How to deliver value one conversation at a time...

The heart of true leadership is making a positive difference to people's lives and to our world.

As a leader, one of the many challenges in today's world is to ensure everyone adds real value.

In The Rise of the Conversational Leader I explore how organisations are finding that the traditional ‘command and control’ system is just too slow and rigid for today's world.

Leaders don't have all the answers anymore.

For success we need more inclusive and collaborative leadership behaviours. We need leaders who can have real conversations!

The need for cross functional collaboration, external partnerships and delivering value through fast change is increasing at an exponential rate.

We can see the impact of not changing and moving fast enough is having on once great organisations.

We need to add value one conversation at a time.

The standard Performance Management Systems from the Old World (A world where the pace of change was slow and we could learn faster than it. A world where we needed efficiency and great managers to manage the status quo) just don't cut it anymore. The concept that your boss does your annual appraisal is so outdated and adds very little value in a fast moving world.

In a previous article, Appraisals Have Been Banned, I outline why this is the case and what we can do about it.

In today's world we need everyone focussed on what VALUE they are adding.

In Moving Towards a Leadership Legacy Approach I share a new leadership approach to ensuring people are adding value and making a positive impact by being themselves, being collaborative and being impactful.

One of the core skills is the ability to have real conversations with people. For this to happen we need to ensure the following three factors are in place:

Factor #1 - Create a Psychologically Safe Environment

Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson coined the term:

Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes."

This is crucial if you want to have great conversations. In 2015 following the success of Project Oxygen, Google published the results of a two year study into what makes a great team. The interesting thing was that the answer wasn’t: those with the most senior people, with the highest IQs or even those that made the least amount of mistakes.

Based on the findings of “Project Aristotle”, Google developed a list of the 5 key dynamics that make great teams successful: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. With psychological safety being be far the most important.

So how do you create psychological safety?

As leaders we need to lead by example, create team guidelines, practice and encourage active listening, be comfortable asking for feedback and sharing our vulnerabilities, set ground rules, use informal meetings, be in the moment, get from behind our computers and connect with people, celebrate successes, kill the emails and have real conversations, take time to speed up by slowing down, remove judgment and the blame game, kill the gossip, look for the good and ensure people feel valued and listened too. And finally we need to keep an open mind.

Factor #2 - Create a High-Trust Culture

When you create a high trust culture people say what they mean. They feel comfortable saying it as it is.

“The first job of a leader—at work or at home—is to inspire trust. It’s to bring out the best in people by entrusting them with meaningful stewardships, and to create an environment in which high-trust interaction inspires creativity and possibility.”

― Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything

In an article on How To Create a High Trust Culture from the Great Place To Work Institute they identified 7 key elements to create a high-trust culture...

1. Define your company's purpose and connect people to it.
2. Trust and empower employees to do their job.
3. Give employees a voice.
4. Showcase the customer.
5. Make your workplace a community.
6. Recognize employees' contributions.
7. Make "giving back" part of your brand.

They all make sense to me.

Factor #3 - Develop Conversational Skills

As well as developing core skills of empathy, questioning, listening, holding space and managing state we also need to look at conversations at an organisational wide level.

In Viral Change, Leandro Herrero explains that a relatively small number of individuals within any organisation have great power in the creation of change. This power is related to various factors such as high connectivity with others, high trust, moral and non-hierarchical authority.

Conversations are key!

In the Harvard Business Review on Leadership is a Conversation, Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind outline their research on how to develop core skills and approaches to organisational conversations.

Bringing it all together

We need leaders who can create psychological safety, build a high trust culture and have the conversational skills to make change happen and add value one conversation at a time.

Every success,

Graham

About the author

Graham Wilson is on a mission to change the way organisations are being led. His sole purpose is to awaken possibility in leaders to deliver extraordinary results. Called a Leadership Wizard by his clients, he is the founder of the award winning Successfactory, author of Leadership Laid Bare! and The New Leadership Manifesto. He is trusted by many of the best leaders and organisations around the world to develop their leaders.

You can contact Graham at [email protected]

If you are intrigued and want to learn more then register interest in the Leadership Athlete Masterclass here and you will be able to download a free electronic copy of The New Leadership Manifesto (￡12.99 on Amazon). Our next 2 day workshop in November is filling up fast!

www.thesuccessfactory.co.uk and www.grahamwilson.com

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Leadership Laid Bare! and The New Leadership Manifesto are available from amazon.co.uk