are doomed to failure and will not work.

Unless stuck conversations are resolved, effective action will remain elusive, additionally any action “agreed” upon in the meeting will fail to be executed. Getting a stuck conversation back on track and productive requires insight into the meeting dynamics. It’s in these situations that I’ve found the ”change formula” (I previously posted on the change formula here) a useful tool. The change formula describes what’s required to bring about change in an organisation or in this case a conversation. The formula shows that change will occur when a dissatisfaction with the current situation, a vision of what is possible, and the first steps toward reaching the vision are greater than the resistance to change, as illustrated below….

The key insight behind this formula is that if the value of dissatisfaction, or vision, or first steps is zero, the resistance to change will not be overcome nor can anyone commit to taking ant action. A critical mass cannot be formed, and any organisational change cannot be sustained. Just as these components are required for meaningful organisational change they;re also necessary for meaningful conversations. So, to use the change formula when you’re next in a stuck conversation, help the meeting through the following steps:

1) Check for a Shared Understanding of Current Reality

• Are the right people in the room?
• Do all the people in the room have access to the evidence, data and facts relating to this problem (or opportunity)? Has this data been shared and discussed?
• Have the people in the room discussed the available data and shared their interpretation(s) of the facts?
• Is there sufficient diversity of opinion and organisational functions for us to have a meaningful discussion?
• Do all the people engaged in the conversation have the same understanding of the problem (or opportunity)?
• Have use used tangible and specific examples, anecdotes and stories to illustrate the impact or the problem (or opportunity)?
• Has the exploration of the facts and data made those in the room dissatisfied with the current situation? If not you may need to stop the meeting and start a programme of collective learning, see my previous post on why this is necessary…

2) Facilitate a Shared Vision of the Future

• Do all the people engaged in the conversation have a common understanding of what a desirable outcome would look like?
• Have we explored various alternative futures?
• Have we considered each alternative future’s advantages and disadvantages?
• Have you answered the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) question?
• Have you engaged people emotionally by creating an inspiring picture of the future?

3) Agree the Next Steps

• Is the gap between the current reality and the future vision small enough to be achievable, but not too large to be overwhelming? If not you’re going to have to chunk the the next steps into tangible short-term tasks that people can relate to (get the minds around)….
• Are the next steps achievable in the short term (6-12 months)?
• Are the actions described in S.M.A.R.T. terms (see my previous post on how to achieve this here) ?
• Has each action have an owner who is responsible for the S.M.A.R.T. outcome?
• Have you agreed to how the progress towards the vision will be tracked and managed?

That’s it, a simple and effective framework to help you resolve a stuck conversation. Any additional thoughts, ideas and suggestions are welcome. Try it, I would be interested in your feedback and experiences in using and improving on this approach….

Related posts:

1. The Power of Conversations