Rallying your people around your key challenges is important for boosting agility, commitment, and performance. You need the right skills to engage your team in open, frank conversation, and to avoid the classic pitfalls that kill conversation
What do you gain from having conversation?
When you give up a certain amount of control, you gain just as much as your team does for the purposes of open conversation.
When you involve every actor in your company, you increase the chances of being better informed and make it more likely you’ll be able to participate in and guide discussions (which isn’t the same thing as controlling them).
The 3 key advantages of conversation:
#Complexity: Encouraging confident expression and establishing flat communication promotes learning and a better alignment between execution and strategic decision-making. You and your team will be better equipped to face the complexity of your environment.
#Agility: “The goal is to learn faster, to know how to make decisions, and to act and react more quickly,” says Jack Mollen, former HR VP at EMC2 (now Dell EMC), one of the world’s leading data storage firms. All this needs to be done to accelerate innovation, time to market, and the response time to customer requests.
#Commitment: Being able to express yourself freely and to feel that you are being listened to strengthens commitment. If your people are respected and recognized, they will become more involved.
The importance of a good conversation – and how to have it
The night before the Challenger exploded, NASA had a three-hour conference call with a company that knew the shuttle would fail. Why did NASA not abort the mission? John O’Leary explores what makes for an effective conversation. He lists three myths that can lead to destructive silence, and vital techniques to enable good conversation for groups everywhere.
Based on TED Video
Based on
Talk, Inc. by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind, (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012)