Conversational Leadership
Conversational leadership is about leading in a way that treats “conversation as a core process to cultivate the collective intelligence needed” to create value. Conversational leadership is a way of approaching leading as an attentional practice that helps you focus on how you see, the way you hear others and the language you use.
Where problems are complex, we need to access a diversity of perspectives and insight effectively - and find a way forward together. Whether about strategy, generating ideas, or considering feedback on performance, how you hold your conversations matters.
Conversations are the containers we create and recreate every day that are the building blocks of our culture. They define the boundaries of what is possible in our relationships. Whether we can address the ‘real’ issue or not, or have the bandwidth to include the whole person, or tap into the collective wisdom we need to create new solutions - all depends in on how flexible and generative we can be in conversation together.
One of the key roles of a leader lies in consciously shaping the essential conversations which form how people in organizations talk, think and act. The trouble is that many of our most important conversations don’t happen in public. We reserve our most true perspective for the places we feel safest. While this is an important instinct to pay attention to, it also create blindspots for you and your people. Unless we are consciously attending to our way of holding conversations the culture we create will have a low capacity for good conversation. Where we allow ourselves to be comfortable with this, the work of the organization becomes a dance where we all skillfully ignore the most important conversation we can have - and the best work we can do.
It takes courage to invite our most important conversations to the surface; to make space for them within the group and risk your carefully crafted identity as the one in control, or the one with the answers, or the power to make things happen.
4 Ways to Grow Your Conversational Leadership
Know the edges of your own growth, As Warren Bennis says, “becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.”
Learn how to pay real attention to others and listen from different perspectives, “The art of communication is the language of leadership” James Humes. There is more than one way to pay attention to another. Learn how to pay attention to the systems that enable different kinds of conversations.
Developing a deliberate practice for holding conversations that match the purposes you have. Engaging others in ways that open conversations to new possibilities for collaboration and performance.
Be more committed to the future than the past in what we can be and create together. Our biggest barriers are often found the reactivity we have developed from past experiences. Some of these reactions have been deeply useful or even ‘adaptive’. Often wisdom is found in resisting the very adaptive impulses we have. Finding the point of your own integrated and wholly engaged self, finding the place where new things can emerge with the others you lead. It is about making space for this connection and inviting others to participate and contribute courageously.
“A leader these days needs to be a host – one who convenes diversity; who convenes all viewpoints in creative processes where our mutual intelligence can come forth.”
Further Resources
David Whyte Courageous Conversations
David Whyte and the Conversational Nature of Reality
