Jessica Nordell

If we look at the distance between that minimum standard and how we actually want to interact with one another—with trust, kindness, respect, love, and care—there’s a very big gap. Laws can only do so much. You can’t legislate kindness; I can’t order you to treat me with respect. What this means for organizations is that policies are essential, but it’s also important to create … [ Read more ]

3 Ways to Clearly Communicate Your Company’s Strategy

For all the communication around strategy, we know that leaders at many companies don’t provide the necessary context for employees to understand what the words and sentences in a strategy statement actually mean. What can leaders do to help employees understand enough context to understand a strategy? In this article, the authors offer three ideas.

Frank V. Cespedes

Too much performance feedback is of the “do good and avoid evil” variety. That may sound harmless, but overly general feedback increases feelings of defensiveness, rather than openness to behavior change, because it involves broad judgments and invites counterpunching rather than discussion.

Matt Wallaert

For interpersonal [feedback], I’m a big fan of a simple formula: “When you A, I feel B, because C, and what I’d really like is D.” Specific behavior, specific emotion, specific cognition, specific alternative behavior.  And I think a variant can be used for delivering performance feedback as well: “When you A, it causes B, because C. One thing to try could be D.” Specific … [ Read more ]

Ximena Vengoechea

It’s easy to assume that listening is merely about showing up and paying attention to the other person, but it’s also deeply tied to paying attention to ourselves. Being an effective listener is about building self-awareness around how you naturally show up in conversation.

Ximena Vengoechea

We often think of miscommunication as an issue with our own content or delivery — that if we could tweak the what or the how, our message would be more effective. But that perpetuates a dynamic where we view our counterparts as an audience, not as collaborators.

Lucy Pérez, Dame Vivian Hunt, Hamid Samandari, Robin Nuttall, Donatela Bellone

Forward-looking companies think carefully about communications—not just in terms of what resonates with investors, but with a range of stakeholders; and not just communications for the sake of announcing to others but in order to learn, become smarter, and improve as an organization. Employees are a key constituency and are invariably an important source of insight. Companies can also continuously improve by engaging through trade … [ Read more ]

The Illusion Of Alignment: Why Your Strategy Execution Is Failing

You may have communicated your must-win strategic goals ad nauseum, but without shared context—or the common understanding of what matters, why it matters and how the pieces fit together—your leadership team will be clueless.

Ximena Vengoechea

When things feel personal and when our ego is involved, it gets really hard to listen.

Kip Tindell

One of our foundation principles is that leadership and communication are the same thing. Communication is leadership.

Haruki Murakami

Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.

Bruce Craven

We rely upon persuasion when an objective, inarguable truth isn’t available, when the facts can be interpreted in different ways and judgment is required. Then the persuader, instead of arguing to prove a truth, must enable the listener to accept a mere possibility – to accept the idea that another explanation might be viable and begin to consider it.

Paul B. Thornton

In the old days the boss might have said, “Stop talking and get to work!” Today, the boss might say, “Start talking and get to work.” You need to communicate and collaborate with colleagues, consultants, customers, suppliers, and thought leaders to keep learning and get things done.

Constantinos C. Markides

Simply communicating the choices you have made is often insufficient. What you really need to do is to communicate the choice and the alternatives considered and rejected in favor of the choice. It is the positioning of the choice relative to the alternatives considered that makes the choice clear to people. This means that what you need to say is not “We have decided to … [ Read more ]

When Leaders Say They Are Aligned—But Aren’t

Five key practices can unify leaders up, down, and across the organization—and spark concerted action.

Baba Shiv

As a current and/or future organization leader, you have to be effective at two things among others day in and day out. You have to be effective at making decisions, but even more important, I would argue you have to be effective at shaping others’ decisions. And when we go about shaping others’ decisions, what do we often end up doing? We present rational arguments. … [ Read more ]

Sam Corcos

We’re a memo culture, not a meeting culture, and we put a lot of time into long-form documentation. Why? My belief is that content scales; your time doesn’t. I’ve personally written many hundreds of pages of strategy and documentation to align the team. Keep in mind what content replaces: taking meetings to explain the same material over and over again, emailing people, meetings, calls, seemingly … [ Read more ]

Iffet Türken

Powerful questions are open-ended questions. When you ask a closed-ended question, like a yes or no query, you cut yourself and your interlocutor off from the opportunity of deep listening. Why are open-ended questions important? They can lead to discovery, insight or even a commitment that fuels further action. Managers must become accustomed to asking good open-ended questions. The practice naturally engages partnership.

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The power … [ Read more ]