Founder and CEO of Emergent Global, leadership development trailblazer Holly Ransom says that too often we treat conversation as ad hoc rather than a practice – but there are ways to build the muscle.
All of us are engaged in conversation every day. Yet it’s often overlooked as one of the biggest shapers of high-performance relationships. I’ve had the great fortune of working with organisations to help guide, design and facilitate their most important conversations. I’ve seen organisations that show up, lean in and focus the conversation on the thing they should be talking about and think deliberately about who needs to be in the room. It’s conversation that leads to action. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that this is the invisible performance system in every organisation. It’s a question of whether that system is working or not.
Even well-intended conversations can miss the mark. One of the big things to watch for is leaders in monologue, not dialogue, with no opportunity for questions, clarifiers and objections raised. If we don’t have understanding, we won’t have action and certainly not alignment around that action. Another one is when everyone is avoiding having uncomfortable conversations. The times when I’ve seen conversation change an organisation is when leaders come in and raise a tricky issue with humility, transparency and without necessarily professing to have all the answers. Or when they invite someone in who can name the thing that the politics and history of the room have made unsayable.
You can have the right conversation but the wrong people talking. Often I watch the same people who reached the last decision sitting around the table and trying to come up with a new one. A lot of the work I do with organisations and conversational design is thinking about composition. You might have someone new to your organisation with fresh eyes. You might intentionally bring in a customer perspective or a stakeholder who gives you a refreshing lens or an external expert that comes into your world and challenges you. So before you try to fix the conversation, fix the room. Ask: who’s missing?
In healthy conversational cultures, leaders often speak last. If you happen to be the most senior person in the room – the executive general manager or the CEO – and are seeking people’s opinions, hold back on offering your own until the very end. If you throw down your anchor at the start, you’re going to get the babble effect, which means most people will feel obliged to show up with some version of your opinion.
Don’t leave the room without committing to an action that will shape your next conversation. It might be that you send an invite to a colleague or put it on the agenda for the team meeting. We should make sure we take advantage of all the AI tools that remind us, resurface things for us and support us maintaining a focus on why conversation is important in a world that just wants us to be bombarded by the urgent.