by Dr. Cecil Clements (12th June 2012)
Much has been written about Steve Jobs, the way he handled Apple and his unique leadership style. I came across this article by Walter Isaacson, a writer with great credibility, having written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, entitled ‘The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs’, it perked my interest and is an excellent read—one worth reading in its entirety. However, let me read you just a snippet.
Isaacson says, “Steve Jobs liked to engage face to face. Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. ‘There’s a temptation in our network age to think that ideas can be developed by email’ he told me. ‘That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing and say, “Wow!” and soon you’re cooking all sorts of ideas.’ He had the Pixar building designed to promote unplanned encounters and collaborations. If a building doesn’t encourage that, you lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So he designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see. The front door and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium; the café and the mailboxes were there; the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it; and the 600-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. ‘Steve’s theory worked from day one,’ Lasseter recalls. ‘I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.’
He loved to engage “face-to-face.” Reading that article made me realize just how important it is for us to have conversations. Every now and then, I am able to visit a new home and one of the things I love to speak into this new home as a blessing is to hope that the corridors that connect the different rooms would be meeting places for the family. Why? because we don’t live in isolation. We’re not made to live as islands apart from each other.
I think the same holds true even in a business setting. I saw this article in Harvard Business Review, written by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind. They say, “Leadership is a conversation. The command and control approach to management has in recent years become less and less viable. Globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers have sharply reduced the efficacy of a purely directive, top-down model of leadership. What will take the place of that model? Part of the answer lies in how leaders manage communication within their organizations – that is, how they handle the flow of information to, from and among their employees. Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated, more important, that process must be conversational.”
Basically, what the authors are saying is this: it is no longer acceptable to have one-way discourses in an organization. Conversation is the involvement of two people – speaking and listening, and listening and speaking. Boris Groysberg, by the way, is professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Michael Slind is a writer, editor and communications consultant. They are also co-authors of a book ‘Talk, Inc.: How trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations’. And reading through their article, I thought that it would be good to share their thoughts on our weekly call. What they are saying is that corporate conversation or organizational conversation must be the same as personal conversation. The same dynamics that are in personal conversations must intrude into organizational conversations for them to be more conducive towards creativity and intimacy. They say, “The chief benefit of conversation is that it allows a large or growing company to function like a small one.”
That is quite a challenge, isn’t it? However, the old adage is true: To really be effective, large must be small. We need to handle growth by keeping it small and maintaining smaller segments. Otherwise we will get lost in the hugeness of an enterprise and miss out on the various advantages that proximity and tête-à-têtes and exchanges can offer. The authors offer 4 attributes of personal conversation that must become part of organizational conversation:
Much has been written about Steve Jobs, the way he handled Apple and his unique leadership style. I came across this article by Walter Isaacson, a writer with great credibility, having written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, entitled ‘The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs’, it perked my interest and is an excellent read—one worth reading in its entirety. However, let me read you just a snippet.
Isaacson says, “Steve Jobs liked to engage face to face. Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. ‘There’s a temptation in our network age to think that ideas can be developed by email’ he told me. ‘That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing and say, “Wow!” and soon you’re cooking all sorts of ideas.’ He had the Pixar building designed to promote unplanned encounters and collaborations. If a building doesn’t encourage that, you lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So he designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see. The front door and main stairs and corridors all led to the atrium; the café and the mailboxes were there; the conference rooms had windows that looked out onto it; and the 600-seat theater and two smaller screening rooms all spilled into it. ‘Steve’s theory worked from day one,’ Lasseter recalls. ‘I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.’
He loved to engage “face-to-face.” Reading that article made me realize just how important it is for us to have conversations. Every now and then, I am able to visit a new home and one of the things I love to speak into this new home as a blessing is to hope that the corridors that connect the different rooms would be meeting places for the family. Why? because we don’t live in isolation. We’re not made to live as islands apart from each other.
I think the same holds true even in a business setting. I saw this article in Harvard Business Review, written by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind. They say, “Leadership is a conversation. The command and control approach to management has in recent years become less and less viable. Globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers have sharply reduced the efficacy of a purely directive, top-down model of leadership. What will take the place of that model? Part of the answer lies in how leaders manage communication within their organizations – that is, how they handle the flow of information to, from and among their employees. Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated, more important, that process must be conversational.”
Basically, what the authors are saying is this: it is no longer acceptable to have one-way discourses in an organization. Conversation is the involvement of two people – speaking and listening, and listening and speaking. Boris Groysberg, by the way, is professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Michael Slind is a writer, editor and communications consultant. They are also co-authors of a book ‘Talk, Inc.: How trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations’. And reading through their article, I thought that it would be good to share their thoughts on our weekly call. What they are saying is that corporate conversation or organizational conversation must be the same as personal conversation. The same dynamics that are in personal conversations must intrude into organizational conversations for them to be more conducive towards creativity and intimacy. They say, “The chief benefit of conversation is that it allows a large or growing company to function like a small one.”
That is quite a challenge, isn’t it? However, the old adage is true: To really be effective, large must be small. We need to handle growth by keeping it small and maintaining smaller segments. Otherwise we will get lost in the hugeness of an enterprise and miss out on the various advantages that proximity and tête-à-têtes and exchanges can offer. The authors offer 4 attributes of personal conversation that must become part of organizational conversation:
- You need to develop intimacy, that is, you need to stay close. People need to be close to each other. Institutionally (shared goals and visions), attitudinally (pulling for the same reason, you need to have a good attitude about your product) and spatially as well, as much as you can afford to have.
- You need to have interactivity: the sound of one person talking is not necessarily a conversation. Leaders need to talk with and not just to. There must be interactivity; two people need to be part of the conversation.
- You need to have inclusion: people need to be included in the company’s story. When you have inclusivity, then people automatically become brand ambassadors for their company. A classic example of employees being excellent brand ambassadors can be found in companies like Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, Apple and Infosys. However, there could be a downside to inclusivity as well: you could lose a certain amount of control over conversations that go on. Grievances could be aired or confidences broken. Infosys, say Groysberg and Slind, have a company diktat: “You can disagree but don’t be disagreeable.”
- ou need to have intentionality: conversations must reflect the shared agenda that reflects an alliance with the company’s strategic objective. I like to look at it as a funnel. You can have intimacy, intentionality and inclusivity, and not have anything to do with the company or the values or the objectives of the company. Intentionality acts like a funnel. It gathers up all these conversations, gives them direction and make them pertinent to the company’s strategic objective.
I don’t know how you are in terms of conversation. I don’t know how many conversations you have with people around you, or whether you even gave it much thought. But I think that there is great value in what Steve Jobs, as well as these writers, say. If we are to foster a culture of connectedness, of belonging to a company, the only way we can do it is to have more conversations.
Conversation agent Valerie Maltoni, a strategist, has an article entitled, ‘Connecting Ideas and People: How Talk Can Change Our Lives’. She interviews Dr. Constance Goodwin on Leadership Conversations. Dr. Constance says, “As human beings, we spend a lot of time talking. Are we having conversations? In my view, something that generates or engenders transformation or a transformative atmosphere is a conversation. We articulate our conversation through language; our thinking takes place in language.” Delineating between talking and conversation, she points out that in the latter transformation takes place, which must be the positive result to ensue when conversations take place. Even in the case of non-verbal conversations in the case of “…a dancer/athlete/artist/businessperson…those inputs are made sense of through language, through their symbolic linguistic representations.”
So, if conversations are so very important, what would be guiding principles for this exercise, that will ensure that all these components are intentional, yet transformative. John Agno, an executive and business coach, says this about Leadership Conversation Principles. He says, “When you have interactive conversations, it pulls people together, makes them more comfortable. There’s greater personal responsibility and commitment. Five things must come out of conversation:
Conversation agent Valerie Maltoni, a strategist, has an article entitled, ‘Connecting Ideas and People: How Talk Can Change Our Lives’. She interviews Dr. Constance Goodwin on Leadership Conversations. Dr. Constance says, “As human beings, we spend a lot of time talking. Are we having conversations? In my view, something that generates or engenders transformation or a transformative atmosphere is a conversation. We articulate our conversation through language; our thinking takes place in language.” Delineating between talking and conversation, she points out that in the latter transformation takes place, which must be the positive result to ensue when conversations take place. Even in the case of non-verbal conversations in the case of “…a dancer/athlete/artist/businessperson…those inputs are made sense of through language, through their symbolic linguistic representations.”
So, if conversations are so very important, what would be guiding principles for this exercise, that will ensure that all these components are intentional, yet transformative. John Agno, an executive and business coach, says this about Leadership Conversation Principles. He says, “When you have interactive conversations, it pulls people together, makes them more comfortable. There’s greater personal responsibility and commitment. Five things must come out of conversation:
- When peers connect, change happens.
- It’s OK to begin a conversation by confronting the other person with questions that seem awkward but set the stage for a respectful exchange. What’s the point of the conversation? What are we here for? How do we want to spend our time together so that there’s a sense of focus?
- Conversations are not meant to be structured. Be open; be focused on the interests of the other person, not on your own purpose.
- Don’t get pulled into solving problems that may not matter to the other person. Allow time. Provide spaces, be a thoughtful listener without taking on the responsibility to fix or debate the issue.
- Personal transformation happens when the right questions get asked – not by providing answers. When you allow people to answer their own questions, they discover what they were not aware of and what is needed to move forward. Personal transformation leads to corporate transformation.
I like the whole aspect of conversation. I like the thought that as we begin to converse with people around us, when we engage in more discussions, we will be able to draw from a bigger pool of resources, instead of being confined to the intellectual knowledge base of a few. I think that’s what Steve Jobs did to great effect. He would get 100 of his top people in a room, get a whiteboard out and put down ideas. Then he would whittle those ideas down to ten and three, but the startup pool was a hundred.
So, here are some thoughts for you to think about. Look around your own situation, your own office spaces, the way you do work, how you treat people and ask yourself: are we having conversations? And if you think conversations are important to the furthering of who you are and what you do for your company, then maybe it’s time you started having more of them.
God bless Us All.
So, here are some thoughts for you to think about. Look around your own situation, your own office spaces, the way you do work, how you treat people and ask yourself: are we having conversations? And if you think conversations are important to the furthering of who you are and what you do for your company, then maybe it’s time you started having more of them.
God bless Us All.
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