by Anthony K. Tjan | 8:30 AM May 5, 2010
I have co-written this week’s blog entry with Tsun-yan Hsieh, who has spent the past three decades working with global leaders to help them become more effective. He is Director Emeritus at McKinsey, as well as a member of the Cue Ball Collective. Recently Tsun-yan wrote a guest blog entry on recognizing the decisive moments in leadership. This post expands on that theme and is based on leadership research he has conducted over the last five years in Asia, North America, and Europe.
Leaders get things done through others; they constantly need to prioritize tasks, develop growth strategies, and delegate responsibilities. The most effective leaders also know how to have courageous conversations. Most important leadership transactions still take place in live, in-person conversations. Virtual, asynchronous communications such as email, sms, Twitter and Facebook postings are faster, cheaper, and more convenient than in-person options for staying connected and sharing information. But problems arise when they are used to avoid critical or challenging messages that can have significant impact on a business. Good leaders embrace technology to enhance communication productivity, but they are careful not to replace the in-person conversations required to get difficult things done.
There are three types of critical conversations for leaders to master — one-on-one meeting, small group discussions, and one-to-many town-hall style convenings — and three ways for improving them. The effectiveness of each style of meeting depends on the participants and setting, the credibility and completeness of your intent, and your responsiveness to and emotional engagement with your audience.
The right participants and the appropriate setting
First, be sure you invite the right people to and select the right type of meeting for the conversation. You know the typical problems: some people use multiple one-on-one’s when they should have a group interaction or vice-versa; group meetings are rarely productive attendance is restricted to only certain senior members; and some executives will do anything to avoid town halls because they are visibly nervous or wooden in front of a crowd. The physical setup is also important. Does the space allow good eye contact? Does it project the right informality? Does it promote reflective dialogue when called for? Try a different format, include or exclude one or two people, see what happens and learn from it.
First, be sure you invite the right people to and select the right type of meeting for the conversation. You know the typical problems: some people use multiple one-on-one’s when they should have a group interaction or vice-versa; group meetings are rarely productive attendance is restricted to only certain senior members; and some executives will do anything to avoid town halls because they are visibly nervous or wooden in front of a crowd. The physical setup is also important. Does the space allow good eye contact? Does it project the right informality? Does it promote reflective dialogue when called for? Try a different format, include or exclude one or two people, see what happens and learn from it.
Credible and complete intent
Your audience must understand and trust the purpose you have stated for the conversation. Try this for your next one-on-one: list the outcomes you desire, starting with concrete ones such as “She will agree to these two specific performance goals”. Keep going until you exhaust the more abstract ones: e.g. “She knows that I really want her to succeed and will do everything i can to help her.” You might typically have ten desired outcomes in a one-on-one chat. If we interviewed her after the meeting, what percentage of these outcomes would she believe the conversation had achieved?
Your audience must understand and trust the purpose you have stated for the conversation. Try this for your next one-on-one: list the outcomes you desire, starting with concrete ones such as “She will agree to these two specific performance goals”. Keep going until you exhaust the more abstract ones: e.g. “She knows that I really want her to succeed and will do everything i can to help her.” You might typically have ten desired outcomes in a one-on-one chat. If we interviewed her after the meeting, what percentage of these outcomes would she believe the conversation had achieved?
In Hsieh’s scoring of dozens of one-on-one conversations by Asian CEOs and CXOs in this manner, we were surprised to see a median score of only 43% of intended objectives met, and a range of scores between 20 and 65%. We had imagined that senior leaders would be more effective at covering the vast majority of key points they had planned to discuss. In many cases the executives themselves expressed surprise at their low scores as well. The fact is that in difficult conversations, even senior executives have trouble being either direct or comprehensive with their pre-meeting objective intents. Abstract messages (e.g. I want her to think I still believe in her potential”) are miscommunicated more often than concrete messages (e.g. “You failed to deliver the second-quarter results.”) And those abstract messages are often the most important ones to get right. We encourage executives to prepare a complete list of intents and depending on their ease with the more abstract ones, talk through how they might convey them ahead of time.
Responsiveness and emotional engagement
The best leaders go beyond good listening to make a caring connection at an emotional level. They respond to others’ needs as they surface, thereby building trust. A good leader is willing to adjust her goals for the conversation based on the discoveries she makes about others’ needs, while staying true to her own values. This does not mean being flexible to the point of agreeing to whatever the other party wants, but rather being open to a set of shared outcomes.
The best leaders go beyond good listening to make a caring connection at an emotional level. They respond to others’ needs as they surface, thereby building trust. A good leader is willing to adjust her goals for the conversation based on the discoveries she makes about others’ needs, while staying true to her own values. This does not mean being flexible to the point of agreeing to whatever the other party wants, but rather being open to a set of shared outcomes.
The ability to engage in direct, persuasive in-person conversations remains the skill most crucial to leaders’ success. It’s not often that executives ask for help to improve their conversation skills. More likely, they ask for things like improving teamwork at the top, creating greater empowerment down the line, catalyzing innovation, and helping better align board expectations. When you investigate many of these familiar issues, you usually find that the right conversations either didn’t happen or failed to produce the necessary outcomes. You can’t afford not to have your conversations work the way they should for you and for the good of your enterprise.
ANTHONY K. TJAN
Anthony Tjan is CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball, vice chairman of the advisory firm Parthenon, and co-author of the New York Timesbestseller Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck (HBR Press, 2012).
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