The Power of Conversational Leadership
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Communication is always a challenge,
especially in multinational corporations. Boris Groysberg and Michael
Slind discuss why it makes sense to adopt the principles of face-to-face
conversation in organizational communication.
When
a company is small, communication among employees is as simple as rolling a
desk chair around the room to talk to the president, the admin, or the chief
engineer. But as a company grows, communication becomes more difficult. And
strategic direction can suffer as a result, even if those at the top assume
otherwise.
"Having communication that goes bottom-up is just as
important as having communication that goes top-down."
"In many cases you have an
executive team that's so sure about company strategy, but then you go inside
the organization and find that nobody else has a clue," says Harvard
Business School Professor Boris Groysberg. "Nobody knows what strategic
conversations are actually unfolding."
For that reason, many CEOs are
reconsidering the classic command-and-control structure in which a few people
are sending all the directives from the top of the corporate hierarchy.
Instead, they are adopting a conversational approach. In their new book, Talk, Inc.:
How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations, Groysberg
and communication professional Michael Slind show how several global companies
are adopting principles of face-to-face conversation, and why this approach
positively affects a company's bottom line.
"In many ways the book is not
about communication as much as it is about performance," Groysberg says.
"In an economic environment where there is so much uncertainty, the senior
management of a company might not know where the company should be going in
three years. But your frontline customer-facing people might. Having
communication that goes bottom-up is just as important as having communication
that goes top-down."
To try to suss out best practices
for communication, the authors interviewed communications directors and CEOs at
more than 100 companies. "We were struck by how often that word
'conversation' kept popping up," Slind says. "CEOs, especially,
expressed an aspiration to promote a conversation in their organization. They
talked about wanting everyone to be on board with the conversation about what
they want to do with the company."
Borne of those interviews, the book
advocates an approach called "organizational conversation," which
applies to all processes a company uses to circulate information across
the organization, rather than just from the top down. "It's about creating
a culture in which the communication function becomes something that more and
more resembles the way that two friends would talk," Slind says.
The
properties of a good organizational conversation
The book divides good organizational
conversation into four alliterative elements—intimacy, interactivity,
inclusion, and intentionality—each of which applies to a particular attribute
of an organization. "Intimacy is about leadership," Groysberg
explains. "Interactivity is about channels. Inclusion is about content.
And intentionality is about goals, vision, and the strategy of getting things
done."
INTIMACY: The authors note that intimacy need not require physical
proximity, which would be impossible in a multinational company where employees
are separated by thousands of miles. Rather, it requires emotional or mental
intimacy. "It's about trust, it's about being authentic, it's about
communicating your vision but also at the same time listening to what employees
have to say," Groysberg says.
Talk, Inc. highlights the case of the Indian company Hindustan
Petroleum Corporation Ltd., which at the turn of the twenty-first century
launched an effort to develop a new vision statement. Rather than keeping the
effort confined to the C-suite, Hindustan held an extensive series of
"vision workshops" where employees at all levels of the company were
invited to share their thoughts.
A typical vision workshop included
about 20 people and lasted three days. HPCL is a Fortune Global500 company
employing more than 11,000 people, so it took years to complete the workshops.
But by the end of the process, "almost every person felt that the company
vision was his or her own vision," Groysberg says.
INTERACTIVITY: Once some intimacy is established, it's important to keep
the conversation flowing. "It's not just that one person is both talking
and listening, it means that there is a real sort of back and forth where the
act of listening actually changes what you think and say," Slind explains.
"As your company gets larger, that gets more difficult. But one of the
ways to do it is by using technology."
The book provides a quick overview
of the social technology that helps global corporate communication mimic
personal conversation: internal blogs (in which leaders share their thoughts
and employees have a chance to comment), wikis (which enable collaboration on
corporate databases), online communities (which help far-flung employees find
like-minded colleagues), Twitter (which lets employees broadcast information
widely, both internally and externally), networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn
(which enable information sharing among a particular group), video sharing
(YouTube and the like), and web-enabled video chat (which help to mimic
in-person communication).
Global computer networking giant
Cisco Systems, for example, uses its own TelePresence videoconferencing
technology to simulate in-person meetings among its ranks—more than 6,200
executives and some 72,000 employees in total. "You really forget that
you're speaking across a fiber-optic cable," says Slind, who has observed
videoconferences at the San Jose, California-based company. "You feel like
you're sitting across from this person."
Slind hastens to add that technology
is only as effective as those deploying it. "Interactivity isn't just
about technology," he says. "It's equally important to build an
interactive culture."
INCLUSION: In organizational conversation, inclusion means giving
employees a chance to help tell a company's story. Ceding a measure of control
over communication to employees comes with the obvious risk of uncontrolled
messaging, but the authors report that the rewards of inclusion often outweigh
the risks.
A traditional command-and-control
company will filter a bunch of top-down messages through the communications
department. But the book recommends a more organic approach. Sales teams can
share success stories from the field via public video blogs, which journalists
and customers may consider more authentic and more useful than slick marketing
material. Furthermore, besides meeting with sales teams, customers might have a
chance to meet with the no-nonsense engineers who actually created the
technology.
INTENTIONALITY: While the goal of organizational conversation is to draw on
the characteristics of a talk between friends, it must always have an
agenda—and a leader must always have a goal in mind. Otherwise it might take
the form of talk just for the sake of talking. The goal may be to ensure that
all the employees understand the company's competitive strategy, or it may be
to ask every employee to help shape that strategy. But there must be a goal,
and the leader should use conversation to achieve that goal.
"Even if you can't control
everything anymore you still are the leader," Slind says. "You still
have responsibility for setting the tone and setting the direction. And that's
what intentionality is about. As you're planning a conversation, you need to
make sure that it's in alignment with your company's strategic goals. And if
it's done well, the power of communication can support those goals."
The authors note that establishing a
culture of conversation won't always mean hitting each of the four
"I's," but stress that these elements "tend to reinforce each
other" to create a highly iterative process in which good ideas have a
chance not only to be heard but to be developed as well.
"A productive conversation is a
source of sustainable competitive advantage," Groysberg says. "We
find that if you can have good conversations in a company, you can actually
achieve a lot."
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6876.html?wknews=07252012
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