‘Leaders cannot legislate culture with mission or vision statements; it is managers who build engagement and a high performance culture, one employee, one conversation at a time.’
(Towers Watson report 'Turbo charging employee engagement 2010)
Despite the relentless march of technology and the never-ending attempts by organisations to turn every human interaction into a process, the basic building block of organisational life remains the conversation. It is quite simply how business is done. And for very good reasons.
- Conversations drive engagement... neuroscientists have shown that we feel first and think second and that how we feel is 4 times more valuable than what we think in driving engagement. And the person who most strongly influences how we feel, for better or worse, is our line manager - through the conversations they have with us (Source: the Corporate Leadership Council in its Employment Engagement Survey of 90,000 employees in 135 organisations)
- Management is conversation ... managers and leaders in white collar environments spend upwards of 60% of their time in conversation of one form or another - any investment in making this time more productive has huge potential paybacks on employee engagement, innovation and productivity
- Conversations drive innovation... research at the Institute for Research on Learning in the US has found that knowledge creation is primarily a social rather than an individual process. That people learn best in conversation as they work together
- Conversations drive better decision-making ... medium and large organisations are increasingly led by small management teams and not a traditional 'heroic personality'. These teams rely on effective conversations to function properly
- Conversations are how we collaborate - increasingly organisations rely on networks of people who are required to cooperate across traditional functional boundaries. To do this requires more than just technology, it requires people to have open and effective conversationsonversation.
- Conversations are how leaders build trust ... in a world that is increasingly cynical and where trust in business leaders is at an all time low, people see a willingness to engage in honest, open conversation as perhaps the most important attribute of leadership
'In most companies, very little attention is paid to the quality of conversations. As a result, a vast majority of conversations tend to be dehydrated, ritualised talk that adds no value to anyone. Most conversations in most companies tend to either be uninteresting or irrelevant'
('Improving the Quality of Conversations', Organisational Dynamics, 2002)