Today’s organizations are experiencing an ever-accelerating rate of change and informational flow amid fierce competition and tight labor markets. As leaders, we are being called upon to do more with less, keep pace with the current information explosion and technological revolution, and display breadth and depth in more areas than our predecessors. To address the growing need to develop our workforce, we as leaders must change the ways in which we interact with our direct reports.
The challenges currently facing our businesses require that we leave behind some of our comfortable routines and move into territory that we have not explored before. Leadership is all about moving out of the village (the comfortable confines of our current state/environment) and taking people where they have not been before.
Whenever we leave the village and move into new territory, one of the things we inevitably have to confront are what have been called “Unwelcomed Realities”—aspects of the situation or challenge that we must confront, but don’t want to. We have no problem getting people to embrace those welcomed new realities, but when the new realities are unpleasant, people often work hard to avoid dealing with them and therefore courage is required.
As leaders of people ourselves, we have wrestled in the trenches on teams within a variety of organizations for decades. We have been students of leadership, and conversed and coached thousands of leaders in over 50 countries, and we understand the importance of what we share.
Courageous Conversations™ are the keys to strategy, innovation, execution and sustainability. Courageous coaching conversations are a critical lever to engagement, commitment, and high levels of satisfaction. Courageous Conversations™ are good for people, good for organizational dynamics, and good for business.
The Courageous Conversations™ methodology is influenced by the brilliant work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schoen, whose research on Action Science may be considered some of the most robust social science research ever conducted and whose work has spanned nearly 50 years. We believe our contribution to their efforts provides a more thorough understanding and user-friendly approach for their model, its complexity, and its numerous applications.
The Courageous Conversations™ approach is not a panacea, it certainly won’t fix all of our leadership woes, but it can help you identify the predicable patterns we as leaders, regardless of our age, sex, race, social-economic backgrounds, have developed over time and the traps we all fall into when conversations are lacking or ineffective.
Courageous Conversations™ can guide and help you become better through giving you a set of new skills required for increased conversational competence. Again, Courageous Conversations™ is not as much about being comfortable as it is about being more effective around important issues that matter most and having the courage and competence to engage and lead others more humanely.
You have no way of really knowing how a conversation will be received, but it is important to understand the potential risks involved and to ensure you are making an informed choice about moving forward with the conversation.
Whatever issues your courageous conversation addresses, the potential risks and benefits involved must be evaluated carefully. Making an informed choice is a critical step towards your conversational effectiveness. Remember, your efficiency is dependent upon how you engage the conversation, not solely on the openness of the recipient.
Recommended For You:
Coaching
