The four conversations of a leadership team, part I

How often have you been in a meeting with other leaders and wondered, “What conversation are we supposed to be having?”.

It’s only through the right conversations that leaders can synthesize their different perspectives and produce collective action. But we see a lot of leaders struggling with two things — the art of conversation itself, and what conversation they should even be having.

At a recent meeting I attended, things started off fairly well, but at various points went off course. People took turns to say something without listening to understand what the previous speaker was saying. At one point, the discussion even meandered into three sidebar conversations.

That’s missing the entire point of being together, which is to struggle with different perspectives in such a way that you arrive at a genuinely useful new alignment.

My favorite principle to introduce in these moments is straight from Stephen Covey: “Listen with the intent to understand, not reply”.

The second challenge for the group — and the subject of this piece — was knowing what conversation the team should even be having.

It’s worth distinguishing between four very different conversations a leadership team (at any level) should be having: envisioning the future, problem-solving, planning, and decision-making.

The vision conversation

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” — Buckminster Fuller

What separates great from so-so

Vision conversations take place when a leadership team is doing strategic planning, at the very least. There’s no useful strategy without a clear vision, or as some of my clients would say “a point of arrival”.

But envisioning the future is remarkably hard, psychologically. The future is unwritten and must be imagined, which makes skilled operators squirm for the lack of any firm footing in current fact.

So these conversations — there should be more than one, over time — are best held away from HQ and all its distractions to allow for deep work. The biggest problem I see for executives is the tendency to want to feel they know. But vision conversations are not about knowing the future. They are about inventing it — and all invention starts from a place of deep curiosity.

So leadership teams that execute these conversations well optimize their agenda for curiosity. Curiosity about customers, trends, technology, forces for and against a firm. Curiosity about successes and failures. Curiosity about what is aligned with your purpose. They bring in outside perspectives, expose themselves to new information from customers, get outside the office…

And when you’re the one leading the conversation, I encourage you to use the language of curiosity and avoid the language of judgment:

1 | Watch for the tendency of leaders to judge ideas too soon. Use words that inspire openness and curiosity. For example, ask “What does this teach us about our future?”, “What possibilities do you see?”, “What else do we see?”

2 | Contrast the future with the present, to make it more “solid”. A good exercise is to identify the shift from current state to a point of arrival in the future with columns of “From–Tos”.

3 | Without specifics, you can’t create a useful vision. But creating those specifics is particularly difficult for people who are used to having confidence about their answers. Listen for the defense of vague abstractions and intervene by asking for “bright specifics, no matter if they are wrong”. Ask people to “Play out an example for me… it’s okay to be wrong — we’ll have a starting point.” Or invite people to bring “evidence of the future” from their current experience.

4 | A vision is more real in our minds when we can summon more senses. Encourage the use of image words to do just that. For example, “We will double our audience” is not nearly as powerful as “Every food lover in every major city will have one of our products in their kitchen”.

5 | Watch for people’s tendency to think of the future as a mild extension of the present. Ask your team to think beyond their comfort zone. Give them permission with words like “unreasonable”, “bold”, “alternative”, “crazy” and keep asking “what if we…?” to increase the range of acceptable options.

A great vision conversation should yield shared agreement in the form of:

• A shared narrative of the future 5 years away — with bright details
• A list of From-To statements to clarify what will change
• A set of strategic themes and goals to create the future imagined — organized as an agenda for change

Next up: The problem-solving conversation