One of the best ways to learn about conversational leadership – aside from being a part of a conversation – is to apply the individual elements of meaningful, deep conversation in order to help you get where you want to be.

In this session, you’ll learn about the Four-I model of organizational conversation as well as the importance of developing a common language.

Intimacy

Digging Deeper

As simple as it seems on the surface – a conversation being two or more people chatting – there can be plenty more going on in reality. Conversation isn’t always easy, and for a leader to create a closeness with staff, they’ve got to be trusted, approachable, and likable.

Distance can exist between people trying to communicate no matter whether they are in the same room, talking over the phone, or texting. However, those gaps can be bridged when people purposely make an effort and create something that gives way to an emotional closeness, or proximity. This proximity lends itself to conversational intimacy, which in the organizational sense, is gaining recognition as a function of leadership.

Conversational intimacy flourishes when leaders sense that the gap between themselves and employees is shrinking. The most profound institutional and psychological gaps exist in many companies. They come from the idea that people are placed into roles and this or that needs to be done. This is when, “That’s not my job” flourishes as a reply.

If you think about how a small company can represent an ideal of communication excellence, it is often attributed to the conversational style that people operate in. In the old-school business model, success came from becoming a bigger company where employees responded to orders and created more and more products so they could gain a wider share of the market. Today’s small company, however, can quickly mobilize resources and target new markets by leveraging their size. It is pretty straightforward for them to leverage conversational intimacy as a way to communicate and move things along.

The Four Features

Small companies are adept at using four features to accelerate their results: scale, structure, participation, and focus. Those same four features are what define a conversation in that setting. By applying these four features through conversation, large companies can move as quickly as smaller ones.

Scale relates to the number of people in a conversation, which typically involves just a few people at a time.

Structure incorporates the proximity of people being close together physically (even if it’s virtual) and an inviting atmosphere where people are open to share key insights and data.

Participation in a small company means that fewer formal dividing lines exist, and a wide range of employees can be involved in the same projects.

Focus refers to all employees being aware of and staying committed to the priorities that have been defined.

The authors of Talk, Inc. How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations, agree that, “Through conversation […] a big or growing organization can retain or recapture much of the nimbleness, the cohesiveness, and the raw, productive energy of a well-oiled small company.”

Replacing Corporate Communication

When corporate communication departments have traditionally passed communication information from the head office or corporate leadership out to employees, it created something of a vehicle that made conversation almost unnecessary. Directives, decisions, vision statements, and information about flu shot clinics could all be disseminated through corporate communications.

However, organizational conversation creates a shift at a fundamental level through the Four I’s:

• Intimacy
• Interactivity
• Inclusion
• Intentionality

You’ve just been introduced to intimacy. Next, we’ll look at the other elements and how together they contribute to a method of communication that has a high performance result.

Interactivity

Building on Intimacy

A real conversation has to have at least two people involved. If someone monopolizes the conversation, it’s no longer a conversation. This is the case whether we are in person-to-person conversation or using technology. When a company uses media to take care of large scale communication, then they are often relying on one-way transmission of messages that involve just a single voice.

When a company is spread out geographically, and there is diversity of language, time zones, and different cultures to consider, the temptation to broadcast gets enormous. Consider instead the potential for interactivity in your communication.

Building on intimacy, where your efforts to get closer to employees, to listen, and to display and earn trust are founded, is an essential element of interactivity.

A commitment to interactivity provides the place for employees to speak up and to enter the conversation. The term inter comes for the Latin word for “between” and emphasizes that conversation exists as an exchange and a back-and-forth process through which we communicate.

Evolving Communication Techniques

While you might think the concept is so simple that it hardly bears thinking about (and indeed, the concept is simple), the truth is that a lot of us think we are in conversation when in reality we are either broadcasting or not listening. Indeed, many corporations (because of their sheer size and logistics) have difficulty getting used to the idea of interaction. Their traditional use of media for internal and external communication has not lent itself to interactivity. If you think of internal devices such as e-mail, memos, reports, and videos (even when they specifically request feedback), they are all pretty consistent about being one-way vehicles. External communications like annual reports; print newsletters; magazine articles; brochures; and television, radio, or podcast programs all tend to broadcast in one direction.

Today we are working in environments that disrupt the tradition of broadcast messaging. Social media lends itself to be highly interactive and provides spaces for instant, passionate, and almost constant conversation. We have all kinds of opportunity for conversation, and the employee suggestion box has given way to internal wikis and blogs that allow for input from all levels of the organization. This includes the use of video blogging, video conferencing, and leveraging different types of online communities.

In the past, communications specialists were heavily involved in speech writing for CEOs and politicians. Now, many CEOs and politicians post on social media on their own. Their communications team will keep them up to date on how to use social media, and perhaps even manage their accounts, but the CEO or politician creates their own messages. This emphasizes how things get even trickier to manage when the CEO or politician has released a message over Twitter or Instagram that goes viral and garners hundreds or even tens of thousands of responses. These events remind us how fluid this communication is, as opposed to where it was closed, directive, and of singular direction in the past.

Inclusion

What It’s All About

Inclusion lets employees have control of the information (content) that is being generated. Since organizational conversation is all about contributions to two-way conversations, a natural step includes having employees involved in creating those communications. This does require that the executive and communication departments relinquish some control of what’s being communicated, but the benefits are tremendous.

When employees are involved in what was formerly a corporate communications role, the mood of those communications becomes more personal. It also helps raise the morale and engagement of employees who get to be much more involved in what’s going on in their workplace.

Inclusion builds on what is being created in intimacy and interactivity, which were discussed earlier. Inclusion is an example of full participation from within the workplace, even when those communications are kept internal.

A company can get much better information when they equip employees with tools and resources about what they could say to one another. Instead of focusing the employee messages on outside audiences, the messages are mostly internal. When the executive sees a message they want to share publicly, they will do so.

Looking at Inclusive Communications

One excellent example of inclusion are posts on intranet forums, blogs, and/or a Facebook page that is only open to company employees. This is a shift from where corporate communication professionals used to create all the messaging through which the company told its story to internal and external audiences. In the old system, communication was a highly controlled medium for distributing official company messages. Employees who received those messages became part of the passive audience, pretty much like members of the public.

Now, we’re seeing organizations let go of some of that control as they provide portals and space for more collaborative messaging. This is a variation on what we refer to as user-generated content (where people post blogs or on social media for public consumption), and is what we’ll refer to as employee-generated content instead.

One great example of inclusive employee-generated content includes internal blogs (written and/or video) that are created by employees outside of the communications role. These are employees who have a strong interest in writing, and become the equivalent of citizen journalists for the company. They can take pictures of company events with their phones or cameras, create blog posts about products being used, report on company events, share ideas about innovation, and much more. If the company wants to make those messages external, then those can be shared (and polished if needed) by the corporate communications team.

Intentionality

Defining Intentionality

You’ve probably heard about being intentional when you meditate, study, eat, or work out. Now you’re about to learn about intentionality in conversational leadership.

Conversational intentionality is about knowing ahead of time how you are going to hold a conversation and what your end point is.

All conversations, even the really good ones, have to end at some point. One aspect of intentionality is that it makes the effort needed to end the conversation a little easier than in a wandering dialogue. Having an end in mind, even if it’s vague, helps the people involved to identify the right place to wind things up.

Creating a Conversational Strategy

Intentionality is also where we create a conversational strategy that includes the plan for how to conduct organizational communication, as envisioned by the organization’s leaders. Then, there is also a process for developing communication practices that leaders want their people to use, which we call strategic conversation.

Organizational conversation doesn’t exist just for pleasantries, increased engagement, or employee empowerment. The main goal of fostering conversational leadership is to improve performance and achieve better results for the business. The task of the leaders, then, includes guiding and supporting that conversation so that it leads to achievement of both the competitive and operational goals of the organization.

The questions asked in discussing intentionality include:

• What business are we in?
• What are our challenges and opportunities?
• Where will this company be one, five, and ten years from now?

One of the differentiators from intentionality over the other three elements is that intimacy, interactivity, and inclusion all help bring energy to the organization. Intentionality, on the other hand, leads to a specific destination.

While it might seem counterintuitive that a conversational strategy is needed for what is really simply defined as a conversation, you’ll see that having a strategy facilitates an essential connection between the business, employee contributions, and the marketplace.

Sample Strategy Elements

A conversational strategy can include elements like the following:

• The majority of communications from the management team are not sent to employees as memos and e-mails (which are directive by nature). Instead, they are posted in an internal blog that employees visit regularly.
• The organization uses multiple channels to communicate with employees, including informal internal blogs, a forum (or multiple forums in large companies), Facebook closed groups, etc.
• All external communications for the public are sent to employees first.
• Big meetings, including delivery of the annual report or announcements about upcoming projects, will be attended by employees who are also internal bloggers and will live blog from the event.

A strategic conversation is simply one where the parties involved know what the company goals are, what their topic is (even if it’s just loosely defined), and what they want to get out of a conversation. It’s not about pushing a particular agenda or going after a defined result; those would be discussions and negotiations, which are not the same as conversation. However, it will also include what to look for to finish up the conversation.

Common Language

Students of conversational leadership have discovered that the way the company brand is discussed outside a company is inseparable from the conversations inside, and this is why strategic conversation is so important. Organizational conversations need to be aligned with the direction and goals of the company, and they need to provide support so that employees come to a unified organizational vision.

Part of creating a unified vision includes using common language. If part of the company thinks a particular task is a marketing task, but it is performed in the sales department, there is an issue. Sales and marketing specialists will tell you how different marketing is from sales, and lumping things haphazardly together makes it harder for them to function