Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations
In the past, the California-based firm added staff and expanded its clientele by poaching talent and customers from rivals. This strategy was effective in California, but other regions had more stringent regulations. Given the legal challenges, would poaching work abroad? Where should Sanctuary expand, and how? Groysberg, Boris, and Olivia Hull.
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Afterword - Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations [Book]
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- How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations | with Michael Slind.
How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations , Harvard Business School Professor Boris Groysberg and communications professional Michael Slind discuss the power of talk as a way to recapture high levels of employee engagement and strategic alignment. This excerpt identifies four elements critical to creating flourishing organizational conversations.
Read an interview with the authors.
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Organizational conversation, in our use of the term, applies to the full range of patterns and processes by which information circulates through a company—all of the ways in which ideas, images, and other forms of organizational content pass between leaders and employees, or from one employee or group of employees to another. It occupies roughly the same space that "corporate communication" has traditionally occupied in organizational life. Yet, both in spirit and in practice, organizational conversation is quite different from corporate communication. The latter function grew naturally out of the command-and-control model.
Top-down and one-way in its orientation, corporate communication aptly suited the needs of large, hierarchy-driven companies by serving as a central organ for distributing news of corporate activity to internal as well as external audiences.
Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations
In effect, it served as a vehicle for making human conversation all but unnecessary, at least from an organizational perspective. Departments of corporate communication remain in place, of course, and that legacy term remains in common usage. No company to our knowledge has yet created an "organizational conversation department" or hired a "chief conversation officer.
Where organizational conversation flourishes, it involves up to four elements. These elements reflect the essential attributes of interpersonal conversation, and likewise they reflect the classic distinguishing features of a high-flying small company. In developing our model of organizational conversation, we have attached to each element a word that begins with the letter I.
Conversation between two people both requires and enables its participants to stay close to one another, figuratively as well as literally. Only through intimacy of that kind can they achieve a true meeting of minds. In organizational conversation, similarly, leaders reduce the distance—institutional as well as spatial—that would normally separate them from their employees. They do so by cultivating the art of listening to people at all levels of their organization, and by learning to talk with those people in ways that are personal, honest, and authentic.
Conversational intimacy equips leaders to manage change within their company, and it helps them to solidify buy-in among employees for new strategic initiatives. In short, it allows them to build trust through talk. Talk is a two-way affair—an exchange of comments and questions, of musings and mutterings. The sound of one person talking, whatever else it may be, is not a conversation.
Following that same logic, organizational conversation replaces the traditional one-way structure of corporate communication with a dynamic process in which leaders talk with employees and not just to them. Changes in the technology of communication, especially those that incorporate emerging forms of social media, support that shift.
Talk, Inc.—The Book
Equally important, though, is the emergence of cultural norms that favor dialogue over monologue. The benefits that accrue from conversational interactivity include lower transaction costs, an easing of the pressure caused by information overload, and an increase in employees' ability to respond readily to customer needs. At its best, interpersonal conversation is an equal-opportunity proposition. It invites all participants to put their own ideas, and indeed their heart and soul, into the conversational mix.
Organizational conversation, by the same token, calls upon employees to participate eagerly in the work of generating the content through which a company tells its story, both internally and externally.