11th May 2020
A Leadership Model using Organizational Conversation
As the role of leadership evolves from a top-down model, successful leaders are adapting how they manage the flow of information to and from their employees. Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind outline their model of leadership they call “organizational conversation.”
Their article talks about the shift to interpersonal communications instead of top down commands, and how it can foster employee engagement, operational flexibility and reduce the emotional proximity between senior executives to create a more close knit environment in large organizations.
From the Article:
Smart leaders today, we have found, engage with employees in a way that resembles an ordinary person-to-person conversation more than it does a series of commands from on high. Furthermore, they initiate practices and foster cultural norms that instill a conversational sensibility throughout their organizations. Chief among the benefits of this approach is that it allows a large or growing company to function like a small one. By talking with employees, rather than simply issuing orders, leaders can retain or recapture some of the qualities—operational flexibility, high levels of employee engagement, tight strategic alignment—that enable start-ups to outperform better-established rivals.
Physical proximity between leaders and employees isn’t always feasible. But mental or emotional proximity is essential.
In developing our model, we have identified four elements of organizational conversation that reflect the essential attributes of interpersonal conversation: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. Leaders who power their organizations through conversation-based practices need not (so to speak) dot all four of these i’s. However, as we’ve discovered in our research, these elements tend to reinforce one another. In the end, they coalesce to form a single integrated process.
You can read the full article online: Leadership Is a Conversation.
Make sure to explore Inspiring Workplace’s other content and insights about leadership and communication.