Conversation & Leadership Practice

Through Success.com, I got information about this interesting blog, even considering the content seems to be dedicated to the ones of us , working in very formal organizations, the knowledge always helps to get us better and more effective.

The emphasis in this article Shaping-conversation-as-a-leadership-practice is about "Team Communication & Direction", and conversations are the ideal form of communication in some respects, since they allow people with different views of a topic to learn from each other, so we are talking about simple step tasks as clerical work or complex ones as Project Management for example.

As humans, we are Social entities, so a leader has to be a Social Manager, to say it in any way, and again, communication takes a vital role to achive our goals, to be an effecftive manager, to handel different opinions and personalities, Leader-as-social-architect , without getting trapped in a net of conflicts and uncertainty.

Effective communitation is basic to achieve goals and get the expected returned income. Cheers....DAP

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 container in 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.

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.