Managers – Is Something Missing From Your Job Description?
There may be something missing, but you may not know it. You probably don’t think about it most of the time, but without it you wouldn’t get anything done. You wouldn’t even have your job.
Here are some hints…
- We all do it all the time–with our bosses, our reports, our peers, our customers, our competitors (and with our friends, our lovers, our kids, and our neighbors’ kids).
- It actually shapes what we see, how we think, and what we commit ourselves and our organizations to.
- It’s all about action (but may not always appear that way).
- Without it you wouldn’t even have your job.
The answer: You have conversations.
You’re attempting to stifle that yawn, but consider: As a manager, almost everything you do is conversational. Let’s take a closer look…
Obviously your meetings, phone calls, skypes, emails, blogs, texts, even tweets are conversations–somebody is speaking (or typing) and somebody is listening (or reading). So that also includes preparing and reading reports, articles, books, slide decks and the rest of it. Even if they’re not in the same room at the same time, there is still a conversation taking place between the speaker (or author) and the actual or imagined listener or audience.
You spend most of your time reviewing numbers, immersed in financials or dashboards? Those are conversations. You’re still “listening” to the person who prepared the report. That person is “speaking” to you, conveying and organizing facts, possibilities, predictions. Telling you a story in the language of numbers and graphs. And in response to their speaking, you’ll be forming your own story, and you’ll likely continue the conversation in some way, perhaps by thanking them for their work, asking for clarity or more supporting data, or making a decision based upon what they said.
You like to sit quietly in your office, reflecting? (You do quietly reflect sometimes, don’t you?) Even when deep in thought, we are often still in conversation with real or imagined others. There is someone speaking and someone listening, although it happens to be one and the same person (us). If you’ve ever tried to meditate for even just 5 minutes, you know how constant—even relentless—your inner conversations can be.
I’m not saying that we don’t do anything else, but in one way or another, it all comes back to conversation.
We typically assume that our conversations are something to be tolerated in between the “real” work: “Enough talk, let’s do something!” But as managers, our conversations are the real work, because as my colleague, author, speaker and business consultant Dr. Rafael Echeverria says, “conversation is action; when we speak we act.”
That is in fact what many linguists, biologists, social psychologists and others now understand—that we human beings get things done with words—through conversation. We plan, evaluate, describe, seek help, offer help, hire, fire, learn, make promise, succeed and fail… with words. Our words even shape our emotions and our bodies (but more on that another time).
Through conversation we exert a force, we generate power in the world. But clearly some conversations are more potent than others.
What’s a good conversation?
Good conversations can alter people’s understanding and change what they commit themselves to. Good conversations can open up new possibilities that weren’t conceived of before. They foster meaningful commitments and strengthen relationships. They’re energizing. Good conversations set into motion a virtuous cycle in which we build trust with one another which helps us to be more open, cooperative and accountable with one another tomorrow and the next day.
When conversations aren’t good, they set into motion a different kind of cycle. They widen the distance between us, leading to misaligned actions, weak business results. Disappointment, distrust and defensiveness spawned by poor conversations can linger and accumulate like toxic sludge, contaminating relationships, teams and entire organizations. You’ve probably experienced a toxic organization at some point. You may even be working in one now. It’s not because the people themselves are screwed up, it’s just that their conversations are weak.
Here are just a few common symptoms of weak conversations…
- People around you are constantly fighting fires, feeling overwhelmed, heroically solving the same problems again and again.
- Everybody knows what the “real” problems are (the elephants), but these aren’t discussed with the people who can actually do something them. Or when they are raised, nothing changes.
- People complain about meetings, saying they’re a waste of time. Meetings sometimes even make things worse, destroying what little trust and morale people may be clinging to, and further widening the distance between folks who are already hunkered down in their silos.
When you know what to look for, you can trace each of these symptoms back to weak conversations. And it’s pretty common.
How common are weak conversations?
For years, my colleague, author, speaker and business consultant Dr. Rafael Echeverria, has been asking business executives around the world how many of their daily conversations they felt are ineffective, as in do not produce satisfactory results. Ready for a shock?
These highly successful, highly paid CEOs and VPs from widely diverse companies, industries and cultures consistently estimate that more than 50% of their conversations are not effective. These estimates jive with my own informal polling of executives over the years.
What do you think the cost of these ineffective conversations is to your organization? The wasted meetings, lost business opportunities, misaligned actions, poorly kept promises? What if you could improve these conversations by just 10% or 20% (You can improve them by much more than that, but let’s be conservative).
Try this exercise: For the next week, pay close attention to your most important conversations, noting…
- How people (including you) are listening to each other. Are they checking their own listening with others to be sure they’re actually getting what the speaker is intending? Are they each leaving the conversation with different ideas of what was decided and who is going to do what?
- How people (yourself included) are thinking or feeling at the end of the conversation versus at the beginning. Are people letting themselves be influenced as much as they are trying influence each other?
- What is not being talked about. What might people be avoiding? And why do you think that may be? (It’s usually because we don’t feel confident about having conversations in which people may feel uncomfortable.)
- The mood and energy of the conversation. Are people open, curious, appreciative of others? Or do you notice defensiveness, resignation, or antagonism? Are folks leaving the conversation energized or deflated? (These are just a few examples. You may notice many other moods.)
Observing your conversations more closely, you may notice things that you haven’t seen before. You may see all sorts of room for improvement.
If you do, know this: You can improve your conversations–dramatically. You and your team can develop good conversational chops. But it doesn’t just happen by itself—you’ll have to treat it like any other skill and make it a priority.
Get some coaching, learn about what works and what doesn’t work in effective conversations. Set time aside in your team conversations for practicing and exchanging constructive feedback about how your conversations are going.
Which brings us back to your job description. Even though it’s probably not spelled out, one of your key job responsibilities is to have really good conversations. Because that’s what makes you a good performer.
With so much riding on your team’s conversations, you might also want to start including “fostering effective conversations” in your organization’s job descriptions. At the very least, it could be a good conversation starter.