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How Did That Conversation Go?

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The Power of Conversation
Powerfully effective leadership requires a great deal of skill – or should I say skills. What do change agility, delegation, performance management, and motivation all have in common? Conversation. Not just talking to or at someone or some group, but talking WITH them.
At the root of almost all leadership successes and failures are conversations that did or did not go well. Leadership conversations can run the gamut from basic to complicated and they are ubiquitous. A rather basic conversation can change a performance issue. A conversation can create the win-win of an effectively delegated task or project. Conversations do the heavy lifting of leading change. Conversations are used to explain a strategy and enlist an executive team to execute it. Conversations articulate the vision in a meaningful, real way and provide those irresistible invitations to come along over a period of time.
As business becomes ever more complex and changing, there is less room for misunderstanding, mistrust, and disengagement. And yet, we increasingly rely on email and texting to communicate – tools that often contribute to more misunderstanding and can create mistrust.
We all know that some conversations are great and others are not. What are the characteristics of a powerful leadership conversation? Here are our top 5:
  1. Authentic. Be aware of who you are and how you are bringing your best self to the conversation. Share your perspectives, learning, insights, and experiences in an honest way. Break down the walls and let others see the person behind the title. Also, be authentic about what the conversation itself is about. Is it a conversation about performance? About a new strategy? About a concern? Say so at the beginning.
  2. More listening than talking. Leaders spend a lot of time telling. Conversations require listening and curiosity. They should not just be about what you need to express and what ideas you need to get across. Focus on hearing what the other person is saying, understanding what is important, what is difficult, what is working or not working. As a leader, practice approaching conversations by asking yourself “‘what can I learn from this interaction? What can I learn about this person/group?”
  3. Purposeful. Approach each conversation with a sense of purpose. Too often we treat conversations as transactions — what do I need to get from this right now? Being purposeful is about thinking about the conversation in the broader context of the relationship you have with the individual or group. What is their purpose? What do they need from this conversation? How does this fit with business strategy and upcoming initiatives? Jot down a few bullets before the conversation to focus your attention.
  4. Excellent questions. Focus on questions that add clarity to the conversation. “Why?” is one of the most useful questions. It’s thought provoking. It can uncover assumptions, perspectives and clarify what really needs to be discussed.
  5. Win-win-win. Powerful leadership conversations focus on creating a good outcome for the three parties involved — the organization, the other person/group and you. That’s not to say that all conversation are positive. Some, like performance or downsizing conversations, can be difficult. However, even difficult conversations can have a good result.
As a leader, do you spend more time crafting emails and presentations than working on the conversations you have every day? What opportunities are you missing?
Mastering the art and science of conversation will improve or help you better leverage virtually every skill you need if you want to excel as a leader in our rapidly changing world.
At NextBridge, we place a premium on great conversations as we help our clients navigate organizational change and leadership development.
What conversation would you like to have? Call me at 978-475-8424. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

What Dancing the Rumba Can Teach You About Leadership

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Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.
— H. Jackson Brown Jr.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to drag my husband to dance class. I’ve always loved to dance. Him? Not so much. I thought the class would be fun. We’d have some time together. Maybe he would be more comfortable on the dance floor. We could learn some real dance moves to take the place of the ones we’ve improvised since the early 90’s.
What I didn’t expect was an amazing lesson on leadership.
Here are five things dancing the rumba reminded me about leadership:
What leadership is: When talking about leading your dance partner, the instructor described it as an irresistible invitation to come along with you. Think of the great leaders you’ve known. Has that vision they’ve created and the actions they’ve taken created an irresistible invitation to come along?
What makes great leadership different: When a dance partner is leading really, really well, the other partner doesn’t stop to think about being led. It is effortless. It is like the two of you are naturally in sync. You aren’t constantly questioning the path or trying to move in a different direction. The leader operationalizes that irresistible invitation.
Leaders step up when the need arises: Traditionally, we’re taught that when a man and woman are dancing together, the man leads. Actually, as I learned, either partner can lead. If one finds that their partner just keeps doing the same step over and over, the other partner can take the lead and move the couple into the next series of steps. When leadership is shared, we move where we need to go rather than staying on a course that may no longer be the correct one.
Indecision makes for sore toes: When leading, it’s important to be at least one step ahead so that when the time comes, you effortlessly move on to what’s next. If you haven’t thought about your next step or are not sending the correct messages, your partner assumes you are continuing on the same path. You move in one direction. Your partner moves in the other. Now, you have sore toes.
That there is always another step: Just when you think you have the dance down and know how to lead, the instructor adds another series of steps that are completely different from what you just got comfortable doing. The demands of leadership change. We have to be open to knowing that what we were just successful doing, is now only part of what’s required of us.
After four lessons my husband and I are still occasionally stepping on each others’ toes, but we’re learning to lead each other in new ways that challenge and engage us, bringing a new energy to the dance floor!
NextBridge has been teaching the dance of leadership and helping organizations become more change agile for nearly 20 years.
How can we help you?

Over-Collaboration: Solution #3: Designing for Great Collaboration

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Our last three blog posts have outlined collaboration challenges and solutions.  In this fourth and concluding post, we’re talking about the role the organization plays in making collaboration work. The way you design your organization — your rules, tools and people practices — has a substantial impact on how effectively you and others collaborate.

Rules
What is the collaboration culture like in your organization?  Are the ‘rules’ about collaboration mostly unspoken or informal? They shouldn’t be.  Organizations that thrive in our fast-moving business environment tend to be intentional about how collaboration takes place.

A good place to start is to look at your decision rights – your framework for the decision-making process in your organization that includes who makes what types of decisions.  Effective decision rights/governance structures include guidance about who and how people collaborate on decision-making. A lot of collaborative effort may not seem to be directly linked to organization-level decision-making. But embedded in the day-to-day collaborative work everyone does are numerous decisions which should follow from and support those higher-level decisions. Being intentional about decision-making clarifies, streamlines, and improves collaboration.

I’ve run into many organizations over the years who, when I ask them to describe their culture, use the word collaborative as one of the first descriptors. What that means need to change as your organization grows. Small start-ups often thrive in a culture where everyone is involved in everything. Different perspectives and viewpoints create energy and momentum. However, as the organization grows, continuing to live by the ‘involve everyone’ mantra actually slows momentum, delays decisions and creates roadblocks. You need to establish and adapt your culture’s norms around collaboration.  The more complex your business, the more you need formal decision rights.

Some questions for further thought…  Is your organization structure designed to facilitate the right level of collaboration and drive effective, timely decisions? Are your senior leaders all explicitly on the same page and do all your leaders have the right knowledge and skills to leverage decision rights?

Tools
There is no shortage of technology tools designed to facilitate collaboration, with more on the way. And with good reason.  Used effectively, such tools can improve collaboration, enhance productivity, and accelerate innovation, among other things.  We’re not experts on specific tools, so we’ll leave questions like functionality, platform and scalability to others. However, there are significant ramifications for what you choose, and some consideration for how you do it.

(1) How does your choice align with your business strategy?  Are you looking to acquire businesses over the next few years?  Are you looking to rapidly expand globally?  Are you about to take on new products and services that impact what types of projects you run or the talent you hire?  Make decisions based not just on your current challenges, but on your future ones.

(2) What problem(s) are you trying to solve?  Or put another way, what are you trying to accomplish?  More effective sharing of resources?  Better decision-making?  Improved communication?  It’s easy to say “all of the above,” but what specifically does that mean?  This should be one of the first questions you ask, and then dig deep on the answers.

(3) How will your choice impact users?  Is the tool great for one group, but not another?  What will the transition to the tool require of users?  What do they lose in the changeover and how will it impact their work?  Does the new tool fully compensate?

(4)  How important is it to standardize your tool set?  Issues arise when the organization allows every group or business unit to determine what its tool of choice is.  Then you have certain groups that can easily collaborate while others either have to spend time learning multiple tools or work around tools which don’t integrate effectively. Even organizations that don’t want to mandate tools and technology will benefit by standardizing or integrating their collaboration tools.

People Practices
Not only are high-performing organizations clear about decision rights and what that means for who and how people collaborate structurally, they tend to be clear about what it looks like behaviorally.

When you consider all the practices that we could discuss here there’s enough fodder for multiple pages.  Boiled down, here’s my mantra… Define it. Communicate it. Integrate it.

Define it.  The most important consideration is this: what does good collaboration look like?  What does a good collaborator do and say?  We covered some basics in our “Solution #2” blog post.  But what does it look like in your business, specifically?  Identify role models.  Break it down to finite behaviors that can be easily understood and replicated.

Communicate it. Starting at the top, let people know what’s expected of them. “Here’s what our company believes in and expects when it comes to collaboration.” Make it a formal part of things like project charters, personal goals and feedback discussions.

Integrate it.  From competency development and selection to performance management and training, ensure that the organization places the appropriate priority on collaboration.  Furthermore, it’s critical not to send mixed messages across practices.  In high-collaboration cultures, it’s not uncommon for goal-setting, development activities and formal recognition programs to reinforce collaboration. And yet, performance management and compensation practices don’t always support it. Research shows that about 20% of an organization’s “stars” don’t collaborate. They hit their numbers (and receive kudos and raises for it) but don’t do anything to amplify the success of their colleagues.  That hurts the business in the long run.

In a world where collaboration is increasingly essential for business success, how you collaborate can create competitive advantage. If you’re mired in slow decision-making, faced with abundant project bottlenecks or losing good talent because of “collaboration burnout,” then you’re not staying ahead of the curve.

Properly leveraging rules, tools and people practices makes a huge difference in how well you collaborate and how smoothly your business functions.

To read the other blog posts in this series go to:
Collaborate The Right Way and Free Up 20% More Time
Solution #1: Over-Collaboration:  Be More Intentional About Meetings
Solution #2:  Over-Collaboration:  Better Skills and Behaviors